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Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music
David Tudor is remembered today in two as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output ― which began with the organ and ended with visual art ― have kept Tudor a puzzle.
Illustrated with more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor's instruments, Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war
experimental music.
Illustrated with more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor's instruments, Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war
experimental music.
- GenresMusic
768 pages, Hardcover
Published November 2, 2020
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 26, 2023
On page 85 at the moment. At this point, words are inadequate to express my admiration for You Nakai's achievement with this book, and the depth of its effect on my understanding of not just its subject (Tudor) but the entire world of postwar avant-gardeism. The cost of the book is a bit of a barrier, and I feared another letdown such as Martin Iddon's dreadful "New Music At Darmstadt" (which is really so bad as to deserve mention here). I'm glad I went through with it. About every 15 pages I have to put the book down and try to assimilate the revelations that "Reminded..." dishes out, and then get out other books on Cage and Stockhausen, and recordings, and dig the new perspectives Nakai's research and insight have bestowed upon them. And this is still chapter one I'm talking about!
ONE YEAR UPDATE: I put it on the shelf soon after writing the above, having ground to a halt around page 115. It's not easy to say exactly why.
ONE YEAR UPDATE: I put it on the shelf soon after writing the above, having ground to a halt around page 115. It's not easy to say exactly why.
Displaying 1 of 1 review