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193

Title “David Tudor presenta un programa de musica experimental: Jean Martinon dirige La Nacional,” 21
Maker Enrique Franco
Date 12 November 1960
Type press clipping
Location Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 63, folder 2

This review of a 1960s concert by David Tudor begins with a descriptive account of the pianist’s use of unusual techniques, radios, whistles, and other unconventional noises, along with long silences that ask listeners to engage with ambient noises. Enrique Franco eschews the discussion of individual works on the program, and instead, perhaps recognizing the international momentum that by 1960 has built up around a resurgent avant-garde, stages a deeper sociological critique of the “industrializers of ‘snobbery’ and the ‘bluff’” (industrializadores del “snobismo” y del “bluff”). Franco expresses a concern over the status of artistic authenticity and sincerity, a theme that recurs in the reception of Afro-modernism during the 1960s and becomes a salient theme of Stanley Cavell’s 1967 article, “Music Discomposed.” Like other European critics of the time who see theater, cabaret, comedy, and slapstick in John Cage and Tudor’s concerts, Franco judges the experimental event to be a mere “spectacle.”

Cite

Franco, Enrique. “David Tudor presenta un programa de musica experimental: Jean Martinon dirige La Nacional,” 21, 12 November 1960. Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 63, folder 2. 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/193/.