CANCELLED: Researching An Undocumented Past History For Postwar Experimental Music and Sound Art
David Tudor and Pauline Oliveros were influential American composers who collaborated extensively, particularly in avant-garde electronic and electroacoustic music. Their work questioned the boundaries between human and technological expression, and their collaborations helped define the emerging field of sound art. In this third presentation in the cross-disciplinary History/Art History Seminar Series, CVPA Professor Walker Downey will discuss the research involved for his book In Resonance: The Sonic Art of David Tudor and Pauline Oliveros and the unique challenges the project’s two main subjects have posed.
While friends and collaborators David Tudor and Pauline Oliveros have each been canonized as early innovators in postwar experimental music and sound art, the nature of their respective works, which often took the form of elaborate electronic sound-systems activated in live performance, has consistently short-circuited the methodologies of musicology and art history. Some of their most important creative efforts were neither documented (whether via photos, film, or sound recordings) nor translated into musical notation. In such cases, there are no straightforward primary sources for the historian to analyze.
In researching In Resonance over the course of six years, Downey has sought out insight into Tudor and Oliveros via odd and circuitous channels, piecing together electronic diagrams drawn on scrap paper and hotel notepads, delving into intimate correspondence with friends and family, and tracking down never-before-interviewed contemporaries of Tudor and Oliveros who are now in their late eighties and nineties.
Presented as part of "Past and Present: The Power of Memory," a seminar series co-sponsored by the History Department, the Art Department and the Office of the Provost. Light refreshments will be served.
MacLean Campus Center Conference Room 218
Carol Hansen
x8301
chansen1@umassd.edu