David Tudor
David Tudor was an American pianist, organist, composer, and pedagogue associated with 20th-century classical, contemporary classical, avant-garde, and experimental music.
Born in Philadelphia on 20 January 1926, Tudor built a career as a performer who took on demanding and newly written repertoire. In 1950 he played the United States premiere of Pierre Boulez's Piano Sonata No. 2, and he also premiered works written for him by John Cage as well as works by Morton Feldman. His activities as a performer extended to composers beyond those he premiered: Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated a work to him, reflecting the breadth of his engagement with the European and American avant-garde.
Over time Tudor moved increasingly toward composition, taking on numerous projects for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. That institutional relationship deepened after the death of John Cage in 1992, when Tudor succeeded Cage as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a position he held until his own death. He died in New York City on 13 August 1996.
Throughout his career Tudor worked across genres that included classical music, electronic music, contemporary classical music, and experimental music, placing him at a sustained intersection of performance and composition in the mid-to-late twentieth century.
Quotes by David Tudor
I’ve never been able to arouse any interest in myself for digitally produced sound, and so the computer turns me off.
If you put yourself in a situation of unpredictability and then find that it’s completely possible to accept it, then you become an observer.
I’ve always felt that there’s a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that’s the point where I know the composition is finished.
Performing is very much like cooking: putting it all together, raising the temperature.
Take the classic experiment of using ordinary feedback: just take the output of something and feed it back into the input. Those of us who do that have had really rich experiences. And it is obvious that that line of experimentation can continue.
The basic notion was the idea that the loudspeaker should have a voice which was unique and not just an instrument of reproduction, but an instrument unto itself.
Most electronic equipment uses the principle of amplification. You need filters, modulators and mixing equipment which have gain stages. By piling these components up, I was able to work without any sound generators and I made several pieces in that manner.
If you put yourself in a situation of unpredictability and then find that it's completely possible to accept it, then you become an observer.