David Tudor and the performance of American experimental music, 1950-1959.
Item
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Title
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David Tudor and the performance of American experimental music, 1950-1959.
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Identifier
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AAI9417470
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identifier
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9417470
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Creator
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Holzaepfel, John.
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Contributor
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Adviser: H. Wiley Hitchcock
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music
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Abstract
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The importance of David Tudor to the music of the postwar avant-garde has been as often acknowledged as it has gone unexamined. Based on direct work with Tudor's collections of manuscripts, papers, correspondence, and programs, this dissertation is the first historical and analytic study of a career unique in twentieth-century musical performance.;The first two chapters discuss Tudor's early training and the radically new musical orientation he underwent at the end of 1950 through a fortuitous encounter with the aesthetics of Antonin Artaud. The remaining four chapters concentrate on Tudor's realizations of selected works by the principal American experimental composers of the 1950s: Morton Feldman's Intersections 2 and 3, Earle Brown's Twenty-five Pages and Four Systems, Christian Wolff's Duo for Pianists I and For Pianist, and John Cage's "Solo for Piano" from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The order of presentation reflects the evolution of Tudor's practice of preparing his own performance material from a composer's score. A discussion of the context and development of each composer's notational techniques and a description of the works in terms of their notations and the problems these pose for the performer are followed by an analysis of Tudor's realization, which proceeds by a close study of the texts involved: the composer's score, Tudor's work notes, and his own performance material.;The systematic extension of playing techniques was an essential component in Tudor's makeup long before his encounter with experimental music. This remained central to his musical thinking throughout the 1950s and in fact grew as he used the new music as a basis for pianistic innovation. Tudor's role in the composition of American experimental music during this period and his legacy as a pianist are intertwined: his overriding interest in the music lay in the challenges presented by its notational problems, problems Tudor regarded as puzzles. And his solutions were, throughout the 1950s, invariably in terms of what he could do with the piano, either by extending existing techniques or inventing new ones. In this regard, the dissertation is a contribution to the history of piano-playing.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
