David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output — which began with the organ and ended with visual art — have kept Tudor a puzzle.

This huge volume (688 pages, more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor’s instruments) sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor’s own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor’s creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor’s electronic devices as musicological ‘texts’ and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

You Nakai is Associate Professor at Kyoto City University of Arts. He creates music(ians), dance(rs), haunted musical houses, nursery rhymes, and other forms of performances as a member of No Collective (nocollective.com).

Table of Contents:
Input: The Other Side
Chapter 1: Piano
Chapter 2: Amplified Piano
Chapter 3: Sound Systems
Chapter 4: Bandoneon!
Chapter 5: Pepsi Pavilion
Chapter 6: Island Eye Island Ear
Chapter 7: Natural Objects
Chapter 8: (Likeness to) Voices
Chapter 9: Reflections
Chapter 10: Neural Syntheses
Output: Maps & Fragments
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Notable Realizations
Appendix B: Rainforest Amplifiers
Appendix C: Redrawn Matrix Maps
Bibliography
Index

“You Nakai’s book is a remarkable achievement that illuminates the breadth and depth of David Tudor’s life and work as a composer-performer. Based on extensive analytical research and interviews with Tudor’s surviving creative associates, it charts his evolution from organist and virtuoso pianist to his innovative live-electronic music, ending with his final explorations of soundand space. Engagingly written and eminently readable, this extraordinary study offers fresh insights into Tudor’s reclusive personal life and elusive creative complexities.” – Gordon Mumma, composer, Professor Emeritus, University of California

Harcover, published in 2021.