Michael Gallope, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
Room 215, 80 Queen's Park
Free
David Tudor's Esoteric Spectacle—Town Hall, 1958
On the evening of May 15, 1958, pianist David Tudor gave the premiere of John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra at the composer’s famously raucous 25-Year Retrospective concert at New York’s Town Hall. Drawing on a new score reconstruction of Tudor’s “realization” of Cage’s work, a range of Tudor’s sketches and notes, the commercially released recording of the performance, and an array of published sources, the talk shows how Tudor’s realization exploited the age-old phenomenon of music’s ineffability, though not in any sense associated with German Romanticism or absolute music. Rather, Tudor’s interest in the ineffable stemmed from an avant-garde mysticism influenced by Antonin Artaud, Carl Jung, theosophy, and Cage’s own orientalist metaphysics. These influences, I argue, point to a philosophical crux of Tudor’s practice at mid-century: that notwithstanding the formidable formalisms and calculations that structured his collaborations with Cage, Tudor’s performance operated with equal power as an opaque sensory spectacle.
Biography
Michael Gallope is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He formerly taught at the University of Chicago, as Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, and at NYU, where he completed his Ph.D. in Historical Musicology. He is the author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (University of Chicago Press, 2017), as well as over a dozen articles and essays on music and philosophy. As a musician, he has worked in a variety of genres from avant-garde composition and experimental improvisation to rock music and West African electronica.