This is a reproduction of David Tudor’s second realization of the Solo for Piano, used in the 1959 Indeterminacy recording. John Cage, who had already made a practice of giving lectures that helped make his work accessible to audiences, recalled, in September 1958, that Tudor had suggested that Cage give a lecture consisting entirely of stories. Cage delivered the first version—thirty stories—at the Brussels Fair that month, with no musical accompaniment. In March of 1959, Cage was then asked to deliver a ninety-minute lecture at Columbia University’s Teachers College. For the event, Cage added sixty stories and asked Tudor to provide a ninety-minute accompaniment. For the occasion, Tudor prepared a second, far sparser realization of the Solo for Piano. He culled all the sheets from his first realization that consisted of “single ictus” attacks (fifty-three out of his existing sixty-three) and “superimposed” them. By superimposing, Tudor means this: Imagine putting these sheets into a single stack, converting the papers into transparencies, and then enlarging a single image of all attacks into a ninety-minute landscape. Tudor achieved this by measuring the horizontal distances of individual attacks within each graph. Then, by way of meticulous calculations, he expanded these distances into a single ninety-minute backdrop in which the attacks of each graph are interwoven with every other. In the resultant performance score, each horizontal line is roughly thirty seconds, with a page equaling roughly one minute, and individual events are notated proportionally. Readers interested in the nuts and bolts of Tudor’s calculations will find a complete digitization of Tudor’s materials for the second realization in the Archive section for chapter 2.
Solo for Piano by John Cage © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Permission by C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved.
