Natural Objects

Tudor claimed that in his seminal work Untitled, electronic components were discovered as “natural objects” as they were patched in a feedback loop creating a giant oscillator which generated sounds without exterior input. But his description of the piece as “part of a never-ending series of discovered works” calls into question its very status as a standalone “work.” Turning to its performance history appears to only complicate the puzzle. Despite his aim to perform everything live, the proliferation of modular instruments forced Tudor to record the output of his setup in advance and use this recording as input source in subsequent performances. He would later create Toneburst, which realized the no-input principle without the aid of pre-recorded sources. Shortly before his death, Tudor revived Toneburst for other musicians of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to perform. A close examination of recordings reveals that the same three source tapes were used not only in all performances of Untitled, but also in all performances of Toneburst after its revival. This surprising discovery, along with Tudor’s use of the linguistic indeterminacy inherent in the title of Untitled to solve a conundrum he faced in the revival, is used to depict the complex oscillation between work and performance in Tudor’s live-electronic music.

Reminded by the Instruments

David Tudor (1926–1996) is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of postwar avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, influencing the development of graphic notation and indeterminacy; and as a spirited pioneer of live-electronic music who realized idiosyncratic performances based on the interaction of homemade modular instruments, inspiring an entire generation of musicians. However, the fact that Tudor himself did not talk or write much about what he was doing, combined with the esoteric nature of electronic circuits and schematics (for musicologists), has prevented any comprehensive approach to the entirety of his output which actually began with the organ and ended in visual art. As a result, Tudor has remained a puzzle of sorts in spite of his profound influence—perhaps a pertinent status for a figure who was known for his deep love of puzzles. This book sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor as a puzzle that David Tudor made, applying Tudor’s own methods for approaching other people’s materials to the unusually large number of materials that he himself left behind. Patching together instruments, circuits, sketches, notes, diagrams, recordings, receipts, letters, custom declaration forms, testimonies, and recollections like modular pieces of a giant puzzle, the narrative skips over the misleading binary of performer/composer to present a lively portrait of Tudor as a multi-instrumentalist who always realized his music from the nature of specific instruments.

Freedom and Spontaneity in the Creative Process: Lessons from Experimental Music

This chapter focuses on composers who explored freedom and spontaneity in the creative process as alternatives to compositional systems with various formal rules and constraints. John Cage used chance operations and indeterminacy to compose music that allowed listeners unlimited interpretative freedom. Pauline Oliveros designed human/machine interfaces that created feedback resembling human intuitive and spontaneous interactivity. David Tudor created “live” electronic music in its most literal sense with idiosyncratic sound systems that produced sounds that took on a “life of their own.” Frederic Rzewski viewed spontaneous music as a transcendent and transformative creative process available to both musicians and non-musicians. Roscoe Mitchell developed composition/improvisation hybrids that challenge traditionally held assumptions about musical works in the Western canon. Embracing freedom and spontaneity as aesthetic values made it possible for these composers to challenge the dominant political ideology and its social conventions.

Now I'm Digital, Where Is My Ritual?: Exploring Postdigital Performance Objects as Totems for Agency and Ritual

The author argues that significant aspects of electronic music performance have been diminished in the rush to incorporate the latest, often discreet (as in intentionally unobtrusive) technologies. He identifies these aspects as agency, ritual and, to a lesser extent, serendipity and mess. Using references to his own work, he suggests that applying an understanding of how actors create totems to present agency and affordance is essential to regain, and possibly acclimate, these tools and practices so they are relevant to live electronic music performance practice in a contemporary technology environment.

Tecnofagia: A Multimodal Rite

This is a concert proposal of Brazilian digital art, which brings in its creative core the historical and cultural aspects of certain locations in Brazil. The term ​ Tecnofagia derives from an allusion to the concept of anthropophagic movement (artistic movement started in the twentieth century founded and theorized by the poet Oswald de Andrade and the painter Tarsila do Amaral). The anthropophagic movement was a metaphor for a goal of cultural swallowing where foreign culture would not be denied but should not be imitated. In his notes, Oswald de Andrade proposes the "cultural devouring of imported techniques to re-elaborate them autonomously, turning them into an export product." The ​ Tecnofagia project is a collaborative creative and collective performance group that seeks to broaden aspects of live electronic music, video art, improvisation and performance, taking them into a multimodal narrative context with essentially Brazilian sound elements such as:accents and phonemes; instrumental tones; soundscapes; historical, political and cultural contexts. In this sense, ​ Tecnofagia tries to go beyond techniques and technologies of interactive performance, as it provokes glances for a Brazilian art-technological miscegenation. That is, it seeks emergent characteristics of the encounters between media, art, spaces, culture, temporalities, objects, people and technologies, at the moment of performance.