You Nakai: Reminded by the Instruments

Hardcover, 2020, New York City and Oxford: Oxford University Press, http://www.oup.com.You Nakai's book on David Tudor is a masterful investigation of archival and published doi:10.1162/COMJ_r_00597 materials left behind by the composer and his many collaborators, students, and biographers. Rather than clearing out a field of study that had until now been difficult to address, Nakai shows us his path through the dense forest of notes, ad hoc systems, and trickster-like aphorisms that Tudor left behind as his life's work. As a performer and composer infamous for open-ended and short remarks, instructions, and comments (contrasting with the gregariousness of John Cage), he certainly did leave plenty of materials; these form, as Nakai so convincingly demonstrates, puzzles of a scale and variety that certainly rival (if not dwarf) the puzzles of new music Tudor himself solved in his early career as a performer of the western avant garde's most challenging pieces.David Tudor (1926–1996) was a composer, electronic sound system builder, and performer. A close collaborator of Cage's and an integral part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company until his passing, he remained, until the publication of this book, a woefully mysterious figure. Previous scholarship was extensive and erudite, often coming from scholars close to the artist, but it only covered short segments of his oeuvre. Although his proximity to Cage meant that his correspondence with the latter is published (Iddon 2013), two dissertations covering his preelectronics career (Holzaepfel 1994) and his work Rainforest IV (Rogalsky 2006) had for a long time acted as the primary long-form references. Elements of his work with electronics remained fragmented across shorter publications, primarily in a collection of talks given at the Getty Research Institute (GRI 2001), which were later the basis for a special issue of the Leonardo Music Journal (Volume 14; 2004), but these only discussed some aspects of some of his works or his approach to electronic sound, primarily from the perspective of some of his many collaborators. An undergraduate thesis by Brendan O'Connell (2008), stood out for being a rare documented project of reusing some of Tudor's original electronic instruments. Over the years, Tudor had built a revolving cast of friends and fellow travellers that helped him forge his unique vision of sound.The Introduction in Nakai's book covers prior work in extensive detail, but the ghostly presence left behind by Tudor's disappearance had been palpable, if not always explicitly investigated, in the equally invaluable writing of some of his past collaborators: Nicolas Collins, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, etc. (Lucier 1998; Ashley 2000; Mumma and Fillion 2015; Collins 2020;. Where Lucier worked to make clear the magic potentially hiding in how instruments and speakers vibrate, Tudor reveled in the inscrutable complexity of feedback networks, large-scale audiovisual prestidigitation, and trickster aphorisms.One might ask: From where does the challenge to engage with Tudor's legacy come? At the 2016 Wesleyan University event on Tudor, co-organized by Ron Kuivila with Charles Eppley and Sam Hart from Avant.org (Eppley and Hart 2016), Phil Edelstein (a member of Tudor's ensemble Composers Inside Electronics) told me how, in building Rainforest IV, Tudor effectively gave his ensemble the now famous diagram with little instruction. Nakai's book collects numerous documented instances of the artist's succinct explications, making clear the composer's interest in seeing how his ideas translated through the minds and interpretations of his friends, very much as he had transformed the ideas of Cage or Boulez in his own realizations of their music. Contrasting with this oral parsimony, the archive left behind after his death is towering. The David Tudor Papers at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles contains over 200 boxes of papers, photographs, and recordings. The David Tudor Instruments collection, part of the World Instruments collection at Wesleyan University and originally numbered by Matt Rogalsky, itself contains hundreds of homemade and commercial electronic devices. The Tudor instruments at Wesleyan are themselves joined by over a hundred books, mostly on electronics, that Tudor purchased over the course of his experimental electronic music career. When considered along a short but dense list of interviews, we begin to get an intuitive sense of why Nakai was the first to offer an attempt at an exhaustive investigation over 25 years after Tudor's passing. Nevertheless, the real challenge with these combined collections remains in how exactly they require one to engage with the knowledge and work they represent. As Nakai identified in his own work leading up to this monograph, the issue is indeed epistemological: ``The traditional analysis methods of musicology are in large part rendered ineffective in the face of Tudor's circuits, schematics, and other technological puzzles'' (Nakai 2016, 2017, p. 6). Nakai, in his dissertation, had already offered a sense of how to make this all legible through his collaboration with the electronic music hardware engineer and performer Michael Johnsen (more on him below).Nakai's dissertation, ``On the Instrumental Natures of David Tudor's Music'' (Nakai 2016), is a compelling forensics of concert pictures and system identification, building a visual vocabulary of devices through which to trace trajectories of evolution in Tudor's career. But Nakai's book is monumental in the detail with which it ruthlessly rewrites the dissertation to thread a meticulous tracing of the development of the majority of Tudor's projects, systems, and recordings, into an awe-inspiring assessment of the humor, mystery, and earnest weirdness with which Tudor operated. It does not exactly solve the mystery of Tudor—rather, in answering some questions about what precisely Tudor did, it sheds light on the magical, bizarre bas-relief of Tudor's work. In doing so, he gives the reader a better sense of what exactly happened for Tudor to want to and succeed in making these devices and sounds and artworks, but he does not take away from the spirit of an oeuvre that continues to confuse and fascinate.In the rest of this review, I will discuss some stand-out contributions Nakai's book makes to the study of Tudor specifically and of live electronic music generally, and present some of what I believe are the primary implications for future scholarship.Early on in the book Nakai states, “The narrative of the book roughly follows chronological order, with some twists and turns here and there.” This is very much an understatement, as Nakai carefully bounces through time and space to make the ad hoc arcs of Tudor's career emerge. His commitment is to following threads wherever they lead. An overarching theme is that of instrumentality: Nakai opens by detailing how Cage's scores became instruments in Tudor's hands, and Tudor's instruments built in the process of playing these pieces in effect became pieces themselves, or, at least offered Tudor his path “from piano to electronics” (Tudor and Schonfeld 1972). Tudor's ambiguous and deeply generative ambivalence towards his place in systems is established from the beginning. When he plays pieces by Stockhausen, Boulez, or Cage, he is rendered instrumental to their careers, and yet leaves such a mark on mid-century contemporary music that he is effectively brought to the status of composer through his collaborations with Cage. Nakai casts this as the foundation on which Tudor would come to build his place in a system of electronic components and prerecorded material: as builder and organizer, and very much an intentional architect, but with an explicit commitment to letting the materials speak for themselves.The first three chapters, “Piano,” “Amplified Piano,” and “Sound Systems,” detail Tudor's encounters with electronics and the development of his idiosyncratic, sonic imagination in their regard. Most significant, here, is the deeply collaborative reality of this development that involves three forms of collaboration. The first category involves collaboration with his friends and close associates, with whom he developed pieces, for whom he assembled unique performance systems, and by whom he seemed to live throughout his life (even though the details of this cast of characters change as the arcs in his career wax and wane). Secondly, there is the category in which he collaborates with the materials themselves. “Piano” offers a detailed account of Tudor's mastering of the modern piano's sophisticated double escapement mechanism, a fairly complex arrangement of wood and metal whose potential for timbral variation was obsessively explored and mastered by Tudor. This acts as a foreshadowing for what we might call a “materialist” bend in Tudor's career, where complex, out-of-sight components and their interrelationship (rather than, or in addition to, specific melodies and rhythms) become the very basis for a musical work. The third category involves collaboration with contexts. Reading of Tudor's life in retrospect, it is astonishing to see the efficacy with which Tudor, a talented but perhaps reserved individual, used almost every opportunity offered to him to not just build a career, but explore themes, questions, and ideas that, through Nakai's words, appear as genuinely fun.“Amplified Piano” introduces Tudor's tendency to utilize very personal forms of notation, developed for his “nomographic” approach to Cage's Variations II. As is made obvious in the rest of the book, legible but fairly original ideograms would become another subtopic in Tudor's career, a bridge between materials and humans, but also between scholars and materials he left behind. Here, Nakai leverages the corresponding ideograms to clarify the complex arrangement of humans, acoustics, and electronics used in performing Cage's piece. He writes: “the nature of Tudor's new instrument went directly against the nature of his old instrument. And as if to amplify this very difference, Tudor had composed his new instrument around feedback” (p. 135).“Sound Systems,” equivalently, details several things simultaneously: Tudor's collaborations with Pauline Oliveros and Raymond Wilding-White, but also with the bandoneon, fluorescent lights, patching diagrams, signals as information or music, various forms of pickups, and preamplifiers. The ever-expanding cast can only be hinted at, and needless to say it will be of interest to anyone curious about the minutiae of the noise table. Gordon Mumma's “Cybersonic” circuits are perhaps a standout, if only for their deep resonance with Tudor's career as a whole: mysterious, self-correcting circuits built from World War II surplus materials and concepts. Although Mumma has published on his work, Nakai's discussion of the devices he made for, or with, Tudor are, to date, the most detailed technical analysis of Mumma's circuits. Nakai's discussion of Tudor's “Pulser” circuit sets another high bar for the rest of the book, as he not only details the relatively simple circuit but also identifies where the idea came from, thanks to a careful and thorough examination of the Getty Research collection.Feedback is central to cybernetics on an abstract level but Reminded By The Instruments makes it the concrete grounding of Tudor's body of electronic works. In the next two chapters, Nakai details two more well-known projects, Bandoneon! (A Combine) and Tudor's contributions to the Pepsi Pavillion at the 1970 World Fair at Osaka. These, along with Rainforest IV (which, considering Rogalsky's work, is somewhat bracketed out of the book) arguably form the core of Tudor's formal explorations of feedback as an organizing musical concept.Nakai's discussion of the work leading up to Bandoneon! includes situating Mumma's work with cybersonics in the wider context of Harald Bode, Don Buchla, Robert Moog, and Hugh Le Caine, who each in their own way were thinking of voltage as the shared medium of sound and information. It clarifies Tudor's position on modular synthesis, following a short series of experiments with early instances of the technology. It offers details of his relationship to Lowell Cross, whose visual synthesis work is placed in a dialectical relationship with Tudor's ever-growing collection of circuits and composition and performance tricks. In Musica Instrumentalis, the latter duo uses Cross's visual system as a score for Tudor's exploration of a feedback based audio system featuring devices by Mumma, with Tudor himself (with his eyes, ears, hands, and brain) as part of the control mechanism in the feedback loop.The path to Bandoneon! is complex, with Tudor's nomographic work reaching a further level of refinement. The chapter's forensic focus digs through iterations and notes to make sense of the notational schemes, identify the corresponding devices, and detail their interconnections and roles in performance. The role of the piece in the larger context of Experiment in Arts and Electronics with Bell Laboratory engineers' Nine Evenings project is presented as an outlier: where other pieces perhaps fell from their ambitious heights because of self-imposed technological goals and their inevitable complications, Tudor's approach to noise, feedback, and complexity allows him to improvise a solution that, in Nakai's words, seems impervious to partial failure, or that perhaps already accounted for its possibility. Tudor, virtuoso of wires, moves from the steel of piano strings to the copper of circuit boards and patch cables.The monumental scale of the New York Armory (location of Nine Evenings) itself prefigures the “instrument” Tudor made of the Osaka World Fair's Pepsi Pavilion. The underlying story would make a script for a compelling heist movie: an intercontinental adventure with cutting-edge, mysterious devices requiring last-minute decisions and sweat-filled soldering sessions, giant mylar screens, clouds of artificial smoke, E.A.T., a capricious major food conglomerate with a large budget and bizarre expectations, and the cream of the U.S. experimental electronic music crop wondering what sounding like a rock band could be like. Tudor, working with Ritty Birchfield, assembled a collection of prepared audio materials on tape that would serve as the basis of the live processing happening in the main space of the pavilion. A dome of speakers, built into the roof and hidden behind a reflective mylar surface, propagated these sounds as modified by a combination of devices made by Mumma and Tudor, with the “Pepsi Modifier” console at its center. In a space so large, the surface, support beams, and other structural items became sound modifiers themselves, in a magnification of the basic concept of physical objects as audio filters that powers Rainforest IV. Pepsi, not knowing what to do with E.A.T.'s effort or Tudor's contributions to it, unceremoniously kicked out the artists after two weeks. Tudor and his colleagues had to surreptitiously sneak tapes and other small devices out of the space. This chapter will be of interest to anyone interested in one of Mumma's most interesting systems, and in Tudor's use of it, but also to those curious for the scale at which corporations and experimental artists collaborated (albeit with friction) in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Island Eye Island Ear, his next collaboration with E.A.T., is another mystery in itself, in large part because it never fully materialized. Chapter 6 recounts the international quandaries that began with Tudor wanting to make his next large-scale instrument a whole (if small) island. Originally meant for Knavelskär (Sweden), Island Eye Island Ear combines directional light and sound to complement a small ecosystem's base audio-visual output. A system of reflectors, signal or light generators, and transmitters were tested for these purposes, but a number of challenges prevented E.A.T. from ever installing a full system in earnest.Discussing Nakai's forensic investigation of Island Eye Island Ear is an opportunity to briefly detail the influence of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy on Tudor's career. Steiner's occult philosophy came to Tudor's attention in the late 1940s, forming a parallel interest that Tudor explicitly worked to keep hidden from plain view. He became an official member of the Anthroposophical Society in 1957. Steiner's influence on Island Eye Island Ear is perhaps the best documented connection to date: Nakai concludes the chapter by detailing how, notwithstanding the ultimately unsuccessful logistical and legal issues with performing the full planned work, Tudor held on to the project as an essential part of his spiritual development.Chapter 7 shifts back to explicit feedback, introducing the concept of the “giant oscillator.” Discussing Untitled (1972), Nakai writes: “By … composing a giant instrument that oscillated on its own, Tudor could create music from the inner nature of materials without having to resort to external language. Titles could be attached later—or never, as appears to have been the case in 1972” (p. 340). The nature of the piece was defined by its own confines, and Tudor, ever interested in the fluid nature of language, reveled in the joy of then shifting the status of the piece from “untitled” to titling it Untitled. To achieve the work's underlying oscillatory system, Tudor worked through a series of preliminary works. By this point in the book, Nakai's process of bouncing between writing, diagrams, notes, and performance pictures is a well-honed exercise in clearly exposing the composer's work to the extent to which it is documented. Highlighting the painstaking detail with which this exposition, like all the others in the book, will never be undeserved: Nakai, here, does something that has effectively overwhelmed every other Tudor scholar for the past 25 years, including his own collaborators. (I will elaborate on the methodological implications of this book in the next section.)Chapter 8 threads a history of language and sense through Tudor's career, working from early influences with Cage's work (Variations III, Solo for Voice No.2) to their realization as Forest Speech, Weatherings (Nethograph), and Phonemes and Dialects. It also details Tudor's working relationship with Jackie Monnier, whose artistic output also participated in his performances as resonating bodies and sculptures to be amplified and processed. One of their shared interests, a French metal chimney cleaner that translates to English as “hedgehog,” becomes part of one of the works discussed in chapter 9, Fragments. Monnier and Tudor would eventually perform Sea Tails and Nine Lines, Reflected together in 1986. The latter works with radar waves and a suspended installation of kite tails built by Monnier. Inaudible waves are reflected on the tails, creating signals that were then picked up, processed, and amplified before being played back to an audience as sound waves by Tudor and his specialized equipment. Once again, masterful deconstructions of the diagrams and photographs left behind connect the mechanisms and topics of interest to the duo with their eventual sonic realization using Tudor's now well-honed selection of signal processing and generating devices from his growing collection, with the addition of new radar-specific equipment. This chapter also discusses works such as Five Stone Wind and Virtual Focus.Nakai's exhaustive approach to investigating and explicating Tudor's work will be an important source of information for anyone interested in understanding or replicating Tudor's work. The penultimate chapter discusses Neural Synthesis, a project based on a unique, integrated circuit, which stands out as an early hardware implementation of the now infamous neural network concept. Indeed, the basic architecture of these networks, matrices of programmable filters, would seem to have significant musical potential. Of course, Tudor worked with engineers to implement an adapted version of his oscillating feedback system using the proprietary hardware and software, and of course, he placed himself in the center of the network to participate in the exploration of its potential behaviors. He added other mixers and processors around the digitally controlled analog network of filters, placing it back into configurations he had developed for Toneburst or Pulsers. Nakai also identifies a performance approach linked to that of Untitled: Because the overall system was unwieldy to control, source tapes would be recorded and used for the performance of a new work, Neural Network Plus (premiered in Paris in November 1992). This chapter will be of interest to anyone wishing to draw a longer history of neural networks in audio and sound work. Tudor's work with the system, in effect bending the neural network to his ruthless feedback-based approach of making circuits sing, stands in stark contrast with the primary mode of neural networks today, where large amounts of previously generated data are used as a training corpus to extract patterns from external stimuli.As Tudor's health declined, his career of experimentation seems to have slowed down, but not stopped. The conclusion in Nakai's book details the collaboration with Sophia Ogielska, Fragments, as an ``outro'' closes an album. Ogielska, a visual artist, worked with Tudor to warp and add color to fragments of the Untitled score, which were then used as new scores to plan new audiovisual performances. Feedback always.The complex problem at the root of Tudor's music is one of timbre and arrangements of timbres. Nakai elucidates the complex, ad hoc development of each piece, and in doing so achieves the rare elucidation of technical or physical decisions as a source of audible results. As an in-depth analysis of the majority of Tudor's pieces, the primary accomplishment of the book, therefore, is to make what Tudor left behind legible to the investigator and reader. It can be considered a shift, taking a musicological focus from sound, notation, and recordings, and extending it to technical objects (Simondon 2016) and their associated abstractions (diagrams, schematics, patching notes, etc.). It can also be considered a recontextualization of the object of study, acknowledging the deep musicality inherent in those technical objects and abstractions. I leave this discussion to future publications, but regardless of future discussion, the grace with which Nakai operates this shift shines as a reference to which future scholarship on Tudor and the music “implicit” in technology (Collins 2007) will inevitably and necessarily be compared. That Nakai managed to do this without Tudor present to answer further questions adds to the shining achievement at hand, and holds promise for other research on artists whose technical legacy remains to be investigated post-mortem, such as that of Tudor's close friend Pauline Oliveros.It will also stand as, more generally, an epistemological tour de force, making the highly idiosyncratic technicality of Tudor's legacy accessible to humanists. Beyond that, it proves that to contend with cultural work grounded in the electrically mediated nature of the 20th century, humanists will best understand the complexity of the work at hand if electronics, their authors, and their geniuses are investigated on their own terms. This is an opportunity to highlight the contribution of Michael Johnsen to this project. Of course Nakai's acknowledgment to his collaborator, and the authorship of the book, suggest that Johnsen primarily taught and “pushed in the right direction” Nakai as he completed his forensic work. Nevertheless, their cooperation proves that such collaborations can realize their immense potential, and hopefully will serve as inspiration to future technocultural interpretations beyond the usual confines of sound and media scholarship, a topic I have elaborated on in the past (see Teboul 2020).The companion website for the book, which collects pictures of diagrams and instruments with a mechanism to connect various items across pieces and time, acts as a welcome entryway through which to grapple with the massive amount of information printed on paper. Notwithstanding this tome's length, Nakai offers a book that seems to point to the extent of the work that remains to be done rather than a definitive conclusion to the mysteries Tudor left us. In the spirit of Composers Inside Electronics, which is still active today to implement work by, or inspired by, Tudor and other work developed more recently by its members, Tudor's legacy is best preserved through practice (as Nakai reiterates throughout the monograph). In what ways were Tudor's circuits modified from the schematics he found to build them with? Perhaps modifications could be identified at the component level to reveal more details about how he experimentally tuned the insides of his systems just as carefully as their outsides in performance. This is just one of the questions left over. Previously, it seemed intractable because we had no map with which to begin investigating the materials. Now, however, we know exactly where the relevant hardware and notes are, and we have a much better idea of the ideological and cultural background that motivated most of these projects. Reconstruction and new development projects based on Tudor's work, by Johnsen and others (such as composer Philip White), have already been completed. Nakai's forensic approach to electronic music will hopefully act as a milestone, making this type of investigation mainstream in music research, just as Tudor's cachet legitimized his soundscape's at times harsh timbres and rhythms to the avant-garde. Nakai himself is already making public discussions of Tudor's projects that did not fit in the book's progression: for example, his presentation on Monobirds and Tudor's work with a Moog modular in Ahmedabad's National Institute of Design (as part of the “Archives Public Programs” on October 10, 2021) and the associated essay included in the recording's latest pressing. One does not simply compose inside electronics.