David Tudor: Live Electronic Music

The three pieces on the LMJ14 CD trace the development of David Tudor's solo electronic music during the period from 1970 to 1984. This work has not been well documented. Recordings of these pieces have never before been released. The three pieces each represent a different collaboration: with Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) and with Jacqueline Matisse Monnier [1]. The CD's cover image, Toneburst Map 4, also arises from a collaboration, with the artist Sophia Ogielska.

Anima Pepsi (1970) was composed for the pavilion designed by EAT for the 1970 Expo in Osaka, Japan. The piece made extensive use of a processing console consisting of eight identical processors designed and built by Gordon Mumma and a spatialization matrix of 37 loudspeakers. Each processor consisted of a filter, an envelope follower, a ring modulator and a voltage-controlled amplifier. Anima Pepsi used this processing capability to transform a library of recordings of animal and insect sounds together with processed recordings of similar sources. Unlike most of Tudor's solo electronics, this piece was intended to be performed by other members of the EAT collective, a practical necessity as the piece was to be performed repeatedly as part of the environment of the pavilion for the duration of the exposition.

Toneburst (1975) was commissioned to accompany Merce Cunningham's Sounddance. This recording is from a performance by MCDC, probably at the University of California at Berkeley, where MCDC appeared fairly regularly. (The tape is labeled San Francisco, but there are no records of any performances by the company in San Francisco in the 1970s.) One can hear the sound of the dancers' feet at various moments. In an interview, Tudor commented that while performing with the company, he "listened" to the dance rather than watched it.

Toneburst is one of a series of pieces based entirely on purely electronic feedback, without the addition of "source material' (as is found in Anima Pepsi or Dialects). The actual sound-producing networks use multiple feedback paths and various forms of processing—filtering, clipping, ring modulation—to create chaotic systems that produce sounds of remarkable "physicality." Producing such behavior with a large array of analog components involves a "salad" of cables and very careful tuning. The inherent instability of the components guarantees that such tunings are only temporary conditions. The sheer difficulty of assembling and disassembling these networks on tour, together with the constant problems of tuning, led Tudor to use pre-recorded material processed in performance together with material generated live for many of the pieces in this series. (The same approach was taken later with his Neural Synthesis [2].) However, Toneburst was always performed completely live, "without a net."

The following comments are drawn from David Tudor's own program notes for Dialects:

Dialects is produced through the process of electronically transforming both vowel-like and fricative sound sources into each other, in two interactive streams.

The first sound is the beating of insects' wings; the second, alpha waves, modulated in both frequency and amplitude. Both sources were produced originally in laboratories, and subsequently subjected to various transformations by the composer. The principal devices used to produce the transformations are a percussively triggered Vocoder and a percussion generator with pitch modulation capability.

A performance of Dialects combines groups of these sounds, previously prepared, rotating at rapid speeds with live electronic-percussive elements, similarly rotating. Two percussion generators are used, each triggered by bunches of vibrating wire flowers, made for this work by the artist Jackie Monnier [3].

The relentless rhythms of the piece are created by directing brainwave recordings through a "de-glitcher" designed to separate record surface noise from the underlying recording. Tudor used the "glitch" output of that device to trigger the swept filters that impart much of the vocalic quality of the piece.