Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor

The electronic future, as envisioned for the past 80 years or so, has usually taken one of two forms: the streamlined, antiseptic, utopian vision in which technology allows us ever more control (the iPod future) and the messy, chaotic, dystopian vision in which electronics multiply and decay, leaving us at their mercy (the impenetrable-thicket-of-cables-making-it-impossible-to-vacuum-behind-your-desk future). There is, of course, a third vision: one in which we accept the machine as a collaborator, rejoice in its inexplicable intransigence and, like Michelangelo finding the figure in the marble, pause to listen to the composer inside the electronics. This David Tudor was doing as he sat at a table piled with wire-spewing circuits, tending to them like an old lady with 3 dozen cats while producing some of the most extraordinary music of the 20th century.

David Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1926. He began his musical career as an organist but quickly acquired a reputation as a leading pianist of the avant-garde, championing the music of Pierre Boulez, Sylvano Bussotti, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Stefan Wolpe among others (see Austin Clarkson's article in this issue). By the early 1950s Tudor had begun working with John Cage, performing Cage's music, serving as pianist for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and assisting in the realizations of Cage's electronic works. As early as the 1930s, Cage had treated scavenged everyday electronic appliances—record players, radios and amplifiers—as performable musical instruments [1]. Tudor, working with Cage, recognized the profound potential of electronics to create fundamentally new, endlessly adaptable and (equally important) eternally unpredictable performance instruments. Over the course of the 1960s, Tudor gradually abandoned the piano and emerged as a virtuoso of electronic performance. As Ron Kuivila and James Pritchett recount in their articles, Tudor underwent a two-part metamorphosis: from pianist to electronic performer, with his meticulous realizations of Cage's Cartridge Music (1960) and Variations II (1961); and then, by the time of his own Fluorescent Sound (1964) and Bandoneon! (1966), from performer to composer in his own right.

Expanding on Cage's discovery of alternative musical forms implicit in the "found" technology of radios and record players, Tudor embarked on the arduous process of acquiring enough knowledge of circuit design and soldering to construct his own new instruments [2]. He believed that new, object-specific, intrinsically electronic musical material and forms would emerge as each instrument took shape: "I try to find out what's there—not to make it do what I want, but to release what's there. The object should teach you what it wants to hear" [3].

This was a profound shift in the aesthetics of electronic music. It was implicit perhaps in Cage's earlier work, but Tudor made it tangible and audible to a new generation: John Bischoff, in his interview with Douglas Kahn, describes how listening to Tudor "completely turned my musical world around." Inspired by Tudor (and fellow visionaries such as David Behrman and Gordon Mumma) and aided by the proliferation of the integrated circuit, which combined transistors into functional, Lego-like modules that could be wired up with a bare minimum of engineering skill, a number of composers adopted a working method based on seat-of-the-pants electronic engineering. The circuit—whether built from scratch, a customized commercial device, or store-bought and scrutinized to death—became the score.

In 1973 Tudor held an extended workshop in Chocorua, New Hampshire. The focus was on creating a collaborative realization of his composition Rainforest, but—as John Driscoll, Matthew Rogalsky and Bill Viola describe—the event served as a catalyst for a handful of emerging electronic artists, who banded around Tudor to form a loosely collective ensemble called Composers Inside Electronics. Over the years this group served as a laboratory for artist-designed circuitry and experimental electronic performance, presenting dozens of installations of Rainforest IV worldwide, as well as performances of works by individual members of the ensemble (such as Ralph Jones's Star Networks at...