You Nakai — Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music (Oxford University Press)
You Nakai's Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music is a mammoth and vividly detailed analysis of the late David Tudor's trajectory from boy prodigy on the church organ to one of the first purveyors of live electronic music, with stops along the way as go-to pianist interpreting scores from most of the major composers of experimental music through the 1950s. Clocking in at 768 pages with over 300 images of Tudor's performances, instruments, schematics and block flow diagrams, the book goes into intense detail and will not be an easy read for those looking for a mere chronology of Tudor's work. Nor will the book please those in search of anecdotes about Tudor's personal life. As the title implies, this book is mainly about the instruments Tudor developed and used in his live-electronic work from the early 1960s until his death in 1996.
The very notion of what Tudor considered an instrument takes Nakai's research down a long, and at times, circuitous path through numerous interviews with former friends and colleagues, such as Gordon Mumma and Pauline Oliveros, to mining the archives of the David Tudor Papers at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the David Tudor Collection at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut (with over 500 instruments; 150 of which were built by Tudor himself) and the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation Records at the New York Public Library. This trove of material included receipts, crumpled notes, random scribbles on the backs of envelopes, empty packages of electronic components, clippings from hobby electronics magazines, letters from strangers, train and bus tickets, circuit plans, photos, tapes of interviews, video recordings and bills of material for various electronic projects.
If this at all sounds overwhelming, you'd be more than right in thinking so. And it seems this was also the case for Nakai, who at the beginning of his work on the book, which went from 2007-2019, knew next to nothing about analog electronics. The actual idea of writing about Tudor's work stemmed from a random peek into the archives at the Getty Research Institute when Nakai was doing research there for another project. This led to Nakai spending the next 12 years of his life studying and writing about Tudor's work, which for Nakai most resembled a black box that, in order to be fully understood, demanded to be dismantled and looked at from the inside. To achieve this, Nakai employed a method of research he termed reverse-musicology, in which he tried to approach Tudor's materials as Tudor would have approached them himself. But what did this mean exactly?
Part of the answer lies in Nakai's chosen title for the book, taken from a fragment of the Walt Whitman poem A Song for Occupations, which Tudor had scribbled in one of his notebooks around 1955: All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments. For Tudor, being reminded by the instruments meant, in his words, Observing electronic components and circuitry as individual and unique, rather than as servomechanisms, revealing their personalities, directly related to the particular musician involved with them. The deeper this process of observation, the more the components seem to require and suggest their own musical ideas, arriving at that point of discovery, always incredible, where music is revealed from the 'inside,' rather than 'outside.'
This quote is one of the few directly written by Tudor in Nakai's book. Tudor was not known for talking much about his work, if at all. He was often viewed as something of an enigma or living puzzle by his friends and colleagues. One of Nakai's main premises for working on this book was to approach Tudor's materials as Tudor did himself. Which in Tudor's case would be how he went about trying to solve the particular puzzle involved with interpreting a musical object, composition or performance. As John Cage once said about his friend, favorite musician and interpreter of his work, Tudor's interest in puzzles invited the whole thing of indeterminacy. To these ends, Nakai devised a two-fold method of approaching the massive puzzle that was Tudor's work: 1) Observe the given material thoroughly in an unbiased way until it reveals its own nature. 2) Bias the subsequent approach to the material based on this nature.
Nakai went to herculean lengths to understand the nature of Tudor's instruments. At the Wesleyan University collection he opened up the 500 instruments stored there and copied down their circuit plans, without at first even understanding what he was looking at. He took photos of nearly every single bit of material at the Getty Research Archives and transcribed all the recordings of Tudor's interviews to be found in the New York Public Library. Through this research Nakai hoped the nature of Tudor's instruments and their place in his work as a composer and performer would reveal themselves.
Tudor himself would have to be counted as the main instrument in Nakai's study. In 1959 the Italian composer Sylavno Bussotti sent Tudor a new collection of pieces entitled Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor. As Bussotti explained in a letter to Tudor, the pieces were not meant as an homage to Tudor but that they were written for Tudor the instrument, as one might compose a piece for orchestra or string quartet. Even before Bussotti's piece, many composers, including John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, had written their pieces explicitly with Tudor in mind. They were composing in the context of how David Tudor would solve the puzzle of interpreting their pieces, many of which were graphical scores that gave an enormous amount of leeway in how they could be realized.
Tudor also viewed himself as an instrument, though this notion took root many years before composers began considering him as one. Tudor's lifelong interest in the work of the Austrian occultist Rudolph Steiner, who once wrote, Each human being was composed as a musical instrument, helped Tudor see the connection between the physical nature of the material he was working with and a metaphysical concern of his own nature. This side of Tudor's work, like many aspects of his life, was little known during his lifetime. Profoundly influenced by Steiner's book, The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone: The Occult Basics of Music, Tudor even went so far as to become a member of the Anthroposophical Society in 1957. It was this occult approach to understanding the nature of musical objects, as well as himself, which guided Tudor through much of his work.
Nakai faced many challenges in writing about Tudor's work, and not just because Tudor himself spoke or wrote very little about what he was doing. Beyond the hurdle of Tudor's reticence was a problem of concept that Tudor brought to the notions of composer vs. performer, score vs. instrument and composition vs. improvisation. Tudor dismantled, expanded and sometimes just downright ignored these categories. There was also the issue of, as Nakai terms it, Tudor's low threshold of boredom, moving in the course of his life from organ to piano to bandoneon and then electronics. Even when Tudor finally arrived at his phase of working solely with electronics, this was often coupled with visual elements, such as his decades-long work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company or many projects in collaboration with visual artists.
"Reminded by the Instruments" leaves the door open to many other sides of Tudor's life, which Nakai freely admits to omitting in his opus. This would include, for example, Tudor's contact with Borbetomagus and what he thought about the nascent noise music scene in the United States — something Tudor referred to as pop groups! Nakai also avoided spending much time on areas covered in other books about Tudor, such as writing about Rainforest (probably Tudor's most famous piece), his piano realizations in the 1950's or participation at the Darmstadt seminars and Black Mountain College events with John Cage. The main focus here is the instruments and the transitions during Tudor's life. In particular, how Tudor went from being a performer of other people's music to being a composer of his own.
And this is often what is referred to as the great mystery surrounding Tudor's career: why did he stop performing on piano? Was it, as he (half?)-jokingly recounted to Alvin Lucier, Alcohol goes very well with electronic music; it's not so good with piano playing! Or, as he recounted in a joint interview with John Cage in 1972 on KPFA radio, I got tired of the sound of it. And I had a great desire to not have to hear it anymore! As much surrounding Tudor's life, this will probably remain a mystery. Just as his transition from interpreter of other people's work to being a composer in his own right. When did this happen, how? Part of the difficulty in answering such questions lies in the fact that Tudor redefined what composition meant. Or what performance meant. Or even what an instrument was. Virtually every aspect of Tudor's work went against traditional concepts. Which isn't to say that Tudor was at all interested in what all these concepts meant, traditionally or experimentally. Rather, the very nature of the material Tudor worked with caused these concepts to acquire new meaning.
Aside from the incredibly detailed look at Tudor's instruments and his approach to electronic music performance, the book offers an ancillary view of experimental music from the 1950's to the time of Tudor's death in 1996, touching on indeterminacy, prepared piano techniques, graphical scores, the introduction of live-electronics (as opposed to tape playback of pieces composed in a studio) and sound installation. So many of the ideas discussed in this book that Tudor began working with very early on are in such common usage today that we might as well imagine they'd always been with us. This would include no-input systems, field recordings, sound visualization, hardware hacking, circuit bending and sound art, just to name a few. "Reminded by the Instruments" provides the mind-boggling perspective that David Tudor had his hand in nearly all these developments, back in a time when there was no internet. When circuit diagrams had to be clipped out of magazines like Popular Electronics and everything Tudor needed to realize his ideas had to be built from scratch, either by himself or by commissioning electrical engineers to do it for him.
Nakai sums up his effort in Reminded by the Instruments as not so much to produce a faithful representation of Tudor's work, but to coordinate the scattered pieces of the puzzle to create a lively realization that future readers may use for this or that purpose. In which case, this book will provide virtually endless inspiration for anyone trying to find their own way as composers or performers or something else as yet to be defined until they themselves discover what that is.
Jason Kahn
