David Tudor — Rainforest

1968

Artists: David Tudor · Year: 1968 · Medium: Live electronic-music performance and installation — sound produced by driving electromagnetic transducers attached to resonant objects · Substrate: Metal objects, wooden panels, wine bottles, oil drums, springs — each with electromagnetic transducers; amplified live electronics driving the transducers; audio performance and sculptural installation · Place: Buffalo / various touring venues · Institution: Merce Cunningham Dance Company (original commission) David Tudor's Rainforest, first realized in 1968 for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's piece Rainforest, replaced loudspeakers with ordinary physical objects — a wine barrel, a length of pipe, a metal drum, a plastic bucket — each fitted with a transducer that drove sound through the body of the object rather than through a speaker cone. The objects resonated. Each filtered the input signal according to its own physical shape and material — its own acoustic transfer function — and radiated a version of the signal completely unlike what went in. This was an argument. The argument was that a loudspeaker is a coloration, not a neutrality, and that once you have accepted the loudspeaker as a musical object you might as well accept a metal barrel. Tudor had been the principal pianist of John Cage's circle since 1950 — it was Tudor who premiered Cage's 4'33" at Woodstock in 1952 and Tudor who had made a second career, from the late 1960s, out of building and performing live electronic circuits. Rainforest was the point at which his electronic practice left the console and entered the world. The work has four versions — Rainforest I (1968), II (1972), III (1972–73), IV (1973) — each staging the same premise at larger scale. Rainforest IV, designed with members of Composers Inside Electronics (David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Linda Fisher, and others) hangs twenty or more objects from the ceiling of a gallery, each one driven by its own channel of input signal, and invites the audience to walk among them. The room becomes an instrument whose timbre is the sum of physical resonances in three-dimensional space. Every later piece in this archive that treats a room, an architecture, or a set of physical objects as its sound-radiating surface — Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, Bill Fontana's sound-installation practice, the Vasulkas' late video-synthesis pieces that paired visual signal with physical resonance — rests on the 1968 claim: the transducer is the musical instrument, and anything that resonates is a speaker. Lore Cunningham's choreography for Rainforest — dancers in skin-tone leotards, Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds drifting onstage as the set — was staged first at the State University of New York at Buffalo on 9 March 1968. Tudor's score was ready the morning of the premiere, built from equipment he and the engineer Billy Klüver had assembled over the preceding weeks; some of the first-night objects were a plastic trash can and a drained beer keg. Tudor, a notoriously private man, kept performing variants of Rainforest for the rest of his life. He died in 1996, and Composers Inside Electronics have maintained Rainforest IV as a living work ever since, restaging it — most recently at Tate Modern in 2014 and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn in 2023 — with Tudor's original hand-built transducers still in the signal chain. Sources • Nakai, You — Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music (Oxford, 2021). • Getty Research Institute — David Tudor Papers. • Cunningham, Merce — Changes: Notes on Choreography (Something Else Press, 1968).