In his premiere performance of the first realization, David Tudor chose to play graph J early on—thirty seconds in. It is a ferociously violent and dissonant series of flourishes that use the whole range of the piano, a prime example of Tudor’s pianism at its most spectacular. Note that Tudor’s trademark deadpan stage presence (he reported to his partner, M. C. Richards, that he was known as the “Buster Keaton of the piano” in Europe) often conveyed to audiences a solemn and self-negating commitment to high modernism. But here, at Town Hall, in front of the largest audience of his career—the New York Times reported nearly one thousand people in attendance—and in a performance that was Tudor’s first performance of a piano concerto, Tudor gives himself a bombastic solo entrance in the venerable tradition of piano concertos from Beethoven through Rachmaninoff. Note that Tudor, here as elsewhere, simplifies John Cage’s instructions. He ignores Cage’s logically convoluted instructions about “direction in space time” and simply obeys the number of notes (with a little fudging) and the outer pitch parameters (quite strictly), deciding to play a series of ascending or descending gamuts within these parameters. Little in Cage’s graph prescribes tone clusters, let alone bombastic ones. It is Tudor’s choice to play the entire graph in just over thirty seconds. Another perfectly compliant realization of graph J could entail delicate scales—interrupted or done only in fragments—sweeping the range of the piano over the course of two or three minutes. Note as well that in the sketches for graph J, Tudor at first has a different order; the sequencing here is Tudor’s compositional choice.
Solo for Piano by John Cage © 1960 by Henmar Press Inc. Permission by C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved. With permission of WERGO, Copyright © 1993. WERGO, a division of Schott Music & Media GmbH. Animated score developed by Michael Gallope and produced by Greg Albers.
