David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music. After playing the U.S. premiere of the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Pierre Boulez in 1950, he premiered works by New York School composers including Morton Feldman and especially John Cage written for him; Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated a work to him, reflecting his similar degree of integration with the Darmstadt School. He turned to composing, including many projects for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. After Cage's death in 1992, he succeeded him as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Life and career

Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 20, 1926. Tudor began his career as an organist, The two worked closely together on many of Cage's works for piano and electroacoustic works, including for the Smithsonian Folkways album Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music (1959). Tudor also performs on several recordings of Cage's music, including the Mainstream record of Cartridge Music, the recording on Columbia Records of Variations II, and the two Everest records of Variations IV. <!--Tudor selected the works to be performed for the 25th Anniversary Retrospective Concert of the music of John Cage (May 16, 1958), and-->

Tudor taught at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse from 1956 to 1961,

Upon Cage's death in 1992, Tudor took over as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Among works created for the company, Tudor composed Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994), the electronic component of Ocean, which was conceived by Cage and Cunningham, with choreography by Cunningham, orchestral music by Andrew Culver and design by Marsha Skinner. Winter Music (1957), for example, comprises a score of twenty pages, that each contain from one to 61 cluster-chords per page, with the performer deciding which of these to play. In his realizations of these scores, Tudor "pin[ned] them down like butterflies", creating fixed realizations that he notated and played consistently from concert to concert. As Martin Iddon explains: "Tudor's practice was, broadly, to create a single realisation and then to use that version of the piece in all subsequent recordings". The conception and meaning of a work that Cage created with Tudor in mind is thus shared across the subjectivities of these two actors; similarly, the output 'sound-world' is shared in that Tudor's function in realizing the score is decision making based on Cage's score, which does not present a coherent sound-world on its own. Piekut aligns this creative distribution with Cage's Buddhist worldview. Matisse created four kites which Davies filmed being 'flown' underwater (dragged behind a boat) for eight days, and Tudor simultaneously recorded sound below and above deck which was later layered, mixed, and rerecorded onto three separate tapes. The combined work was first presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1983 and later at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2004.

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Further reading

  • Finding Aid for David Tudor papers, Getty Research Institute
  • The Art of David Tudor: Audio and Video
  • Lovely Music Biographies: David Tudor
  • Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music Album Details at Smithsonian Folkways
  • Duffie, Bruce: David Tudor (interview), April 7, 1986