Solo for Piano by David Tudor

Reviewed by: Solo for Piano by David Tudor Marilyn Nonken David Tudor . Solo for Piano by John Cage, Second Realization. Edited by John Holzaepfel. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2020 . (Recent researches in American music, v. 86–87; Music of the United States of America, v. 30A–B.) [Part I. Essay and critical commentary ( 385 p., 15 p. of plates) ISBN: 9781987203028, $225. Part II. Music edition (92 p.) ISBN: 9781987203042, $100.] A quarter century after his passing, the pianist David Tudor (1926–1996), long acknowledged as an interpreter of choice for composers of the Darmstadt and New York Schools, remains an object of fascination. Attempts to address his legacy in the decade following his death motivated an international discourse involving established and emerging scholars, whose beachheads included dedicated journals—“Texte von und über David Tudor” (Musiktexte: Zeitschrift für Musik 69/70, 1997) and “Composers Inside Electronics: Music After David Tudor” (Leonardo Music Journal 14, 2004)—as well as dissertations by John Holzaepfel (“David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959,” [PhD diss., City University of New York, 1994]), Amy Beal (“Patronage and Reception of American Experimental Music in West Germany, 1945–1986,” [PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999]), Eric Smigel (“Alchemy of the Avant-Garde: David Tudor and the New Music of the 1950s,” [PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2003]), and Eric Nedelman (“Performance Analysis of David Tudor’s Interpretations of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke,” [PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005]). Interest in Tudor intensified in the ensuing decade with the publication of Benjamin Piekut’s Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits (University of California Press, 2011) and Martin Iddon’s John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Today, interest in Tudor appears to be peaking. He is the subject of three significant and contemporaneous offerings: Solo for Piano by John Cage, Second Realization , Holzaepfel’s two-volume edition which continues the American Musicological Society’s series “Music of the United States of America;” Iddon and Philip Thomas’s monograph John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (Oxford University Press, 2020); and You Nakai’s Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music (Oxford University Press, 2021), which considers his work as a composer and instrument builder. Tudor is also the focus of “Teasing Chaos,” a prestigiously underwritten 2021–2022 exhibition at Salzburg’s Museum der Moderne that seeks to assert his significance as an interdisciplinary artist. All of these projects, to some degree, have been fortified by John Holzaepfel’s research. Since the 1980s, he has meticulously documented Tudor’s creative evolution as performer and composer, incorporating the perspectives [End Page 462] of his collaborators and intimates. His offerings include chapters in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art (University of Chicago Press, 2001), The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (Garland, 2002). Uniquely, Holzaepfel’s writings on Tudor and those with whom he shared his prodigious talents are informed by the personal contacts he forged within a close-knit community; his writing displays the talents of not only a dedicated archivist, but a conversationalist rewarded by hours with not only colleagues (Cage, Earle Brown, Lou Harrison, and Christian Wolff) but also relatives and friends, such as Tudor’s sister Joy (who married Isaac Nemiroff—like her brother a student of Stefan Wolpe) and another Wolpe student, Jacob (“Jack”) Maxin, known infamously as “the greatest of unknown pianists.” Tellingly, Nakai’s excellent book ends by paying tribute to Holzaepfel, “who . . . would work for years to bring many of the scattered fragments together so that the ‘continuity’ Tudor cared for could be retraced and his music revived, so that we might experience something different for a change” (Nakai, p. 597). An unrealized ambition of Tudor’s was to secure the support necessary to preserve and ensure access to all materials relating to his work as a musician and member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Although he hoped to enshrine his personal archives for future generations, during his lifetime he was reluctant to share...