David Tudor

David Tudor (born January 20, 1926 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † August 13, 1996 in Tomkins Cove , New York ) was an American pianist and composer and one of the pioneers of electronic and experimental music in the 20th century .

Live and act

Tudor studied organ and music theory with H. William Hawke, piano with Irma Wolpe Rademacher, and composition with Stefan Wolpe . After the Second World War he quickly became one of the leading interpreters of contemporary piano music. In 1950 he gave the US premiere of Pierre Boulez's Piano Sonata No. 2 , performed works by Morton Feldman and La Monte Young at an early stage, and in 1954 toured Europe. Among other things, Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated his piano piece VI (1955) to him, and for a short time he also worked as a teacher at the Darmstadt Summer Courses (1956–1961).

The composer with whom David Tudor is most associated is John Cage . Cage's Music of Changes , his Concerto For Piano and Orchestra and also 4'33 " were premiered by him, and Cage later said that many of his piano compositions were either written specifically for Tudor or at least with him in mind There was also a close collaboration with works for electronics (e.g. Cage's Music for Electronic Tape ). Like Cage, Tudor had close ties with Merce Cunningham's Dance Company from the mid-1950s , and when Cage died in 1992 he took over as musical director this troop.

As a result of this collaboration, Tudor gradually gave up his activities as a pianist and interpreter in favor of his own compositional activity towards the end of the 1950s. His works are among the great pioneering acts of electronic music in the 20th century. The numerous commissioned works for Merce Cunningham , in which the music is combined with avant-garde lighting and stage design, contributed to the spread of his reputation. For example, in one of the plays, Reunion from 1968, co-written with Lowell Cross, a chess game is depicted, with each move triggering a light effect or slide projection; at the premiere the game was played between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp . These commissioned works also include: Rainforest I (1968), Toneburst (1974), Weatherings (1978), Phonemes (1981), Sextet for Seven (1982), Fragments (1984), Webwork (1987), Five Stone Wind (1988) , Virtual Focus (1990), Neural Network Plus (1992), and the most recent Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994, based on one of John Cage's last project ideas).

In 1970, Tudor was one of the four artists who designed the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. The fact that many of his works require the interplay of images, light, lasers, dance and television led to numerous other collaborative works in the 1970s and 1980s (with Jacqueline Monnier , Lowell Cross , Molly Davies , Robert Rauschenberg , among others ), and His last work, Toneburst: Maps and Fragments , was also shaped by such a collaboration (with the artist Sophia Ogielska ).

Web links

• Literature by and about David Tudor in the catalog of the German National Library
• The David Tudor Pages
• David Tudor Papers at the Getty Research Institute