Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[you nakai <>]

Hello everybody,

I am happy to announce the publication of my book Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music from Oxford University Press. It’s quite a long book of 768 pages with more than 300 images of schematics, diagrams, scores, instruments, etc, and it sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor as a puzzle that Tudor made, applying Tudor’s own methods to solve other people's puzzles (graphic notation and whatnot) to the unusually large number of materials he left behind. 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reminded-by-the-instruments-9780190686765

Here's a companion website with photographs of instruments, re-drawn diagrams, and transcripts of interviews and talks: http://remindedbytheinstruments.info

There is also going to be another Tudor release soon, a double LP record of his no-audience concert at the New York disco Xenon in 1979, accompanied by a long essay I wrote about the strange occasion and its obscure connection to a recording made ten years earlier in India using Moog synthesizers of all things. It’s a project curated by Julie Martin (E.A.T.) and the sound artist Jacob Kierkegaard, coming out of the label TOPOS (http://www.topos.media/physical.html). And then, in July, a retrospective of Tudor’s works will open at the Modern Art Museum in Salzburg (https://www.museumdermoderne.at/en/exhibitions-events/detail/teasing-chaos-david-tudor-1/). So it’s going to be quite a Tudor year!

I hope you enjoy the book as I enjoyed writing it. And I’d be very grateful if you could spread the word to anyone who might be interested.

Yours sincerely,
You Nakai

(No Collective (http://nocollective.com)  / Already Not Yet (http://alreadynotyet.org))

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Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music

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 notorious reticence, his esoteric approaches, and the diversity of his creative output—which began with the organ and ended with visual art—have kept Tudor a puzzle, strangely befitting for a figure who was known for his deep love of puzzles.
 
Reminded by the 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 coordinates 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 simulating Tudor’s distinct focus on what he called “the specific principles which exist inside each material,” Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.