LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:18 AM Page 49
David Tudor:
The Delicate Art of Falling
Bill Viola
Palongawhoya, traveling through the earth, sounded out his call
as he was bidden. All the vibratory centers along the earth’s axis
from pole to pole resounded his call: the whole earth trembled; the
universe quivered in tone. Thus, he made the whole world an in-
strument of sound, and sound an instrument for carrying mes-
sages, resounding praise for the creator of all.
—Hopi Indian myth of the creation of the First
World [1]
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor who, working in New York
at the turn of the 20th century, revolutionized the applications
of electricity with one of the most fertile and visionary imagi-
nations in the history of science. In an era when electricity was
still in the experimental stages, Tesla claimed that he could
transmit electricity and illumination without wires anywhere
in the world; send sound and speech through the air to ships
at sea or people in their homes through a system he called
“the transmission of intelligence”; and that, by calculating its
resonant frequency, he could send the Earth into vibration
with a properly tuned driver of adequate size and specific
placement. In 1896 he strapped a driver motor to the central
beam of his Mulberry Street laboratory and set the building,
and the ground beneath it, into a resonant oscillation, accel-
erating in intensity and causing a small earthquake that shat-
tered windows, broke pipes and wreaked havoc and alarm in
the neighborhood. He was forced to stop it with a blow from
a sledgehammer.
David Tudor first introduced me to the work of Nikola Tesla.
I was then 23 years old, fresh out of college and ready for wild,
new ideas. I had recently met him at a New Music workshop
in New Hampshire. In fact, it was Tudor who introduced me
to a lot of new things at that time—wondrous, mysterious, mar-
velous things all connected in one way or another to the world
of sound and vibration, revelations that have stayed with me
and continue to inspire and inform my work.
It takes a man to make a room silent.
—Thoreau
I met Tudor through his piece Rainforest in 1973, which he had
brought to a summer workshop at an inn in the town of
Bill Viola (artist), 282 Granada Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90803, U.S.A.
Frontispiece. Bill Viola and David Tudor making pasta, August
1979. (Photo © Kira Perov)
© 2004 ISAST
Chocorua, in the White Mountains
of New Hampshire, to share with
students. I took a Greyhound bus
from Syracuse, having signed up for ABSTRACT
Tudor’s sessions knowing nothing
of Rainforest other than what I had T
he author discusses his early
exposure to Tudor’s work and its
read in the brochure, something
formative influence on his own
about “exciting” physical objects work and thinking. This connec-
with sound to discover their reso- tion began with the author’s
nant frequencies. On the first collaboration in the presentation
morning, a group of about 15 of us of Tudor’s Rainforest, which
provided an introduction to the
assembled in a small upstairs room, provocative currents at work in
which had already been set out with Tudor’s music and personality.
tables bearing electronic equip-
ment and some strange objects.
David Tudor was not a man in-
clined to small talk or social pleasantries; in fact he usually
didn’t say much at all. Things got underway with little or no in-
troduction, with David talking in halting sentences punctuated
by long silent pauses, rarely looking anyone in the eye. This, plus
his formidable reputation, made us all feel quite intimidated at
first, and there was a nervous, unsettled feeling in the room. He
demonstrated the basic principle behind Rainforest by running
a sine tone from an audio oscillator into a metal can using a de-
vice called a transducer, which we soon realized acted like the
magnetic driver part of a loudspeaker without the surrounding
collar. As the oscillator swept the pure tone slowly up through
the audible sound spectrum, the object would vibrate and phys-
ically rattle, giving off a loud, complex array of sound frequen-
cies, or otherwise fall still and quietly reproduce only the
originally pure sound source. David performed this task silently,
with the utmost concentration on the object and the sound.
We were informed that these louder events were the result
of resonant nodes latent in that particular metal can and that
all physical objects had them. Pretty soon we were experi-
menting with these transducers ourselves, attaching them to
anything we could find around the small converted farm/inn
where we were staying—old bedsprings, barrels, cookie sheets,
wood planks. Someone blew out two transducers by trying to
resonate the bathroom plumbing under the toilet. David
seemed truly delighted to see what was previously a table-top
setup designed for road performances with the Merce Cun-
ningham Dance Company expand into a large-scale singing
junkyard (Fig. 1). Years later, during one of the many per-
formances of what became known as Rainforest IV, I watched
as people of all ages wandered entranced through a large hall
filled with a sonic “forest” of suspended objects of all shapes
and sizes, each object lending its own unique voice to the var-
ied, undulating sound field that permeated every corner of
the room.
LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 14, pp. 48–56, 2004 49
LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:18 AM Page 50
Fig. 1. Bill Viola setting up for the first performance of Rainforest for workshop participants
in a barn at Chocorua, New Hampshire, June 1973. (Photo © John Driscoll)
I am still astonished at how, with so very
little instruction, and certainly no aes-
thetic or theoretical “musical” explana-
tions, Tudor had transformed an older
work into something completely new and
unexpected, one that took on a life of its
own. By concentrating on the phenome-
non itself and demonstrating its princi-
ples directly for our senses and our
bodies to experience, he created a self-
instructive piece, one in which the es-
sential parameters are intuitively self-
evident to the performer. Yet at the same
time there remained a great degree of in-
dividual freedom to choose and tailor the
sounds fed to the group of selected ob-
jects under one’s immediate control.
After Chocorua, a smaller group of
us—John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Linda
Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve and
me—joined David and took Rainforest on
the road, and we soon discovered that
this sense of freedom and continuous dis-
covery extended to the audience mem-
bers as well. They were free to circulate
in the room and approach the perform-
ers at their individual stations to engage
in conversation (Fig. 2). One evening
during one of the typically 4-hour-plus
performances, after the small unmarked
cups of tequila had made their obligatory
rounds from station to station, a man
came up to me, a bit bewildered by what
had been advertised to be a concert by
David Tudor. Seeing all the people casu-
ally milling about, he asked, “Is there al-
ways this cocktail party-type atmosphere
to Rainforest?”
The answer, of course, was “Yes.” De-
spite my first encounter with Tudor at the
50 Viola, David Tudor
workshop, I was soon to learn that David
was in fact a very social person who loved
and was dearly loved by all who knew
him. Although he could be deeply seri-
ous and severely introspective, laughter
and delight with everything and every-
one around him were never far away.
Conversations often lasted long into the
night. He seemed to have dear friends all
over the globe, and always elicited warm,
loving smiles from every familiar face
who stopped by to say hello. At home,
cooking in the kitchen and soldering
components into circuit boards were es-
sentially the same act. To be with him, to
make music with him, was to be in a place
where art and life merged and any dis-
tinctions between the two became irrel-
evant. Yet this social dimension was also
only one of the many sides to David
Tudor that I was to discover (Fig. 3).
Keep silent here and talk in the other
world.
—Rumi
The workshops in Chocorua culminated
in a series of performances, and the most
significant for those of us in Tudor’s class
was the first public presentation of Rain-
forest in its scaled-up installation version.
However, the most personally memo-
rable one turned out to be David’s
evening solo performance, apparently
one of the first on the piano that he had
given in quite some time. Linda Fisher
and I climbed up into the loft in the barn
and watched and listened from the
rafters like two barn owls. We had be-
come close during the workshop, kin-
dred spirits searching for something a bit
more immaterial and essential beneath
the technical, intellectual and somewhat
competitive atmosphere of a music
camp.
Tudor began. Everything seemed “nor-
mal” at first, an avant-garde music per-
formance by a highly skilled and
accomplished virtuoso, impressive to be
sure. Then something else took over.
David changed. The music changed. It
felt as if his mind had taken hold of the
room, moving out into the space and into
us with every sound and silent pause. It
was invisible, dynamic, palpable and
physically present, and it rose and fell like
waves on a sea of emotion. I looked over
at Linda, and one look back from her
told us both that we were witnessing the
same thing. We wept.
We talked about it for a long time later
that night, and on several occasions af-
terwards, and to this day cannot describe
the precise nature of what we experi-
enced. All I knew at the time was that my
electronic music professor at Syracuse
University never mentioned anything like
this in our discussions on New Music.
And even more striking, nothing like this
had ever come through on the many
recordings of this music that I had lis-
tened to over the years. In comparison to
what I had just heard, even the more
technically outstanding records seemed
somehow one-dimensional. That night in
the barn, something deep and real and
unexpected opened up in this music for
the first time in my life, and this man was
at the center of that transformation.
Years later, my friend and colleague
Ron Kuivila uncovered a quote from
David that shed some light on what was
going on:
Being an instrumentalist carries with it
the job of making certain physical prepa-
rations for the next instant, so I had to
learn to put myself in the right frame of
mind. I had to learn how to be able to
cancel my consciousness of any previous
moment in order to be able to produce
the next one. . . . [2]
“Cancel my consciousness”—the phrase
struck a chord. This ability David was try-
ing to cultivate is precisely the technical
aim of much of Eastern spiritual practice,
part of a long tradition stretching back
many millennia. It is also the classic
Hindu and Buddhist definition of free-
dom, liberation from the snares of ma-
terial reality. He continued: “What this
did for me was to bring about freedom,
the freedom to do anything, and that’s
how I learned to be free for a whole hour
at a time” [3].
LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:18 AM Page 51

piano, electronics or particular objects at

hand.
David Tudor was a deeply spiritual per-
son, which could be sensed by anyone in
his presence who had their antennae
tuned to such frequencies, but although
existentially present, this quality was, like
most other things with him, rarely if ever
openly discussed by him. I once asked
David whether he subscribed to any spe-
cific spiritual practice. After an unusually
long, uncomfortable and squirmy si-
lence, he briefly talked about once being
involved with Rudolf Steiner’s teachings
and visiting the Goetheanum in Dor-
nach, Switzerland. I sensed there was a
lot more there, but I didn’t press it and
the subject was quickly dropped.

Attain deliverance in disturbances.

Fig. 2. First public performance of Rainforest, Buffalo State College, New York, May 1974. —Zen Master Kyong Ho
(Photo © John Driscoll)

At the time I met David, I was undergo-

Tantric Buddhists call this state “naked eting for those who saw David perform ing a crisis with my work in electronic
awareness,” but it goes by many names and that Linda Fisher and I felt so clearly media. I had been studying electronic
depending on the school and culture— for the first time up in the loft. Tudor’s music in the form of the Moog synthe-
Prajnaparimita, Mahamudra, Bodhicitta performance that night was as much an sizer, and had just started to design and
and Dzogchen among them. It is the pri- inner practice as it was an outer presen- build my own sound-processing circuits
mordial, natural state of all human be- tation of virtuosic technical mastery and using then-new integrated circuit chips
ings, present in each and every one of us, sublime musical knowledge, and proba- such as the famous 741 op amp. With
but covered over or tarnished by the in- bly more so. In fact, what we heard and video I was involved with the corre-
cessant distractions, misleading appear- how we heard it, was only made possible sponding visual practice of image pro-
ances and busy-ness of everyday by Tudor’s harnessing and focusing his cessing, using chroma and luminance
existence. Despite the aversion of the crit- inner awareness at the moment the keying, video feedback (pointing a live
ical establishment and the culture at sounds and silences were being made. camera at its own monitor image) and
large to discussion of these traditions in From that moment, I felt this to be the generating interference patterns by run-
a serious and knowledgeable way (in- essential material of his work, not the ning the signals from audio oscillators
cluding the approach to life and art they
represent), they remain the most ad-
vanced and technically precise systems Fig. 3. David Tudor performing Rainforest at Festival d’Automne à Paris, October 1976.
that we have for dealing with the intrin- (Photo © Philippe Gras
http://www.eye-control.net)
sic nature of individual subjective expe-
rience. It was just this kind of technical
precision applied to intangible realities
that David Tudor relished.
In traditional spiritual texts, the sym-
bol commonly used to refer to our
“naked awareness” is the mirror. The con-
temporary Tibetan Dzogchen master
Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche describes the
distinction between our mind and the
underlying “nature of mind”:

The nature of mind is like a mirror which

has the natural and inherent capacity to
reflect whatever is set before it, whether
beautiful or ugly; but these reflections in
no way affect or modify the nature of the
mirror. . . . What the practitioner does
when entering into contemplation is sim-
ply to discover himself in the condition
of the mirror [4].

This is the tangible inner effort being

asserted, the “action through non-action”
and invisible dynamics that were so riv-

Viola, David Tudor 51

LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:18 AM Page 52
into the video inputs of the monitor to
create complex, undulating abstract
forms.
Although I was becoming more profi-
cient at it, and my ability to control and
perfect the images and sounds was in-
creasing exponentially, my work began to
feel more and more claustrophobic and
isolated from the real world. The focus
was on and within the electronic circuits
themselves, with the loudspeakers in the
room being simply the final output stage.
They might as well have been head-
phones, which often they were when I
worked alone.
Video provided the first way out
through the live camera and projection.
This freed the image from the monitor
box and expanded it to the architectural
scale of both the room and, more im-
portantly, of the human body. By the time
I left for the Chocorua workshops, I was
already familiar with the work of Edgard
Varèse and his ideas of active space, as
well as Alvin Lucier’s electroacoustic ex-
periments, including the tape feedback
piece I Am Sitting in a Room. Although I
had begun studying acoustic phenomena
and was running oscillator signals into
rooms to create standing wave patterns
and resonant nodes, thinking of them as
sculptural forms, my main purpose in
going to New Hampshire was to expand
my knowledge of electronic circuit de-
sign, or so I thought.
Several years earlier, Tudor had cre-
ated a large-scale, multi-speaker spatial
array in the dome of the Pepsi Pavilion
at the 1970 Osaka Expo. For sound
sources, he embarked on a project to
gather scientific field recordings of ani-
Fig. 4. Bill Viola making binaural sound recording, Chittenango Falls, near Syracuse, New
York, September 1979. (Photo © Kira Perov)
52 Viola, David Tudor
mal and natural sounds from research fa-
cilities around the world. He brought
much of this material with him to
Chocorua, as it lent itself very well to the
aesthetic and technical nature of the res-
onating objects in Rainforest. The sound
library was extraordinary—my favorite
recording was of a pack of seals wailing
underwater beneath the arctic ice—and
it was the missing link that I had been
waiting for. The exotic birds and frogs on
Tudor’s tapes sounded a lot like some of
the abstract electronic bleeps and
whoops I had been struggling with. The
resonant properties of the found objects
we were using functioned much in the
same way as the audio modulators and fil-
ters of the electronic synthesizer, but
were more rough and unruly. The world
inside of electronic circuits and the world
outside in the forests and rivers were re-
vealing their common forms and under-
lying principles.
Space was the ground and unifying el-
ement in which this interaction was being
played out. For me the most significant
thing about Rainforest was that the sound
existed both inside and outside the ob-
jects at the same time—the electrical
pick-ups attached to each object revealed
its internal vibrations, which were am-
plified and sent to loudspeakers at the
periphery of the space, while the exter-
nal surface of each object was audibly res-
onating within its own local area. The
different characters of these two sounds,
the inner and the outer, the material and
the ephemeral, the acoustic and the elec-
tronic, made for an extremely varied and
complex soundscape, which audience
members caused to unfold by walking
through. Complementing this experi-
ence was the fact that the objects and
their placement created a rich and evoca-
tive visual and sculptural environment as
well.
Since no one but David had a natural
sound library, one of the important first
tasks in creating Rainforest was to collect
sounds. At the time, the medium of
choice for David Tudor, and therefore for
Rainforest, was the audio cassette, at the
time just coming into its own as a viable
high-quality medium (as hard as this is to
imagine in the age of the Walkman). So
we all outfitted ourselves with the new
“portable” stereo cassette recorders, with
headphones and lots of batteries, and hit
the road. The machine quickly became a
constant companion on all my travels
(Fig. 4).
Some of the most sublime moments of
my life were spent at the side of a pond
in the countryside of upstate New York,
recording singing frogs on a warm sum-
mer’s night. Field recording became a
kind of ritual act, requiring a surprising
degree of mental focus and attention to
detail. One would first search out just the
right spot to position the microphones,
put on a set of headphones and set the
levels, then push “record” and settle in
to listen in the darkness. My method was
to record real-time ambient sequences of
long durations, sometimes as long as an
hour.
Early on I realized that with micro-
phones, as opposed to a video camera,
the entire area around the recorder be-
came sensitized, not only for the object
of the recording but for the person doing
the recording as well. I found myself in a
kind of Heisenbergian dilemma. Given
the generally low level of the sounds
being recorded and the sensitivity of the
microphones, the tiniest of sniffles, swal-
lows or shifting of body position became
audible during the recording. So I would
have to be absolutely still, at rest and in
balance for long periods of time, even if
a crick developed in my leg—which it in-
evitably did. Of course, in retrospect I
could have simply edited out the of-
fending sound, but that was not my way.
This had to be an absolute, extreme,
“pure” recording practice, a natural ten-
dency of mine that was probably en-
hanced by being with David. Maybe that
is why I connected so deeply with him.
Live field recording with microphones
and headphones is a unique experience,
particularly at night. The headphones
enveloped me in sound; the darkness sur-
rounded me and severely limited visual
perception. Physical immobility caused
loss of the senses of body position and
LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:19 AM Page 53
mass. Under these conditions, perceptual
experience was sensitized and height-
ened almost to the point of hallucination
as the frogs’ voices welled up and sub-
sided around and within me in continu-
ally varying waves (Fig. 5), punctuated by
occasional periods of silence that re-
vealed other, more subtle sounds. I real-
ized that the demands of the technology
had inadvertently forced me into a posi-
tion of deep meditation, and on several
occasions I had some of the most pro-
found out-of-body experiences I have
ever had. As with Tudor’s performances,
the live aspect was essential to the over-
all experience. It made the recording
part of the exercise seem secondary.
When I think back to how David was
teaching us, I am amazed. The field
recordings are a perfect example. He is-
sued a simple instruction: “Go out and
gather sounds.” Then he stepped aside, al-
lowing each person to have an experience
on his or her own terms, and in the end
imparted to all of us a greater awareness
of the place of music and electronic
sounds in the order of nature. Those out-
door recording sessions forever changed
my awareness of sound as a dynamic life-
force, a knowledge that still informs many
aspects of my life and artistic practice.
In whatever you do you should burn
yourself completely like a good bonfire,
leaving no trace.
—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Two years later I found myself working at
a video-art studio in Florence, Italy. In my
spare time, I initiated a project to record
the ambient sound in the vast halls of the
major cathedrals in the city, in an attempt
to capture the subconscious background
noise that gave a unique sonic character
to each building. On my first visits, I had
focused like most tourists on the mag-
nificent architecture and art the cathe-
drals contained, so it took me quite some
time to realize that these great buildings
were in fact primarily empty. Spending
long hours making sound recordings
gave me an even more valuable insight:
that this emptiness was not an absence of
something, but rather a presence—in fact,
the presence to which all the artworks and
songs, and the buildings themselves, were
dedicated. A huge empty space did seem
the most appropriate symbol for an in-
visible presence of such magnitude.
This idea of a “charged emptiness,”
and the sense of an activated space that
it engendered, was something familiar,
which I recognized in David Tudor’s
music. It was the distinct impression that
Fig. 5. Pseudacris crucifer, “Spring Peeper.” (Photo © Lang Elliot
http://www.naturesound.
com/frogs/pages/peeper.html) This nocturnal frog, approximately 1 inch long, is more
often heard than seen. Its call consists of a single loud, clear note, or peep, repeated approxi-
mately once per second. A pond full of Peepers can be nearly deafening to the observer.
there was something there underneath the
written notes and technical instruments,
present in the silences as well as the
sounds, and that this was consistently felt
to be the main component of the expe-
rience. The silence experienced in
David’s performances was silence in the
Buddhist sense, not nothing but some-
thing—the latent potential that con-
tained all possible sounds.
He who paints a figure, if he cannot be
it cannot draw it.
—Dante
In 1998, 2 years after David had passed
away, I was a scholar-in-residence at the
Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
The Getty had just acquired the David
Tudor Papers archive, and one day I was
invited by an archivist to help clarify the
nature of some of the technical things he
had mentioned in his notes. When they
brought the first box out and opened it
up, I saw a stack of personal papers in
David’s handwriting. I instantly became
nervous and flustered, unsure of what to
do. David was such a private man, and in
real life it was such a rare privilege to have
him open up and share his inner
thoughts. But here in front of me were
pages and pages of these very private mo-
ments, in stark black and white, fully il-
luminated, naked and unprotected. I felt
like I was looking into a room that had
long been locked for a reason and was vi-
olating some unspoken pact by doing so.
I proceeded very slowly, gingerly at
first—heart in throat. I saw pages of num-
bers and hand-drawn tables, possibly
equipment settings or calculations of
some sort, beautifully composed and writ-
ten in the most delicate and sensitive
handwriting. There were folders of Radio
Shack receipts for electronic compo-
nents and materials; envelopes with
names, phone numbers and assorted lists
jotted down on various scraps of paper;
descriptions of pieces and multiple drafts
for program notes. (The hardest thing
for David to do was to explain himself in
public, yet he could be an excellent
writer and speaker if he wanted to.)
There were also many circuit diagrams,
some with multiple changes and cross-
ings out. The most moving thing was a
small notebook where David had hand-
copied excerpts and sometimes entire
articles, including illustrations and cap-
tions, from Popular Electronics magazine
and other publications like it in the 1950s
and 1960s. He was painstakingly teach-
ing himself electronics, quietly sitting
alone in a room somewhere. Again, all
this was written meticulously in pencil, in
the same careful, thoughtful hand. I was
deeply touched and felt overwhelmed
and grateful at having been given the op-
portunity to be so close to David’s inner
thoughts, closer than I had ever been in
real life, as ambivalent as it made me feel.
I found one particular set of docu-
ments that illuminated the mystery of
what David was actually doing during
some of those performances. It was a se-
Viola, David Tudor 53
LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:19 AM Page 54
Fig. 6. Blind woman hearing and touching Rainforest at Drexel Bank Building, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, 1979. (Photo © Kira Perov) The deaf attended and were able to “hear” the
objects by biting them to induce internal bone conduction.
ries of handwritten drafts of program
notes for a piece simply called Untitled, a
work for electronics. In it he wrote:
. . . part of a series of works in which elec-
tronic components are chained together
in such a way as to produce parameters
unpredictable to the performer. The
work is “discovered” in live performance,
through the exploration of all possible
points of variation within the electronic
hookup [5].
I smiled out loud. Just as I had sus-
pected, his cool, calm demeanor belied
the fact that inside he didn’t know what
the hell he was doing! And he did this on
stage, alone, in full view of the paying
54 Viola, David Tudor
public! Of course, he knew full well what
he was doing, he just had no idea what
was going to happen next. I had always
classified these pieces of David’s that
never sounded the same twice as “im-
provisations,” one of these nice conven-
tional labels we apply without thinking
too much about it. But in these notes
I was reading something else, some-
thing even more thrilling, radical and
brave. This was not improvisation, it
was a type of falling! And, characteristi-
cally, it was much more complex than it
seemed.
I thought about what was behind this.
Tudor had made the circuits, a precise
art involving configurations of compo-
nents arranged in certain sequences ac-
cording to their individual function and
the laws of electrical currents. However,
once this precise layout of components
became animated by the electricity cours-
ing through them, they were trans-
formed into a living, pulsing system and,
if the connections were complex enough,
an unpredictable one as well. The “piece”
became a probing exploration of the in-
ternal junctions inside the system to see
what might be hiding there (Fig. 6).
The description he had written
sounded very similar to a piece called
Pulsers, one of my favorites, which I had
seen him perform several times in the
1970s. His statement explained why at
times an ear-splitting horrific burst of
noise would suddenly come blasting out
of the loudspeakers as if they were going
to explode, and at other times everything
would suddenly collapse in stone silence.
In both situations, David, sitting expres-
sionless, would calmly reach over to one
of those hand-made mystery boxes piled
on his table to slowly and delicately turn
a different knob.
In the same text, David also wrote:
“The performance circuitry is regarded
as beginning in its middle. . . .” [6].
Here, the Zen master within David’s
mind became apparent. For most people,
analog electronic devices, whether stereo
amplifiers or cassette tape decks, typically
come in the form of some sort of box with
an “input” and an “output” on the outside.
We attach the cables in the prescribed
order, turn it on, adjust the various con-
trol knobs provided, and enjoy the show.
An inquisitive child, however, would nat-
urally ask, “But what’s inside the box?”—
a very good question, since that is where
all the action is. The exciting stuff is going
on behind closed doors, somewhere be-
tween the input and the output. In
the case of analog components, this
fundamental action is transformation—
transmuting one form into another,
shape-shifting. So David simply opened up
the box and started poking around, try-
ing to reach the spark at the heart of the
matter, the essential point of change. This
process naturally entails some risk (Fig. 7).
Gordon Mumma once said that the
two key elements to Tudor’s work as a
composer were resonance and chaos.
This astute comment pinpoints the un-
derlying principles that have found many
expressive and creative outlets in Tudor’s
extraordinary hands, both artistically and
philosophically, physically and meta-
physically.
Resonance is the condition whereby a
tiny input autonomously cascades into
LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:19 AM Page 55

a much larger output. It occurs when a

small vibration interacts with the inter-
nal structure of a material and greatly in-
creases in intensity, threatening to
destroy the object if pushed beyond a cer-
tain limit. Chaos is the point at which
order breaks down, when elements in an
organized system start acting randomly
and autonomously, creating a situation
where it is impossible to predict exactly
what will happen next or in what order.
Both involve limits and thresholds that
have been crossed, organization that
breaks down, actions that go out of con-
trol, systems that collapse—creating
something new and unexpected in the
process.
The image I have of David and his art
is one of a child playing the game of stack
the blocks. Block is balanced on top of
block in ascending order until the stack
gets very high, precariously close to top-
pling over. The tension mounts as each
participant places another block on the
stack. The energy of the group proceeds
from smug calmness at the beginning to
stomach-clenching, nail-biting terror in
the end. In this scenario, David Tudor,
composer, performer and child, is the
one who puts the next block on the stack
after the structure has almost toppled
many times over, and the consensus is
that no additional weight could conceiv-
ably result in anything but total disaster.
As all look on in horror, or close their
eyes, David executes this act with calm,
focused concentration, punctuating his
success with gleeful laughter. Whether
the stack falls or not is a matter of inter-
pretation.

We are close to waking up when we are

dreaming.
—Novalis

In January 1977, the Rainforest group was
invited by Pauline Oliveros for a 2-week
artists’ residency at the Center for Music
Experiment at the University of Califor-
nia San Diego. On our last weekend,
Pauline arranged for us to go out on a
whale-watching trip to see Pacific gray
whales on their seasonal migration down
the California coast. The morning light
was magnificent, and our group was quite
animated and excited on the way out of
the harbor. David sat on a bench just
under the captain’s windows at the bow
of the boat. The first whale was spotted,
and soon we had seen several as the boat
maneuvered quite close to a small group.
Their huge, gray, encrusted backs rose
up like massive boulders and then sank
beneath the waves, defining a regular
Fig. 7. Audience member intimately listening to Rainforest, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, June 1976. (Photo © John Driscoll)
rhythm punctuated with sudden audible
bursts of air from their blowholes. As we
got closer, the presence of these creatures
as living sentient beings was distinctly dis-
cernible.
Occasionally, a set of broad tail flukes
rose up high out of the water, signaling a
deep dive, which the animals apparently
did regularly. Within a few seconds they
had all disappeared without a trace. After
an interminable amount of time and
heightening anticipation, they still had
not reappeared. I realized then that
whale watching entailed a lot of waiting.
The captain informed us that they could
be a mile or more away when they resur-
faced, and that when they are down deep
it is impossible to predict where they
might go next. This became the pattern
of the day.
While all this activity was going on, I
noticed that David had become very
quiet. I had sometimes seen him recede
in certain social situations, and I thought
that either that was the case here or per-
haps he had become seasick. On the way
back in I sat down next to him. I couldn’t
see his eyes well under his sunglasses, so
it was hard to tell what he was thinking.
After a spell of silent sitting, I asked how

Viola, David Tudor 55

LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:19 AM Page 56
he liked seeing the whales. There was an-
other long pause, and then he said, “I
could feel them under there.”
Years later I realized how much of
David there was in that whale watching
trip: The calm quiet surface suddenly
broken by a huge form rising up from the
depths, its full size and shape indeter-
minable, visible for a brief moment be-
fore submerging again, leaving only a
disturbed surface and questions of
whether what was seen actually happened
or what its true nature actually was.
Meanwhile, as the rest of us wait to see if
it will happen again, the reality behind
the experience is happening somewhere
down deep, invisible to the eye—a living
being moving in regions we cannot know,
navigating by sound, and breaking the
surface only occasionally, each time im-
parting a gift of power and grace that can
last a lifetime. Thank you, David.
The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
—Li Po, 8th century [7]
56 Viola, David Tudor
References and Notes
1. Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi (Ballantine Books,
1969) p. 5. Originally published in 1963.
2. Ron Kuivila, “Practicing the Imperfect,” lecture at
the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 8 March
1999.
3. Kuivila [2].
4. Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Self-Liberation through
Seeing with Naked Awareness, John Myrdhin Reynolds,
trans. (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2000)
foreword, p. x.
5. From the David Tudor Papers, Getty Research In-
stitute (GRI) (980039). Information about the
archive is available at:
www.getty.edu/research/
conducting_research/digitized_collections/david
tudor.
6. From the David Tudor Papers, GRI (980039) [5].
7. Stephen Mitchell, ed., The Enlightened Heart (New
York: Harper and Row, 1989) p. 32. Quote translated
by Sam Hamill.
Manuscript received 2 April 2004.
Since the early 1970s video art pioneer Bill
Viola has created over 150 videotapes and
multimedia installations that are shown in
art museums and galleries, and on public tele-
vision worldwide. His work explores phenom-
ena of sense perception as an avenue to
self-knowledge and focuses on universal
human experiences—birth, death, the un-
folding of consciousness—with roots in both
Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual
traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic
Sufism and Christian mysticism. Viola re-
ceived his BFA in Experimental Studios from
Syracuse University in 1973, gaining experi-
ence while assisting such artists as Nam June
Paik and Peter Campus in the staging of
cutting-edge media exhibitions. Later Viola
studied and worked with David Tudor and
participated in Tudor’s Rainforest group, ex-
perimenting with music and sonic sculpture.
In 1997, the Whitney Museum organized a
25-year survey of Viola’s work that traveled to
major museums in the U.S. and Europe. In
2002, Viola completed his most ambitious
project, Going Forth By Day, a five-part pro-
jected digital “fresco” cycle in high-definition
video. A new body of work, The Passions, was
exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los
Angeles in 2003, later traveling to the Na-
tional Gallery London. Currently, Viola is col-
laborating with theater/opera director Peter
Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to
create a new production of Richard Wagner’s
opera Tristan and Isolde.