A Conversation with David Tudor
A Conversation with David Tudor
Joel Chadabe
On September 8, 1993, I drove to Tomkin’s Cove, in Westchester County, New York State, to ask David Tudor some specific questions about his work. My motivations was to gather primary-source information for the book that was subsequently published as Electric Sound, a history of electronic music told, in large part, in the words of the people who lived it. I had worked with Tudor on various projects and performances before that evening, a fact that had two ramifications in our conversation. First, given that we had one evening together, I asked about a few specific things, among them Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, Rainforest, and Bandoneon! (Bandoneon Factorial). Second, our time together wasn’t so much of an interview as it was a relaxed conversation. I wrote as we talked. We had dinner. And talked some more. I then edited my notes into a series of short narratives, with punctuation, in which Tudor’s words flowed smoothly, uninterrupted by questions or the normal digressions and discontinuities that often occur in conversations. For purposes of Electric Sound, I quoted excerpts from his narratives. For purposes of this writing, I re-edited some of the detail and offer his words as they appeared in my notes.
I began by asking Tudor about the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, which he initiated with John Cage in 1951. Cage had begun as early as 1939, in Imaginary Landscape #1, to use found sounds in his work, and it was, consequently, not surprising that he became interested in exploring the artistic use of tape recorders as soon as tape recorders became available. Yet the details of what happened in the Project … remained mostly unknown prior to Electric Sound, probably because no one had ever thought to ask Cage or Tudor, or Earle Brown, who was also an important participant in the project, what had happened. The whole story is told in some detail in Electric Sound, in Tudor’s and Earle Brown’s words. Brown showed up in 1952 after it had started, luckily in fact, because at that time Tudor had to pull back from the project as he became busier as a pianist. But Brown’s work is the end of the story. Here, in Tudor’s words, is the startup:
The project actually began because our friend Paul Williams gave us some money. It was John’s idea. It was John who supplied the ideas and motivation so we set to work with great application. I recall that there would have had to have been an idea of all inclusiveness because one of the things that John believed in was not omitting anything, so one of the first endeavors that we made was to categorize sounds … the spirit was to be all inclusive. I worked closely with John in the first year.
The Barrons [Louis and Bebe Barron] acted as sound engineers, as a team. They worked with us for several months. Then, because the money was running out, John took the tactic that we should record all the necessary material, so the last monies were spent with the objective that we would have all the material in our hands necessary to complete the splicing. The Barrons helped to record and prepare all the material, and of course they made contributions out of their technical knowledge and recording methods.
We established a method of working. The main work was splicing tape for Williams Mix, and the splicing continued at Monroe Street [in John Cage’s apartment]. John and I were impoverished. There was no money to throw around. I recall that at one point the money was in danger of running out, and so John and I made an assessment of what had to be done so that the funds would last until the completion of Williams Mix, and subsequently Paul gave us another sum of money to help continue. In those days there was no support … that’s why Paul Williams was such a godsend. He contributed out of friendship.
The procedures were already established. John and I had been working for months and established the order of the work. Then Earle came and offered to help. And spent more and more time helping. Earle arrived in time for the final stages of Williams Mix. And John saw that there was so much material that he and I had made together with the Barrons that John thought it ought to be used, so he thought immediately of Morton Feldman and of Earle. And so as a corollary to this project three of us realized Morty’s piece and Earle’s piece.
Tudor started to work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1953, and it was through the 1950s that he began to emerge as an independent strong personality. He said later, “I became my own composer …” We talked about the genesis of Rainforest — in Tudor’s words, “a piece that was very important to me” — that was first commissioned by Merce Cunningham in 1958 for a dance called Shards.
The first version was composed as a score for Merce Cunningham. I made eight small objects, they were small sculptures, and I programmed the objects with sound generators. The second version was a version designed to be performed by myself and John Cage who spoke. In other words, the sound material was speech but I designed it for John. The third version, Rainforest 3, was designed to be performed simultaneously with Mureau, one of John’s compositions.
At some point I decided that subsequent performances should be titled Rainforest IV. That version 4 was designed to incorporate microphones but in some situations I allowed myself to omit the microphones because sometimes it would be technically inappropriate or unfeasible for reasons of personnel. Not everyone is able to handle the idea that the microphones are releasing the sound of the objects. You put the sound through a physical material so that the physical material transforms the original source which is fed into it. And if you can manage to amplify that sound with a microphone, you release the harmonic content which the material gives to it.
In 1972, Cage organized a European tour for himself and David Tudor. Tudor described it:
He thought that we should go around Europe. He got a number of engagements where we could work together. The idea was that we should each do our own work, but simultaneously. It’s an idea which he had of simultaneous composition, and I know the first time he used that idea was in a collaboration with Lou Harrison. It was an idea which persisted in his mind. So he organized the tour for the two of us. We performed in London, Switzerland, I think we performed in Cologne, and I recall the last performance was in Spain. It was in Pamplona. It was outdoors, poor John. That was the very last performance on that tour and whereas in Cologne John and I agreed to do an evening length of Mureau with Rainforest 3, in Pamplona our last parting shot was to do the other collaboration which was John singing his Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham together with my work called Untitled. That was actually one of the high points of my electronic career, that piece called Untitled. Even for me it was unimaginably wild. The situation was that I didn’t set out to make it a wild sonic piece. Rather, I accepted it because that’s what it was.
Untitled was an electronic hookup designed in such a way that it had no beginning, no point in my thinking where the sound originated. The manner of making the hookup was to connect the end of every chain to the beginning to establish a state of total oscillation. Once I set out to realize that, I saw what I had done, that that was what the piece was, and I had to accept the fact that it was out of control because that was the situation that I had set out to make. A complete feedback loop. There were, I counted them at one time, there were sixty feedback loops in the electronic hookup. The manner of performing it came to become three tapes recorded as source material for the performance, and then those tapes were connected to a final output situation which was again variable, under the control of my performance.
The first performance of Untitled with Mesostics … was at Radio Bremen. It was a radio concert with live audience, and so John and I had the opportunity of working for a whole evening before the performance because we had to test out the piece to see whether we could do it, and we were both amazed. John’s idea was that the character of the mesostics would be best realized by him, as it were, in a single breath, and that he should shout it, he should shout the text. So it really came out wild, it was so unpredictable, it was just wonderful. It’s the kind of thing that couldn’t be done again. However, my next piece subsequent to that, or maybe the second piece after that, was another score which had been commissioned by Merce Cunningham. And I had been working with the feedback loops and the whole concept of electronic feedback and so I thought, why not try to do it live, completely, without any source tapes. So that’s how I did it. The dance was called Sounddance, the music was called Toneburst.
In October 1966, EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), an organization led by technology-and-art evangelist Billy Klüver, produced 9 Evenings: Theater and Technology at the 25th Street Armory in New York City. David Tudor composed Bandoneon! (Bandoneon Factorial) for the occasion. Why the bandoneon?
It was sort of fate because I had been playing Maurizio Kagel, and he had introduced me to the bandoneon and composed his piece Pandora’s Box for me. I bought one bandoneon and had one built for me, a big one, so I had in my mind that I would make a performance with it. The concept of Kagel’s piece interested me. It was a piece of composed music like an endless loop. And so when they asked me to do an evening at 9 Evenings, I thought about a possible realization of this piece, and then my thoughts grew, and I started to accumulate equipment and I saw the possibilities in using the bandoneon and I completely forgot my connection with Kagel’s piece.
My approach to the instrument had to have something to do with my concept of the difference between pulling and pushing the bellows so that the length of the phrases was determined by the amount of air in the bellows at a given time. My approach was to make a situation where I controlled the maximum number of tonal variables that I could obtain through the use of peripheral instruments. There was a lot to take care of during the performance. Without consulting my original score, I could tell you the number of tonal manipulations that I had under my control was 17 or 18, and part of the performance was in a sense controlled by my access to the tonal variations.
Bob Kieronski, a friend of mine, designed a device which he called the ‘Vochrome’. It was a set of harmonium reeds, pirated from a harmonium, in an enclosure that was made to be as soundproof as possible, because my desire was not to have the sound of the reeds present. And I attached two contact microphones inside the bandoneon to vibrate the reeds. Bob designed the Vochrome so that it would mechanically vibrate relays, and then he recalled that he had in his basement some old relays and that he could connect them to the Vochrome. One day, when we were trying it out, he said that the only problem with the relays was that they’re in sequence and you have to start a sequence from the beginning, so would you like it if I put a switch on your bandoneon so that you can reset the relays to zero. That was one of the most important things, because by touching that button I could stop the sound. The silence was deafening, because the sound in the Armory was extraordinary, so reverberant. Once you started something oscillating, it would go on forever.
So according to the pitches that I played, the sounds changed. But the relays not only changed the sounds, they changed the way the sounds were distributed to the loudspeakers. There were twelve independent channels and 12 loudspeakers. And Fred Waldhauer contributed a device that he called the “Proportional Control”, controlling the loudness of the sound in the loudspeaker proportional to the instrument. I had established discrete switching between loudspeakers through the Vochrome device, and I also wanted smooth control.
Then the signals from the same contact microphones were sent to Lowell Cross’ TV Oscilloscope, which displayed visual patterns at the same time as the music.
And there’s more: I had made a number of large sculptures in the manner of Rainforest. I think there were five, because Deborah Hay had a piece with dancers on platforms that could be sent around the space, and she wanted to have music, and I agreed to do the music if I could use the platforms for my sculptures. So the sounds from the bandoneon also vibrated the sculptures. My idea was that they would be sent around the room, that their sound would circulate. The audience was on three sides, so they would come close to the loudspeakers. And for that, I had to have five operators, seated on chairs, sending the platforms around. They were really radio-controlled carts.
Tudor’s compositions, in short, were instruments. Rainforest IV was perhaps unique in that it was a conceptual design for an instrument, meant to be built and played by a group. But as a rule, Tudor built his instruments for his own performances, and those instruments typically took the form of small, gray electronic utility boxes linked together by small patch cords. The approach certainly offered flexibility, in that he could build any box he needed. It also offered portability, in that it allowed him to carry his instruments in normal suitcases, wrapped in covers and foam. And relative to the prices of synthesizers from the mid-1960s on, it was inexpensive. But still, when I posed the question to David as to why he built these boxes instead of buying commercial models of the same functions, I was surprised by the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of his answer:
Flexibility, portability, and cost, but it was also because I could get the sound which I wanted to hear.
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