Inside the Mind of a Sonic Rebel

At CalArts, students are assembling a “rain forest” of sound makers out of car doors and computer parts. At the Getty, two electronics wizards and three pianist-composers are preparing to unveil a trove of newly “realized” music. And around the world, a dozen scholars are putting the final touches on papers and research three years in the making.

This week in Brentwood and Valencia, all that effort comes together in “The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture”--three days of talk, performance and remembrance of a pianist turned electronic music innovator turned avant-garde avatar.

In the 1950s, Tudor was a well-known pioneering piano virtuoso, an inspiration for such composers as John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who premiered new work and concertized around the world. Then in the 1960s, he gave up the piano to pursue live electronic music as a creator-performer. He provided soundscapes for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and created or collaborated in the installations and experiments that made the New York musical avant-garde avant.

But Tudor’s name is not nearly as well-known as many of his collaborators’. Or, as one of the organizers of this week’s events puts it, “There’s still relatively little secondary material written on Tudor.”

This week’s events are something of a corrective--billed as the first international symposium on Tudor--and it’s happening here because Tudor, who died in New York state in 1998 at the age of 70, left a treasure trove of an archive that the Getty Research Institute acquired.

It’s a massive collection. There are musical scores in all manner of notations--from traditional staffs with notes to “graphic” musical instructions that use unique symbols to express music. There are pieces by Tudor, pieces written for Tudor and handwritten notes about how to play them. There are “schematics” for pieces, circuitry drawings that describe how to create a sound or an electronic instrument. And there are more than 500 tapes, kept in cold storage and gradually being converted to CD for better safekeeping. The Getty quantifies the collection in terms of the amount of space it requires--more than 177 linear feet of storage boxes.

Why would the Getty, an institution focused on visual arts and the classics, be interested in this musical holding?

“The David Tudor [archive] is here because of its impact on the visual arts as much as on music,” explains Nancy Perloff, a musicologist and art historian who is collections curator at the institute and the keeper of the Tudor material. “And [it is here] because he collaborated with so many central figures in the avant-garde--dancers, engineers, artists and so forth.

“There’s an increasing interest in postwar and contemporary culture at the Getty,” she continues. “With contemporary art, it’s very hard to study it or consider it without looking at the intersections, the blurred boundaries between the media. So, as our interest in contemporary art increases, clearly the interest in music as part of that becomes more and more important.”

The upcoming Tudor event is the result of a process that began three years ago, Perloff said. “We really wanted lead time, because we wanted people to come here, as much as possible, to see the material”--to use it, in other words, to create scholarship.

“Planning [the symposium] in conjunction with performance was very important, because how could we not hear his work?”

Enter CalArts. Key participants from that institution are electronic composer and teacher Mark Trayle, pianist-composer and music-school chief David Rosenboom, and pianist-professor Vicki Ray, all of whom will be performing music by and related to Tudor on pianos, laptops and other sound makers.

Trayle joined forces with fellow electronic-music and Tudor acolyte Ron Kuivila, who teaches at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, where some of the electronic hardware Tudor created is stored. They’ll present Tudor’s electronic pieces “Dialects” (1984), which uses flapping insect wings as a sound source, and “Untitled” (1972), involving complex feedback loops.

Rosenboom and Ray took on the task of burrowing into the archives in search of piano treasures. They will perform several pieces from material found in the archives, including a rarely done piece for two prepared pianos by Cage, an obscure solo work by Morton Feldman, works by Jerry Hunt, La Monte Young, and “action” pieces by Fluxus-related artist George Brecht. All of these compositions were either first made for Tudor or were collected by him, and his notes about them, which would have been worked out with the composers’ input in most cases, are a kind of Rosetta stone for understanding the music.

Going through the archives was revelatory, says Ray. “We’d be sifting through a folder and pull out a piece of manuscript paper from [composer] Henry Cowell. To hold stuff like that in your hands is pretty amazing. It’s the kind of project where we could go back to the archives year after year and pull more and more pieces out and make it a yearly project, to play through his whole archive, because it’s gigantic.”

In choosing what to perform, Rosenboom noted, “the only real theme was that we were interested in pieces that most people wouldn’t know anything about. Obviously, Tudor was famous for the big, knuckle-bashing pieces, the Boulez and Stockhausen and all that, but many people have done that now. Since we found all this other stuff, we felt it was more interesting to bring out these relatively little-known or totally unknown pieces.”

The research didn’t end with finding the score itself.

Take a work by composer Michael Von Biel, which will be on the Friday-night concert program. It “has very specific and unusual notation,” says Rosenboom. “We found a note pad from a Japanese hotel on which Tudor had written down the equivalencies for the notations. I could imagine that he and Von Biel were having lunch, and David was taking notes about how he should interpret symbols. It’s that note pad that I’m using to interpret the [score].”

Tudor was born in Philadelphia in 1926 and studied with composer Stefan Wolpe. Through another Wolpe student, Feldman, Tudor met Cage in New York City. It was Cage who chose the young pianist to give the American premiere of Boulez’s complex Second Piano Sonata in New York City in 1950, which made his reputation as a conqueror of the most challenging new piano music. In addition to performing, Tudor joined the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a legendary bastion of all things modern, where Buckminster Fuller, Cage and Cunningham, artist Franz Kline and poet Robert Creeley were among his colleagues.

Then, in the mid-’60s, Tudor turned a major corner into electronic music, leaving the piano for good. It was a turn toward composing, and his first major work was the 1966 “Bandoneon!,” using the Argentine accordion to trigger lights, video and kinetic speakers. Tudor also began creating his own patchworks of electronic components, avoiding off-the-shelf synthesizers and machinery, and promoting the idea of live electronic performance rather than prefab tape pieces.

Photographs of Tudor’s post-piano period find the bespectacled figure entangled in maze-like wiring. “Out of those monstrosities,” says Trayle, “he was able to bring really interesting music, always balanced on the edge of being out of control. He was really good at surfing that wave of catastrophe.”

In an interview in 1988, Tudor cursorily explained his radical shift toward electronics: “It was repugnant to me to use the piano as a sound source.”

His exact reasons for abandoning the piano aren’t completely clear, however. Rosenboom, who knew Tudor in the early ‘70s, when they both lived in Stony Point, N.Y., says the composer had come to believe in total control of the means of musical production.

“He was very much drawn to the idea that composers who were looking for new kinds of sounds needed to get involved in the physical sound-producing means and that the more the composer could do that the better.”

As for his ultimate dislike of the piano, Rosenboom remembers a dinner conversation they had. “We got into this sort of mock debate, back and forth, about which was worse--spending thousands of hours with a soldering iron, building all of your instruments to make your own music, or spending thousands of hours ‘woodshedding’ extremely difficult, nearly impossible feats of notes on the piano keyboard.

“I was arguing that the soldering iron was worse and he was arguing that the piano practicing was worse. That’s the only real insight I have to his change.”

One aspect of Tudor’s creativity that observers return to again and again is collaboration. One symposium session will be devoted to exploring the topic, and the kickoff event for “The Art of David Tudor” will be a performance of “Rainforest IV”--”a model of collaborative art-making,” says Rosenboom--followed by a panel discussion among a local contingent of Tudor compatriots.

“Rainforest IV” is a kind of mythic contemporary music ritual. Spawned in 1973 in a workshop in New Hampshire with composers John Driscoll and Ralph Jones and video artist Bill Viola--all of whom will be present for the panel discussion--it turns “sculptures” or found objects into sound-producing objects via transducers. The idea is to pump frequencies into the objects, which then act almost like speakers, each with its own sound.

“Rainforest IV” is one of the few Tudor pieces that gets programmed, and even then, it’s a rare occurrence. (It is available on a commercial recording, on the Mode label.) In part this is because of its intricate demands and unorthodox definition of what constitutes an instrument.

At CalArts, the performance is being coordinated by Trayle, who is having his students create the sound sources. They are “building objects from the ground up,” he says. “They’ve got car doors. A couple of students are using a PC motherboard as their resonating objects.”

Trayle believes that Tudor’s influence may have skipped a generation. He’s finding his students and the younger crop of electronic musicians eager for more--and he thinks it may be due to more exposure and to new technologies that make Tudor’s constructs easier to realize.

“In a way, it’s like a virus,” Trayle says of Tudor fans and practitioners. “It spreads. You hear it and you want to do it. I think the renaissance, or the resurgence or the rekindling of interest in his work is starting. And that’s a good thing.” *

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Schedule

“The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture” includes:

“Rainforest IV”: Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m., CalArts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia. Panel discussion with Tudor collaborators, Thursday only. Free. (661) 253-7800.

Symposium: Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, 9:30-5 p.m., Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Free, reservations required; parking, $5. (310) 440-7300.

Concerts: “Celebrating the David Tudor Archive,” Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., Getty Center. Free, reservations required; parking $5.