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Had a teacher’s suggestion not backfired, one of the most extraordinary performers in twentieth-century music might have spent his musical life as a church organist. Born in Philadelphia on January 20, 1926, David Tudor began piano lessons at the age of six. Five years later, and stimulated by the sound and mechanics of the small reed organ his father played at the family church, he auditioned for H. William Hawke, the organist and choirmaster at Philadelphia’s High Episcopal St. Mark’s Church. Hawke accepted Tudor gratis, made him his assistant within a year, introduced him to the glories and mysteries of the organ, and, over a period of five years, provided him with a conservatory-level education in music history, theory, harmony, and counterpoint. At sixteen, Tudor became an associate member of the American Guild of Organists; a little over a year later, he was appointed organist at Trinity Church in Swarthmore. That winter, as he turned eighteen, he made his professional debut with a series of five weekly recitals at nearby Swarthmore College. Their success led to Tudor’s appointment at Swarthmore College later that winter. His career as an organist seemed well under way. In fact, it was already over. At some point, Hawke had recommended that his pupil resume piano lessons; greater flexibility at the piano could lead to work as an accompanist outside the church. Tudor’s search for a piano teacher ended on the night he heard Irma Wolpe at a gathering of Swarthmore faculty and friends. Hearing her play the Dance in the Form of a Chaconne by her husband Stefan Wolpe, Tudor recalled a few years later, “completely changed the course of my life. When I heard her play I immediately and spontaneously decided to become a pianist.” Chief among his reasons, he said, was the wish “to do something for contemporary music.” Irma and Stefan Wolpe taught weekly at Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School, and Tudor’s piano lessons there were soon supplemented by studies in composition and analysis with Stefan Wolpe. Wolpe insisted that all of his pupils, no matter what their nominal field or interest, learn about music by writing their own. In this regard, Tudor was a reluctant pupil. The two short works he completed under Wolpe’s guidance, despite the amount of sketching and revising that went into them, show only that Tudor quickly grasped the principles of twelve-tone composition, no more. Though he continued to dabble in composition for several years, he never performed anything he wrote or, it seems, even showed them to fellow musicians. But Wolpe had plenty of ambitious composition students, and Tudor soon became pianist for the Wolpe circle. With an ability to read the most complex scores at sight and what Wolpe called an “extraordinary grasp of contemporary music,” he played the music other pupils brought to the weekly master classes in the Wolpes’ apartment in New York City. The door to the large flat was always open, and Tudor increasingly spent his time staying with the Wolpes (the childless couple had quickly taken him under their wing) before moving to the city in August 1948. For the next few years, he eked out a living as an accompanist and took part in the occasional concerts Wolpe organized. In early 1948, he began a long association as accompanist to Sigurd Rascher, whom Tudor would remember as the greatest musical performer he had ever known. The culmination of Tudor’s work in those years came when he gave the first performance of Wolpe’s Battle Piece on March 11, 1950. In the audience at Columbia University that evening was John Cage, who would remember Tudor’s playing of the six-movement, twenty-five-minute, and in all ways difficult work, later that year when he needed a pianist for an even more challenging score. In 1949, Cage had gone to Europe, ostensibly as a reporter covering summer music festivals and for research in the music of Erik Satie. But the most consequential event during his six months in France was meeting the twenty-four-year-old Pierre Boulez, and when Cage returned to New York in the fall he brought scores by his new friend and immediately began looking for people to perform them. Among the works was Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, composed in 1946-48 but still unplayed. Cage first turned to William Masselos, who had been performing music by modern American composers for several years. But Masselos’s repeated attempts to make headway with the innovative difficulties of the sonata were unsuccessful, and when Cage reported this to another new friend, Morton Feldman, the younger composer replied that the only pianist to consider for the project was his own friend and fellow Wolpe pupil, David Tudor. Tudor had in fact been studying the sonata informally from a copy Feldman had lent him. But now, as he prepared the piece for its American premiere, he found himself in the unnerving predicament of being unable to play more than a few measures, anywhere in the score, before grinding to a stop. He looked for clues in the writings of Antonin Artaud, the radical French dramaturge Boulez had alluded to briefly and obliquely in his early essay, “Propositions.” Charged by Artaud’s vision of a theater governed not by language but by action, Tudor developed a sense of disciplined discontinuity in performance, where memory of past musical events and actions had to be obliterated in order to meet the requirements of the next, immediate moment. It was an insight he applied first to Boulez’s sonata, then to all new music that began to appear in the early 1950s, and it led him to look back on the developments of that time as constituting “a change in the perception of music.” As for Cage, he found in Tudor more than an ideal performer. Tudor’s disposition toward the new, the unusual, and the unpredictable, and his apparently limitless technical abilities, combined with a natural reticence and secretive manner, made him at once indispensable and remote, the essential ingredient in the music Cage and the young composers—Feldman, Christian Wolff, and eventually Earle Brown— sympathetic to his ideas wrote over the course of the following decade. More than simply a performer, he was a catalyst: Brown credited Tudor with spurring him to devise his proportional notation, and Cage went so far as to state that Tudor “invited the whole thing of indeterminacy.” There was also a provocative aspect to this new composer-performer relationship: “what you had to do,” Cage, added, “was to make a situation that would interest him. That was the role he played.” Tudor’s performances of Wolpe’s Battle Piece, the Boulez sonata, and, in 1952, Cage’s first major chance-derived composition, Music of Changes, launched his extraordinary and surprisingly brief career as a pianist. For three summers, he taught and performed at Black Mountain College, leaving his mark on such artists as the poet Charles Olson, who went so far as to declare that Tudor, through the simple advice to “read what is on the page,” taught him how to read poetry, and the dancer Katherine Litz (Tudor went to Black Mountain as Litz’s accompanist, but she found herself more deeply influenced by hearing him as a soloist. “I believe this experience,” she wrote after his first recital at the experimental college, “will change my direction in art & life from now on.”). In the summer of 1953, Merce Cunningham was also on the faculty at Black Mountain, and when in August he created a new dance company at the experimental school before returning to New York, Tudor became its accompanist, and remained with the company for the rest of his life. As the decade progressed, Tudor became a touchstone for both the American and the European experimental avant-garde. His unparalleled dexterity, his openness to new ideas of the nature and purpose of music, of what music could be, and his dazzling solutions to the daunting problems of the new music and its notation placed him in the forefront of what Frank Hilberg has called “the eye of the hurricane.” In 1954, he went with Cage to Europe. Reception in the press was often sarcastic (though coverage was enormous: Amy Beal found about sixty reviews of their first concert in Germany), but Tudor and Cage established a beachhead, especially in the person of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In Stockhausen Tudor found the most invigorating musical mind since Cage’s, and he introduced Stockhausen’s music to the United States almost as soon as he and Cage returned to New York. Stockhausen, in turn, acted as an intermediary for the two Americans, working particularly hard to bring Tudor back to Europe. (When he learned that Tudor was to play at the 1956 International Summer Courses for New Music at Darmstadt, the center of the European avant-garde in the 1950s, he exclaimed, “Der Tudor kommt!” and greeted Irma Wolpe, who was also at Darmstadt that summer, with the words, “Thank you for David Tudor!”) Again, Tudor assumed a familiar role. “You ask if I have a wish concerning a particular performer,” Franco Evangelisti wrote to Darmstadt director Wolfgang Steinecke in 1958. “This wish is named David Tudor.” For the next half decade, Tudor saw himself as an emissary between the American and European avant-garde. The European composers responded in the same way as the Americans had done, taking advantage of Tudor’s extraordinary gifts and unique musical personality. In the introduction to his Five Pieces for David Tudor of 1959, Sylvano Bussotti noted that his title was not a dedication but an indication of the instrument for which he had written the music; Roman Haubenstock-Ramati claimed that Tudor “could play the raisins in a slice of fruitcake.” These were European echoes of New York, where Tudor had long been regarded less as a performer than an instrument, an exploratory instrument for musical experimentation.

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