In Search of David Tudor, Enigma

Any account of the century’s great pianists requires the inclusion of David Tudor, who may well have been the most technically astonishing of them all. But that doesn’t mean you are likely to find him included in such accounts.

And while those who understand the live electronic music Tudor spent his later life gnomically creating might enthusiastically list him among America’s most important composers, they are a select few.

Many of the major composers of the 1950s who so admired and depended on Tudor’s transcendent pianism thought his later shift to composition nothing less than a betrayal. The largest audience for Tudor’s own music was the audience for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (with which he was associated from 1953 until his death in 1996), and dance lovers typically despised Tudor’s bewilderingly effusive electronic noises.

When it comes to Tudor, who still remains best known for his association with John Cage, there is a lot to talk about. But it is also typical of the secretive Tudor that after all the talk (and music) supplied by “The Art of David Tudor,” a symposium and series of concerts sponsored by the Getty Research Institute (which holds the Tudor archive) in collaboration with CalArts Thursday through Saturday, one walked away with far more questions than answers.

Part of Tudor’s legacy, it appeared, was to spread confusion, glorious confusion. Indeed, a comment I found particularly helpful in approaching Tudor’s music was that Tudor didn’t just embrace chaos, he surfed it.

So who was David Tudor? That was not exactly the subject of the event, which was subtitled “Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture.” Yet a fractured portrait began to emerge from the diverse points of view found in a community of musicians who knew him and scholars who imagine him.

Tudor was a quiet, obsessively studious man. In pictures from the early ‘50s, he appears the embodiment of cool, with his horn-rimmed glasses, sensual looks and dangling cigarette. The comparison with Bill Evans was made more than once. But behind the coolness burned a fire that led him to master music that was more challenging than any that had ever been written and to do so with seemingly inhuman accuracy.

The composer Christian Wolff, who joined Cage’s circle around the same time Tudor did in the early ‘50s, spoke of how Tudor, when learning Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, not only felt it necessary to read the books Boulez was reading, but went so far as to learn French to do so.

This kind of obsessiveness went into everything Tudor did. When presented with indeterminate music that consisted of only graphic notation, he spent countless hours making calculations about how to proceed; the Getty archives bulge with pages of his arithmetic.

The obsessiveness also appears to be what led Tudor in an increasingly inward direction as he invested more and more effort in thinking about sound in utopian terms. The musicologist Tamara Levitz saw Tudor’s giving up the piano as a giving up of the body. In this controversial interpretation, the once highly sensual pianist found in electronics a release, a way of elevating the ear above all else. The last years of Tudor’s life, in fact, were spent producing electronic music based upon circuits that mimicked the brain’s neural networks.

But where does this leave us today as listeners? We have relatively few available recordings of Tudor (and very few of him as virtuoso pianist). The realization of many of his electronic works are mysteries, although a few disciples are around to have a go at them. Theorists from the visual arts, cultural studies and literature proved eager at the Getty to have a go with Tudor in their own way, as well, hoping that, say, French theories of cinema, such as seeing the material world in immaterial flux, might help. But they don’t.

*

That there is no critical vocabulary with which to speak about Tudor was one lament, but thinking of Tudor as producing performative actions rather than performing doesn’t help either. One art historian went so far as to identify Tudor--a warm, brilliant and giving, if peculiar, man--as a kind of “creep,” bizarrely comparing him with the marginal Fluxus artist Henry Flynt, both having assumed a similarly nerdy manner.

The concerts, however, only added to the confusion of how to continue Tudor’s legacy. Tudor’s most famous and most inviting work, “Rainforest IV,” was set up at CalArts on Thursday night, and it was amazing. Having become the master of finding the acoustical soul of the piano, Tudor branched out in the world itself, using electronics to set everything he could get his hands on resonating. In “Rainforest,” we wander through an installation of electrified common objects--an oil drum, toilet floats, a car door, you name it--that come to miraculous, exhilarating sonic life. With embedded speakers, they are fed sounds that set them vibrating.

The concerts at the Getty on Friday and Saturday nights touched on Tudor in strange ways. They did not include the virtuoso music that had been written for him. But the pianists Vicki Ray and David Rosenboom, from CalArts, played a wide range of music that reminded us that Tudor would do just about anything if he thought it interesting. In “Piano Piece for David Tudor #1” by La Monte Young, for instance, the virtuoso is asked to feed hay and water to the piano. And so Ray and Rosenboom did.

Ray played, with exquisite control, Morton Feldman’s early “Nature Pieces.” Rosenboom accomplished something that I thought no one would ever be able to do: He gave a decent imitation of the arrestingly nutty Jerry Hunt, bashing the piano with a large collection of noisemakers, in “Helix 5.” Cage’s “A Book of Music” for two prepared pianos, written in 1944, didn’t tell us anything about the Cage-Tudor collaboration, but it was well played.

Two examples of Tudor’s own live electronic music, “Dialects” (1984) and “Untitled” (1972), were re-created by Ron Kuivila and Mark Trayle (composers who worked with Tudor). The results may have been louder and more relentless than what Tudor would have liked, but space did seem transformed into an ocean of ever-changing sound. Surfing the chaos is no simple sport, and we are just at the beginning of appreciating how it was that Tudor managed it.