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096

Title “A Whistle, a ‘Slinky’ and a Bunch of Screws,” photograph by Sy Friedman, New York Times, X9
Date 11 May 1958
Type press clipping
Location Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 62, folder 13

This preview of the Town Hall performance in the New York Times makes a spectacle of what ordinarily would go unseen by an audience seated in a concert hall: the innards of the prepared piano, with its bolts and screws wedged in between strings. This photograph appears somewhat staged, with John Cage staring blankly into the piano, and David Tudor eyeing the camera as he knocks the amplified slinky with his hand. Throughout the later 1950s and the 1960s, the duo would continue to refine and rework the showmanship of their performances.

Cite

“A Whistle, a ‘Slinky’ and a Bunch of Screws,” photograph by Sy Friedman, New York Times, X9, 11 May 1958. Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 62, folder 13. In The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975, ed. Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025. https://www.getty.edu/publications/scores/object-index/096/.