LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:18 AM Page 49 David Tudor: The Delicate Art of Falling Bill Viola Palongawhoya, traveling through the earth, sounded out his call Chocorua, in the White Mountains as he was bidden. All the vibratory centers along the earth’s axis of New Hampshire, to share with from pole to pole resounded his call: the whole earth trembled; the students. I took a Greyhound bus universe quivered in tone. Thus, he made the whole world an in- from Syracuse, having signed up for ABSTRACT strument of sound, and sound an instrument for carrying mes- Tudor’s sessions knowing nothing sages, resounding praise for the creator of all. of Rainforest other than what I had The author discusses his early read in the brochure, something exposure to Tudor’s work and its —Hopi Indian myth of the creation of the First formative influence on his own about “exciting” physical objects World [1] work and thinking. This connec- with sound to discover their reso- tion began with the author’s nant frequencies. On the first collaboration in the presentation Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor who, working in New York morning, a group of about 15 of us of Tudor’s Rainforest, which provided an introduction to the at the turn of the 20th century, revolutionized the applications assembled in a small upstairs room, provocative currents at work in of electricity with one of the most fertile and visionary imagi- which had already been set out with Tudor’s music and personality. nations in the history of science. In an era when electricity was tables bearing electronic equip- still in the experimental stages, Tesla claimed that he could ment and some strange objects. transmit electricity and illumination without wires anywhere David Tudor was not a man in- in the world; send sound and speech through the air to ships clined to small talk or social pleasantries; in fact he usually at sea or people in their homes through a system he called didn’t say much at all. Things got underway with little or no in- “the transmission of intelligence”; and that, by calculating its troduction, with David talking in halting sentences punctuated resonant frequency, he could send the Earth into vibration by long silent pauses, rarely looking anyone in the eye. This, plus with a properly tuned driver of adequate size and specific his formidable reputation, made us all feel quite intimidated at placement. In 1896 he strapped a driver motor to the central first, and there was a nervous, unsettled feeling in the room. He beam of his Mulberry Street laboratory and set the building, demonstrated the basic principle behind Rainforest by running and the ground beneath it, into a resonant oscillation, accel- a sine tone from an audio oscillator into a metal can using a de- erating in intensity and causing a small earthquake that shat- vice called a transducer, which we soon realized acted like the tered windows, broke pipes and wreaked havoc and alarm in magnetic driver part of a loudspeaker without the surrounding the neighborhood. He was forced to stop it with a blow from collar. As the oscillator swept the pure tone slowly up through a sledgehammer. the audible sound spectrum, the object would vibrate and phys- David Tudor first introduced me to the work of Nikola Tesla. ically rattle, giving off a loud, complex array of sound frequen- I was then 23 years old, fresh out of college and ready for wild, cies, or otherwise fall still and quietly reproduce only the new ideas. I had recently met him at a New Music workshop originally pure sound source. David performed this task silently, in New Hampshire. In fact, it was Tudor who introduced me with the utmost concentration on the object and the sound. to a lot of new things at that time—wondrous, mysterious, mar- We were informed that these louder events were the result velous things all connected in one way or another to the world of resonant nodes latent in that particular metal can and that of sound and vibration, revelations that have stayed with me all physical objects had them. Pretty soon we were experi- and continue to inspire and inform my work. menting with these transducers ourselves, attaching them to anything we could find around the small converted farm/inn where we were staying—old bedsprings, barrels, cookie sheets, It takes a man to make a room silent. wood planks. Someone blew out two transducers by trying to —Thoreau resonate the bathroom plumbing under the toilet. David seemed truly delighted to see what was previously a table-top setup designed for road performances with the Merce Cun- I met Tudor through his piece Rainforest in 1973, which he had ningham Dance Company expand into a large-scale singing brought to a summer workshop at an inn in the town of junkyard (Fig. 1). Years later, during one of the many per- formances of what became known as Rainforest IV, I watched as people of all ages wandered entranced through a large hall Bill Viola (artist), 282 Granada Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90803, U.S.A. filled with a sonic “forest” of suspended objects of all shapes and sizes, each object lending its own unique voice to the var- Frontispiece. Bill Viola and David Tudor making pasta, August ied, undulating sound field that permeated every corner of 1979. (Photo © Kira Perov) the room. © 2004 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 14, pp. 48–56, 2004 49 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0961121043067406 by guest on 29 September 2021 LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:18 AM Page 50 come close during the workshop, kin- dred spirits searching for something a bit more immaterial and essential beneath the technical, intellectual and somewhat competitive atmosphere of a music camp. Tudor began. Everything seemed “nor- mal” at first, an avant-garde music per- formance by a highly skilled and accomplished virtuoso, impressive to be sure. Then something else took over. David changed. The music changed. It felt as if his mind had taken hold of the room, moving out into the space and into us with every sound and silent pause. It was invisible, dynamic, palpable and physically present, and it rose and fell like waves on a sea of emotion. I looked over at Linda, and one look back from her told us both that we were witnessing the same thing. We wept. Fig. 1. Bill Viola setting up for the first performance of Rainforest for workshop participants We talked about it for a long time later in a barn at Chocorua, New Hampshire, June 1973. (Photo © John Driscoll) that night, and on several occasions af- terwards, and to this day cannot describe the precise nature of what we experi- I am still astonished at how, with so very workshop, I was soon to learn that David enced. All I knew at the time was that my little instruction, and certainly no aes- was in fact a very social person who loved electronic music professor at Syracuse thetic or theoretical “musical” explana- and was dearly loved by all who knew University never mentioned anything like tions, Tudor had transformed an older him. Although he could be deeply seri- this in our discussions on New Music. work into something completely new and ous and severely introspective, laughter And even more striking, nothing like this unexpected, one that took on a life of its and delight with everything and every- had ever come through on the many own. By concentrating on the phenome- one around him were never far away. recordings of this music that I had lis- non itself and demonstrating its princi- Conversations often lasted long into the tened to over the years. In comparison to ples directly for our senses and our night. He seemed to have dear friends all what I had just heard, even the more bodies to experience, he created a self- over the globe, and always elicited warm, technically outstanding records seemed instructive piece, one in which the es- loving smiles from every familiar face somehow one-dimensional. That night in sential parameters are intuitively self- who stopped by to say hello. At home, the barn, something deep and real and evident to the performer. Yet at the same cooking in the kitchen and soldering unexpected opened up in this music for time there remained a great degree of in- components into circuit boards were es- the first time in my life, and this man was dividual freedom to choose and tailor the sentially the same act. To be with him, to at the center of that transformation. sounds fed to the group of selected ob- make music with him, was to be in a place Years later, my friend and colleague jects under one’s immediate control. where art and life merged and any dis- Ron Kuivila uncovered a quote from After Chocorua, a smaller group of tinctions between the two became irrel- David that shed some light on what was us—John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Linda evant. Yet this social dimension was also going on: Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve and only one of the many sides to David Being an instrumentalist carries with it me—joined David and took Rainforest on Tudor that I was to discover (Fig. 3). the job of making certain physical prepa- the road, and we soon discovered that rations for the next instant, so I had to this sense of freedom and continuous dis- Keep silent here and talk in the other learn to put myself in the right frame of covery extended to the audience mem- world.