Reminiscences of a Twentieth-Century Pianist: An Interview with David Tudor

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

As a composer and performer of live electronic music, David Tudor has now spent more than half of his professional life almost entirely away from the piano. But for almost two decades-from 1950, when he made his entrd into the world of new music by giving the American premiere of Pierre Boulez's Second Piano Sonata, to the late 1960s, when experimental music had increasingly come to resemble experimental theater--it was as a pianist that Tudor was at the very locus of the radical avant-garde. It was, in fact, a period of musical composition whose radical innovations increased in direct proportion to Tudor's involvement in it. During the course of preparing my doctoral dissertation on Tudor's performances of music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown, I often had occasion to speak with Tudor about his career as a pianist during this period. For the following interview, which took place in August 1992 at Tudor's home in Stony Point, New York, Tudor discussed a wider range of topics than those on which his reputation rests. JH: It seems that, from the beginning, you have had a penchant for the fringe composers, for people who were thought of as being very striking and very interesting, but never as major figures: Busoni, Alkan, Gottschalk, It seems that, from the beginning, you were always interested in out-of-the-way music. DT: That's true. But some of it was important. Alkan was a major composer. JH: Did it ever occur to you to perform some of that music either in recitals of older music, or to mix your programs? For example, whenever you played Busoni in public, it was tucked away in somebody else's solo recital in which you were the accompanist. Did you ever think of doing a recital of Cage, Boulez, Busoni, and Alkan?