David Tudor

b 1926 in Philadelphia (USA)—1996 died in New York City (USA).
Tudor studied organ and theory with H. William Hawke, piano with Irma Wolpe, and composition and analysis with Stefan Wolpe; 1943 began his professional career as an organist; during the 1950s held positions as Instructor and Pianist-in-Residence at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt (D). He is one of the premier figures in the performance of new music. As a pianist, Tudor gave first performances of works by contemporary composers Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Stephan Wolpe, and La Monte Young, among others. His virtuosity and imagination inspired many of these composers to write pieces for him, involving complex graphic notations and performance problems that they felt only Tudor could solve. As a composer, he chose specific electronic components and their interconnections to define both composition and performance drawing upon resources that were both flexible and complex. He had begun to experiment with the electronic amplification of sound in the early 1950s, and by the end of the 1960s he became fully involved in the composition of live electronic music, employing, for the most part, custom-built modular electronic devices, many of his own manufacture. Tudor's electronic works were often associated with visual forces: light systems, dance, television, theater, film or four-color laser projections.