by You Nakai (Music 780.92 Tudor)
In the world of classical music, composers
often get the lion’s share of attention. Your average person likely knows names
like Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, or even John Cage, but who is familiar with
the names of the musicians who have worked over centuries to make their music
come alive in the air? Conductors sometimes pick up some recognition as the
public faces of the ensembles they lead, but relatively rare is the classical
musician who breaks out on with public recognition of their own.
Obviously there are some well-known
performers, but I raise the general point to shine some light on the many hard
working musicians who often work just outside of the limelight to bring the
music of well-known artists to the stage where audiences can enjoy it. To some
extent, composer and performer roles in the 2nd half of the 20th century
started to change a bit, when composers like Phillip Glass or Steve Reich had
their own ensembles and worked as composer-performers, participating themselves
in the final realization of their works. The composer-performer model became
more common among the other members of those ensembles, too, many of whom had
their own careers as composers even if they weren’t as well-recognized. And
it’s one of those composer-performers, or performer-composers if you’d prefer,
that we’ll focus on here: David Tudor. Unless you’re pretty deeply into
post-1945 classical music, you may not be familiar with Tudor, but his efforts
as a performer were essential to how the works of composers like Karlheinz
Stockhausen or John Cage were received by the public. The information available
about Tudor and his own work has long been scarce, but that has just changed
with the publication of a tremendous overview of his contributions, a
comprehensive tome of a book called Reminded by the
Instruments: David Tudor’s Music by You Nakai,
which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.
In the introduction to Reminded by the
Instruments, Nakai quickly details his motivations
for starting what must have been a gargantuan process toward the completion of
this book. David Tudor is featured on many recordings, particularly those of
the work of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but there simply hasn’t been
much discussion about his contributions directly. His name comes up in
interviews and articles about other composers, but usually he’s mentioned in
terms of something specific that he contributed, or a funny anecdote (and from
the anecdotes, it sounds like he was generally a very quiet person, and occasionally
crabby). But his own career path remained somewhat hidden in the margins of
other composer’s more public career arcs. Nakai visited the four major
repositories of Tudor’s papers and instruments and strove to find the
connections across the span of his career, presenting his findings in
accordance with the way that Tudor would have approached his own work. That is
to say, for a performer who became known in particular for his ability to
interpret graphic scores during the earliest developments of graphic notation,
there seemed to be a consistency of approach that allowed Tudor to excel at
interpreting such works, and he seems to have applied that kind of philosophy
throughout his life’s work. Nakai has distilled this approach down to a 2-step
process:
“1. Observe the given material thoroughly in
an unbiased way until it reveals its own ‘nature.’
2. Bias the subsequent approach to the material based on this nature.”
This seems abstract at first, but it turns out
to be quite practical. Nakai used this approach on the collections and holdings
of David Tudor to help focus his research, and we can discover both the hows
and the whys of pieces throughout his career following this simple plan. Based
on the research materials explored to create this book, it’s fair to say that
this isn’t a biography. It really is a document of David Tudor’s music through
and through, and to some extent David Tudor as a legendary or somewhat
mysterious person will remain elusive as you read this book. But you will
likely understand his work and his methods, and to the degree that he seemed so
deeply invested in his work, perhaps this is enough.
The book proceeds in a mostly chronological
order, starting around 1947, when Tudor is transitioning from the organ to the
piano. We immediately discover his penchant for approaching instruments in that
“unbiased way until they reveal their own nature” as mentioned earlier: in this
case, he has decided to switch to the piano as his primary instrument upon
hearing Irma Wolpe’s playing. In her playing, he detected a unique kind of
dynamic control that he wasn’t finding himself or in the playing of others, so
he went back to the fundamentals of piano, namely the mechanical aspects of
piano action. In doing this, he discovered a trick in the escapement mechanism
where a player can focus on the precise control of the escapement in such a way
that one can play a very loud forte note and then follow it with very clear but
quiet articulations — and all of this can happen using roughly the same amount
of force on the key, which goes against the usual theories of dynamic
production at the piano. It’s this kind of dedication and deep understanding of
his craft that he started applying to graphic notation scores.
Since this is such a massive book, I’m not
going to be able to follow the chronology here at ground level, but suffice it
to say that roughly the first quarter of the book pertains to graphic notation
pieces and how Tudor fastidiously interpreted them for piano performance. As
Cage and Tudor worked together, both found themselves drawn to electronic
music, and in particular methods for creating live electronic music (as opposed
to the kinds of electronic music being made then with giant synthesizers that
couldn’t find their way to stages except on prerecorded tapes). Much of the
balance of the book gets into extreme detail about Tudor’s eventual transition
to building electronic musical devices, an area of his work about which little
has been publicly discussed before. In building his own sound devices, and
creating entire sound systems, Tudor came to the field as a total novice in
electronics, but he devoted himself fully to the task. The book is full of
descriptions of pieces, photos of his electronic gadgets, and perhaps most
importantly, lots of circuit diagrams. If you’re electronically inclined,
you’ll be able to make similar devices yourself with some of the diagrams in
this book. And as we learn about these devices, we also learn about Tudor’s
musical engagement with them.
Take the 1974 piece “Toneburst,” for example.
We’re skipping quite a distance ahead, by which time Tudor had been designing
and implementing such devices for well over a decade, but he continued to
supplement live electronics with pre-recorded materials on tape. Toneburst was
a tour de force of achieving the musical effect he desired without the use of
any prerecorded materials. Even after the debut of the piece, there are
diagrams from several years later where he continues to refine and expand on
the set of devices used to realize it in real time. These kinds of systems are
sometimes referred to in electronic music circles as no-input systems, meaning
that Tudor was able to create sounds through self-oscillation of his devices,
and then further processed those sounds through a variety of methods to create
his music.
As we learn toward the end of the main text,
Tudor was working with principles of neural networks in his final years in the
1990s, which is pretty impressive considering that neural networks and machine
learning continue to be cutting-edge music news 30 years later, like the news
of Holly Herndon’s AI “digital twin” vocalist from just a few weeks ago. And in
his final years, Tudor turned to visual art, which is briefly covered at the
end of the book. Appropriately enough, his visual art efforts look a lot like
colorized circuit diagrams.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try For the Birds by
John Cage, Between Air and
Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments by
Cathy van Eck or In Search of a Concrete
Music by Pierre Schaeffer.)
( official remindedbytheinstruments.info web
site )
Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
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