Other Minds celebra il centenario della nascita del geniale David Tudor - interprete principale della cosiddetta New York School degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta (Cage, Feldman, Brown, Wolff), legato in particolare ai rivoluzionari lavori del coreografo Merce Cunningham, oltre che assoluto pioniere dell'uso in concerto dei live electronics - con due speciali giornate di concerti e seminari questo fine settimana presso il così rinominato Mills College at Northeastern University a Oakland, California. Fulcro del programma è l'esibizione dello storico Composers Inside Electronics, riformatosi dopo lunga inattività nel 1996 per accompagnare le esequie del compositore e di cui ancora fanno parte due componenti del nucleo orginale, Paul DeMarinis e John Driscoll. Verranno illustrati ed eseguiti tra l'altro Forest Speech, Microphone e Pulsers.
David Tudor's (1926-1996) first professional activity, at 16, was as an organist. He became a leading avant-garde pianist, with highly acclaimed first performances of compositions by contemporary composers, before moving in the mid-1960s to the composition and performance of “live electronic music.” In the early 1950s, at Black Mountain College and in New York, he formed relationships with artists with whom he continued to work during his entire career: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Christian Wolff, and others. He became the pianist for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and he and John Cage toured during the 1950s and early 1960s with programs of Cage’s works. In the late 1950s he had an important presence at Darmstadt, where he worked with and influenced Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, and other members of the European avant-garde. His own compositions appeared in the mid 1960s: Bandoneon! (1966), a composition for “Nine Evenings, a project of Experiments in Art and Technology”; design and composition of the Pepsi Pavilion, Expo ’70, Osaka, Japan, also an EAT project: and, from 1976, as a founding member of Composers Inside Electronics, a music ensemble whose members perform collaborative compositions with home-built electronic circuitry. Tudor’s first composition for the MCDC was for Cunningham’s Rainforest in 1968. Tudor assumed the post of Music Director of MCDC in 1992. Tudor’s last work for Cunningham was Soundings: Ocean Diary, the electronic component of the score for Ocean (1994).
