David Tudor

[Gordon B]

I'm requesting David Tudor recs.

I only own:
Three Works for Live Electronics
Rainforest

Does anybody recommend anything else by him?

[walto]

Erst is now distributing a 2-CD set of some of his Feldman performances. It's contains all of an old Columbia/Odyssey Feldman LP and a Cage LP as well.

[Brian Olewnick]

Yeah, the one Walto recs is a must. Tudor's performance of Cage's Variations II is landmark. The Cage/Tudor Rainforest/Mureau recording is very good though the Rainforest on Mode (the one you have, I think) is my favorite. Neural Synthesis is tough sledding (though I should take that out again) and the one with Gordon Mumma is spotty, imho.

[Richard Pinnell]

I'd second all of the above recommendations. the 2 disc set on RZ Edition that includes the quite stunningly brilliant Variations II piece (and I choose my hyperbole carefully there!) is great, the perfect overview album in my opinion.

I also have a soft spot for Indeterminacy with Cage's spoken word, his version of Cage's Music of changes on hatArt (if you can find a copy) and the disc David Tudor plays Cage and Tudor from a few years back on Atonal is worth hearing as well.

[Gordon B]

I ordered "Plays Cage and Tudor" on Atonal and "Music for Piano" on RZ for now from Jazz Loft along with a lot of jazz. That will do me for awhile. Jazz Loft has a good selection of Tudor, including the hatArt that Richard mentioned.

I didn't realize until just now that Tudor plays on Stockhausen's "Kontakte". I have that on lp. It was the only record of electronic music I owned for at least two decades.

[Jon Abbey]

yeah, the RZ one is the one to start with, for sure, I know that's Robert's (hatta's) 2007 album of the year. I only stock ones I can really get behind, so anything I have at ErstDist, I recommend.

[hatta]

This is the Tudor in order of "essential-ness", in my opinion:

* David Tudor - Piano (Edition RZ) - the Variations II is the standout, but there is tons of great pieces on here.
* John Cage - Music of Changes (hatART) - OOP but floating around in some stores.
* David Tudor/Gordon Mumma - Basically the two earliest versions of Rainforest, the definitive Tudor electronic piece. The earliest version were the most interesting IMO as they are the most electro-acoustic.
* David Tudor - Microphone (Cramps) - Hard to find CD, the LP is easier to find (or slsk even easier for this oop piece). Probably my second favorite Tudor composition after Rainforest.
* John Cage - Music for Merce Cunningham (Mode) - For the Cartridge music which gives you a lot of the source sounds for Variations II. The other piece on this is not as good.
* David Tudor plays John Cage and David Tudor - The Cage piece is great the Tudor interesting but only Okay
* David Tudor - Rainforest (Mode) - The early Rainforest is really good if not as solid as the ones on the Mumma/Tudor disc. The Rainforest IV is pretty meh.
* David Tudor- Neural Synthesis / Pulsers; Untitled; Phonemes (Lovely) and Live Electronics (Leonardo Music Journal) - These three discs put out by Lovely and the Leonardo Music Journal are all Tudor pieces for electronics. Great stuff in here, but your millage will vary depending on what you like. Much of it is raucous, raw and noisy but amazing sound and control over this chaotic systems. All must haves IMO.
* David Tudor/John Cage - Rainforest II * Mureau (New World) - Rainforest II which is fascinating and cage reading odd vocable stuff based on Thoreau. So you have to be able to deal with that combo. I think is pretty great, but again taste will dictate.

There is tons more, I dig his stuff on the Edition RZ Feldman, his playing of Earle Brown, Wolff and Evangilisti on various discs and there are tons more Cage recordings. So it kind of depends on what you want. The best online Tudor resource are the EMF Tudor pages and they have a very complete discography. If you want to dig deeper quite a bit of the Tudor collection at the Getty has been digitized.

[walto]

Here's an excerpt from an old (1998) Cadence piece of mine that included something about a Tudor recording:


I have often been known to derogate the importance of the composition/improvisation dichotomy. The differences between ex ante planning and real-time creation are usually fairly clear, but are also generally unimportant, especially when one considers the obstacles to excellence in both sorts of endeavor. Furthermore, luck is nearly as important as cunning at both ends of (and outside) the planned/spontaneous continuum. It’s difficult to dole out compositional or improvisational credit when the parameters of a piece are strictly determined not by any prior or current musical intuitions, but by the way some I Ching sticks have happened to land or a bunch of leaves have been strewn about by a storm.

I have a somewhat different take on the simplicity/complexity dichotomy. Here, I believe I have a settled preference for the complicated, but it’s less clear to me exactly what the term “complicated” connotes. The obvious suggestion is something like, “A piece is complex when it has a lot of different stuff going on at the same time.” But this isn’t too helpful. Does Cage’s “4:33,” with not a single note to be played (and little in the way of other instructions), really represent the limit of the simple, when the piece-as-heard actually includes coughs, foot scufflings, and chair creakings? Does adding instrumentalists generally increase complexity, if one can hear the scritching bow and wheezing breath of a bassist performing solo, and these things are completely lost when this player is joined by a large ensemble in the performance of a little ditty? (I mean, think of “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road”?) How much, then, is miking,.rather than composition or performance, responsible for recorded complexity?

Given tough nuts like these, I’m tempted to quote Joni Mitchell’s often useful (if never grammatical) “Nevermind the questions there’s no answers to.” A little light can be thrown on these knotty subjects, however, by considering a third dichotomy, that between the concrete and the abstract. Just as one may call a sunset “beautiful” and a photograph that captures its essence “art,” the nice, comforting sounds that heard on an “environments” recording of, say, Night on Bull Frog Pond may also deserve that appellation. The microphones, like the camera, must be placed just so, and the timing of the recording must be just right. While the resulting art is admittedly on the very concrete end of the spectrum, artistic choices still have to have been made -- well or badly -- and the results must stand on their own as works that do or do not tend to evoke aesthetic responses of a certain kind. The “complexity” of musique concrete - the unmanipulated chirping of actual birds, the low squeal of a rusty gate in a resonant subway station, a pianist’s gruntings - is of an altogether different sort from the complexity provided by an “abstract” piece of music, like an Elliott Carter string quartet or a Borah Bergman solo. While the abstract can sometimes represent the concrete, the reverse isn’t possible. There’s an aspect of what philosophers call “nonintentionality” to musique concrete: it may be beautiful and even elicit strong emotional responses, but it can’t represent anything at all. While “abstract music” doesn’t always have this representative function, it often does. There’s a difference between being reminded of your mortality by listening to a Bruckner symphony and fearing death because of what sounds like an out-of-control minivan careening in your direction. This distinction is similar to that between reasons and causes. The latter may act on us, but they don’t mean anything. The extent to which the concreteness of a bunch of natural sounds is maintained by a reproducer who is largely engaged in collage techniques may prevent a work’s undeniable complexity from satisfying a yearning for meaning, even if the finished collage is exquisite. So, it’s important to remember that a latitudinarian attitude about what sorts of things can be beautiful music does not require grade inflation with respect to aspects of individual works. Stradivarius or weed whacker; written, improvised or stencilled star charts: it’s not the instruments or compositional methods that matter, it’s the results. I’ve heard both wonderful and bad pieces of all sorts, and I’ve yet to find any correlation with a decent R-square value between compositional method and quality of piece. There are many varieties of and components to excellence in music, and these provide many ways to succeed or fail

The above musings/rantings were occasioned by several new releases that have recently come my way. It’s hard to hear the name DAVID TUDOR without thinking of a young man trashing Steinways back in the 1950s in the name of John Cage and conceptual art. Even if he were still into instrument disrepair, DAVID TUDOR PLAYS CAGE & TUDOR (Atonal 3027) wouldn’t be so outrageous anymore. How could it? So many years after passing the instrument-destruction baton off to The Who’s Peter Townsend, pounding perfectly good instruments or amplifiers into rubble would seem wasteful or even childish. Although there’s no obvious carnage on the 1982 performance of Cage’s 1958 “Solo for Piano,” there does remain a dogged resolve to avoid conventional piano sounds and passages. This performance of Cage’s highly indeterminate score is quiet, thoughtful, and mostly unpianistic: much of it could have been undertaken on a banjo or a hot water heater. As Tudor is a fine pianist, the extreme pointillism of the performance may seem a waste of his talents, but his pitch and timbre choices are wonderful: those who like early Feldman will enjoy the slow procession of almost incommensurate sounds. Others may just like trying to guess what will come next. The other work on this recording, Tudor’s 1993 performance of his “Neural Synthesis No. 2,” utilizes an unusual analog synthesizer that, according to the notes, “responds to external signals of many kinds which are gated by the performer.” Though most of the sounds are unpitched, this piece is somewhat more conventional than the Cage, containing fewer long silences, more repetition, a willingness to use echoes/delays, and a good deal of industrial noise (and plunger) mimicry. I like both works.