John K. Sherman’s review of David Tudor’s solo recital in Minneapolis is delightfully undecided. His descriptions of Tudor at the piano, with all its silences and strange noises, is fantastically evocative. From a traditionalist perspective, due to the extreme discontinuity of the recital’s chance-derived works, he worries about boredom (notwithstanding what he describes as an “amused and amazed” audience). But in response to the electronic sounds that Tudor used in that performance of John Cage’s Solo for Piano (likely the second realization), Sherman remarks the inverse: like a wrestling match on television, or a sports game that entails violence, he hears the electronic aspects of Cage’s music as a “fearful bombardment” that is, no doubt due to its abstraction, still potentially “great fun.”
120
Title | “Music to Hear—and Unhear,” Minneapolis Star |
Maker | John K. Sherman |
Date | 1961 |
Type | press clipping |
Location | Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 63, folder 3 |
Cite
Sherman, John K. “Music to Hear—and Unhear,”
Minneapolis Star, 1961. Getty Research
Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 63, folder
3. 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://