David Tudor; Composer of Experimental Music

David Tudor, 70, a pianist and composer of avant-garde music. A native of Philadelphia, Tudor began his career in the 1940s as an organist and soon switched to piano. He began performing experimental new music as early as 1950, and many of composer John Cage’s unusual pieces were written specifically for him. By the 1960s, he had abandoned piano and began working with electronic sounds. As a composer, Tudor relied on custom-built modular electronic devices, making most of them himself. At a typical concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1975, he created music from steel cans, a big metal ring, a cluster of toilet floats and electronic apparatus amplifying sounds from birds, frogs and whales. Tudor was asked to apply his flexible talents to “Experiments in Art and Technology” in the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. He was affiliated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company since its creation in 1953 and became musical director after Cage died in 1992. On Tuesday in Tomkins Cove, N.Y., after a series of strokes.