Recital Hall of Cruelty: Antonin Artaud, David Tudor, and the 1950s Avant-Garde

Recital Hall of Cruelty: Antonin Artaud, David Tudor, and the 1950s Avant-Garde Eric Smigel From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination. ?Antonin Artaud, "Letters on Crulety" In the final weeks before theUnited States premi?re performance of Pierre Boulez's Second Piano Sonata, pianist David Tudor was in a challenging situation. While fully competent in terms of technique, he was unable to determine how to maintain musical continuity in such a turbulent work. Tudor recalled, "I'd always been well known for my ability to handle complex scores?it could be black as sin and I could still play it?but this time I found a sort of constant breakdown in the continuity."1 Unlike the repertoire of modern works with which the 172 Perspectives of New Music young virtuoso was familiar, the piece by the young French composer posed a problem of a new order. Tudor found the sonata devoid of con ventional hierarchies; there did not appear to be a central line on which all the peculiarities of itsmusical gestures could be strung together: "Boulez had written no counterpoints, no second voices, and you couldn't subordinate any voices at all, as there was nothing leading, nothing on which themusic centered itself."2 The pianist's conception of musical continuity was still governed by the long-standing tradition of classical forms, a tradition that Boulez had purposely set out to demolish. Tudor was diligent in his preparation of the score, and he studied French in order to examine Boulez's critical writings. By 1950 Boulez had published three articles: "Propositions" and "Incidences actuelles de Berg" inPolyphonie (1948), and "Trajectoires: Ravel, Stravinsky, Sch?n berg" in Contrepoints (1949). Tudor gravitated towards "Propositions" as it was the only article that included musical examples from the recently composed sonata. In "Propositions," Boulez provides a brief survey of modern, innovative techniques of rhythmic organization, cit ing examples fromMessiaen, Stravinsky, and his own work, including the Second Piano Sonata. In the final paragraph of the article, Boulez reveals his aesthetic aims in amysterious passage thatTudor enthusiasti cally embraced: "I have a personal reason for giving such an important place to the phenomenon of rhythm. I think thatmusic should be col lective hysteria and magic, violently modern?along the lines ofAntonin Artaud."3 Boulez's comments in "Propositions" not only confirmed Tudor's intuition concerning the sonata's fragmented form, but also, and more importantly, introduced the pianist toAntonin Artaud, whose revolutionary ideas about theater would permanently alter his concep tion of the performance ofmodern music. Tudor procured a copy of Le Th??tre et son double, a collection of essays written byArtaud between 1931 and 1936, and firstpublished in France in 1938. "[W]here simplicity and order reign," Artaud insists, "there can be no theater nor drama, and the true theater ... is born out of a kind of organized anarchy."4 Using traditional Oriental theater as a model, Artaud rejects theOccidental practice of constructing a narrative based on text in favor of a theater that rigorously projects to the audi ence various components of the mise en sc?ne (including speech, movement, and light) as iftheywere physical objects. "[T]he stage," he declares, "is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given itsown concrete language to speak ... [a language] intended for the senses and independent of speech."5 In what came to be known as the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud calls for a production "in which violent Recital Hall ofCruelty 173 physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by awhirlwind of higher forces."6 Recognizing the pertinence of "chaotic violence" to Boulez's sonata, Tudor began to interpret itsdisjunctive pitches as physical objects being projected into the performance space. The music was to be experienced not in terms of a developmental narrative requiring the application of memory, but rather as a visceral engagement with the present, as Tudor states: I recall how my mind had to change in order to be able to do it. ... All of a sudden I saw that therewas a differentway of looking...