A New Box Set Gives Experimental Composer David Tudor His Due

In August 1952, when John Cage premiered his landmark composition 4’33”, the guy who sat at the piano occasionally turning a page but never hitting any keys was David Tudor. An avant-garde pianist and experimental composer born in Philadelphia in 1926, Tudor is inextricably linked to Cage—he performed the premiere of just about every piano piece the older man wrote in the 50s and early 60s. He was also a key collaborator of many of Cage’s peers from the New York School of the 50s, such as Morton Feldman,

Tudor started taking piano lessons when he was six. Five years later he began playing organ, and by the time he was 17 he was working as a church organist in Swarthmore. That was also the year he first heard pianist Irma Wolpe, Stefan Wolpe’s wife, who was performing at a local college; he soon became her student. He proved a quick study with the classical repertoire and gravitated toward more modern sounds; by the mid-40s he was giving recitals of music by the likes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Tudor also developed a relationship with Stefan Wolpe that opened doors for him—their connection helped him land a gig premiering Pierre Boulez’s Deuxieme Sonate (1948) at New York’s Carnegie Recital Hall in 1950. Before long he was the piano interpreter of choice for the composers of the emerging New York School.

After the premiere of Neural Network Plus in 1992, explains Adams, “He did make a few more source tape recordings so he never became familiar with the sounds. This was key, to not ‘memorize’ the source tapes so you would instinctively anticipate certain types of sounds. When something happened that he wasn’t expecting to hear, this was a good performance.”