Material bias

Abstract

It is known that one specific concern in the development of indeterminacy and graphic scores among the so-called ‘New York school’ composers was to satiate the interest of one specific performer: the pianist David Tudor, famous for his genius at solving puzzles. It is also known that after a decade of playing the piano, Tudor started incorporating electronics into his acoustic instrument, subsequently composing music by connecting modular electronics into an instrumental network which also served as the ‘score’ for his performance. What is not known is the connection between these two seemingly disparate endeavours. This paper attempts to solve this puzzle at the heart of Tudor's activities through the notion of ‘material bias’. Tudor's realisations of graphic notation treated the composer's score as biased material, measuring its size, counting its components, and overlaying the parts together. His subsequent foray into electronics can be understood as a move from textual to physical bias, which reveals an underlying coherency in Tudor's approach too often eclipsed by the misleading narrative of transition from performer to composer. Applied more generally, the notion of material bias presents an unusual perspective on how things like musical scores and instruments work.