Abstracts: The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture

Abstract

The following are abstracts of papers presented at the symposium "The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture," held at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California, 17-19 May 2001. (Papers were also presented at the symposium by John Driscoll and Matt Rogalsky, Ron Kuivila, Nancy Perloff, and James Pritchett. Revised versions of their papers are included in full in this issue of Leonardo Music Journal.) Documentation of the symposium is available at: <http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/digitized_collections/davidtudor/symposium.html>. Visit the web site for the full papers or contact the authors directly.

Ambassador of the American Avant-Garde: David Tudor in West Germany, 1954-1972

Amy C. Beal. E-mail: <abeal@cats.ucsc.edu>.

While historians have recognized Tudor's importance to the development of the New York School's early piano music, close attention has yet to be paid to Tudor's almost single-handed dissemination of that music abroad. Correspondence between Tudor and German patrons as well as reviews of Tudor's performances in Germany show that he transcended his role as John Cage's right- (and left-) hand man, both as a performer and as a composer in his own right. Moreover, far from being shadowed by Cage's controversial reception in West Germany, Tudor stood at the center of new music activities in that country from 1954 to 1972. As an ambassador of American music abroad, Tudor by his presence at key music venues in West Germany over several decades helped establish a support network for American experimentalism and contributed significantly to Germans' acceptance of unconventional music from the United States.

The author's research is the basis of a focused look at Tudor's influential performances and recordings at new music festivals, private venues and state-supported radio stations in Berlin, Bremen, Cologne, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Düsseldorf and Munich. The resulting narrative reveals the extent to which Tudor must be considered a principal character in the growing chronicle of international avant-garde alliances. Specifically, this paper examines Tudor's concerts and recordings during the 1950s, his participation in Fluxus events in 1960 and 1961, his appearances with Merce Cunningham and the German premiere of Rainforest at the 1972 Pro Musica Nova festival in Bremen. The primary source material presented here includes extensive interviews conducted with eyewitnesses and unpublished correspondence and documentation held in archival collections in both Germany and the United States.

David Tudor, John Cage and Comparative Indeterminacy

John Holzaepfel. E-mail: <calfam@compufort.com>.

Completed in January 1957, John Cage's Winter Music marked a new stage in the evolution of the composer's music and, consequently, in the performance practice of its most important interpreter, David Tudor. Although Cage had used chance operations as the basis of his compositional technique since 1951, Winter Music was his first work to extend indeterminacy from the composition of his music to its performance. It was also the first Cage score to which Tudor applied his practice of writing out his own performance material, or realization, of a composer's indeterminate notations.

Based on primary sources in the David Tudor Papers archive at the Getty Research Institute, this paper is a close reading of Tudor's two methods of realizing Winter Music. It begins with a brief survey of Tudor's performance practices in American experimental music of the early 1950s and then traces the steps that led to his decision, beginning with Morton Feldman's Intersection 3 (1953), to perform from his own notations rather than those of the composer.

The core of the paper is an analysis of Tudor's realization. It includes a description of Cage's notation of Winter Music, the problems that notation presents to the performer and Tudor's solutions. Tudor's methods in preparing his readings of two or more pages of Cage's score into composite realizations was a technique he would use again, with enormous elaboration, in his realization of the Solo for Piano from Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-1958).

Tudor's realizations...