Table Of ContentReminded by the Instruments
Reminded by the
Instruments
David Tudor’s Music
You Nakai
1
3
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ISBN 978– 0– 19– 068676– 5
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This volume is published with the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of
the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
All photographs of instruments from the David Tudor Collection at
Wesleyan University by You Nakai
All sonograms created using EAnalysis by You Nakai
All matrix map diagrams created by You Nakai
Color version of matrix map diagrams and instrument photographs are available at:
remindedbytheinstruments.info
for Aevi,
for all the time it took
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle.” No
one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a
beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—H ere it would be quite possible for
everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine
such a thing constantly changing.— But suppose the word “beetle” had a
use in these people’s language?—I f so it would not be used as the name of
a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-g ame at all; not
even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—N o, one can “di-
vide through” by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Section 293
(posthumous manuscript, April 1951)
As children we all had a box which we kept hidden; it contained a but-
terfly wing, a beetle, a lucky penny. For each, that box was private, inti-
mate and secret; and yet we all (most of us) had it. Communication of art
is between those boxes, between subjectives, the secret that we all share,
each privately.
— Maya Deren, “New Directions in Film Art”
(lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, April 1951)
Abbreviations
Institutions/Archives
CIE Composers Inside Electronics
DTP David Tudor Papers (GRI)
DTC David Tudor Collection (Wesleyan University)
E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology
GRI Getty Research Institute
IRCAM Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/
Musique
MCDC Merce Cunningham Dance Company
STEIM Studio for Electro- Instrumental Music
TEEM Theatre Electronic Environmental Modular System
Electronics
AM Amplitude Modulation
E.E.G. Electroencephalography
EQ Equalizer
FM Frequency Modulation
L Line Level
MA Microphone Level
PC Polarity Control
PR Preamplifier
Instruments
If the instrument is found in the David Tudor Collection at Wesleyan University its
Rogalsky number (from a list compiled by Matt Rogalsky) is attached after its name;
“(no #)” for the extant ones without a number.
8Ø Multioutput Phase Shifter (Instrument 0007)
90 90- degree Phase Splitter (Instrument 0037)
150 Sony ECM-1 50 Electret Condenser Microphone
(Instrument 0141)
180 180- degree Phase Splitter (instrument 0018) or
180-degree Phase Shifter (Instrument 0006)
800 Sharp RT- W800 Cassette Deck (Instrument 0446)
AD Electro- Harmonix Attack Decay Tape Reverse
Simulator (no #)
AF Ibanez Auto Filter
B E/ L Guyatone PS- 020 Bass Exciter/ Limiter (no #)
B EQ Bass EQ
BFO or B.F. OSC Beat Frequency Oscillator (Instrument 0021)
xii Abbreviations
CH/ FL t.c. electronic Stereo Chorus + Flanger (no #)
CLIP Clipper (Instrument 0027)
D6 Sony Walkman WM- D6
DF Boss FT- 2 Dynamic Filter
DG Drawmer DS- 201 Dual Gate
D/ G Lead/ Lag Complementary Phase Shifter
(Instrument 0460)
D.SYN Drum Synthesizer
EMU or ENV.MOD. BNB Kit Envelope Modification Unit
(Instrument 0267)
EX or EC Electronic Crossover
FOG or FH Olson Fog Horn (Instrument 0461)
FP Ibanez FP- 777 Flying Pan Phaser
H.GEN Harmonic Generator (Instrument 0173)
IBN Ibanez PQ- 9 Parametric EQ (no #)
INF Infinity Intimate Walkman (Instrument 0354)
K Touch Sensitive Photocell Key (Instrument 0252/
0253)
LB EQ Loco Box G#- 6 6- Band Graphic Equalizer
(Instrument 0303)
LEN or L.MOD or LENKURT Lenkurt Modulator (Instrument 0116/0 174)
M1/ M2 or mike P.A. Olson Microphone Preamplifier TR- 86
(Instrument 0022)
MB Shin- ei Mute Box Envelope Filter (Instrument 0472)
MG D&R Electronics Multigate
M.SYN Minisynth (no #)
MT Mu- tron III Envelope Filter
NEXT Next SE- 100 Signal Gate (Instrument 0275)
OCT or OM Electro- Harmonix Octave Multiplexer
(Instrument 0300)
OP or O.Pa or PM or MP Olson RA- 637 Preampfier Mixer (Instrument 0237/
0238)
OSC Oscillating Amplifier
PC Proportional Control System
P.C. PUSH BUTT. Photocell— Push Button Unit
P/ F Phaser/ Flanger (Instrument 0039)
PL or PLS Pulse Generator (Instrument 0474)
PL. BUS BOSS Headphone Amp HA- 5 Play Bus
(Instrument 0473)
PP Electro- Harmonix Polyphase
PLL Phase- Locked Loop
P.SYN Forrest M. Mims Percussion Synthesizer
(Instrument 0025)
QM Four Quadrant Multiplier (no #)
R1/ R2 Maplin RTX3 Radar Doppler Intruder Detector (no #)
RF GEN Radio Frequency Generator
Abbreviations xiii
RMC or M Realistic Stereo Mixing Console (Instrument 0514)
RST or ST Realistic 4-Channel Stereo Mixer (Instrument 0147)
SAE Scientific Audio Electronics 5000A Impulse Noise
Reduction System (Instrument 0333)
SD E&MM String Damper (Instrument 0469)
SPEC. ANLZ or SPEC Fujitsu Ten Biyo QI- 200SD Spectrum Analyzer
(Instrument 0293)
SPK.GEN Spike Generator (Instrument 0173)
SPL or OS Cybersonic Output Splitter (Instrument 0002/0 000)
SR Polyfusion QP- 1 Sound- A- Round (no #)
ST or SPEC. TRANS Cybersonic Spectrum Transfer (Instrument 0450)
SYN PAiA Synthespin (Instrument 0265/0 511)
TA Tunable Amplifier
TB or T- Box Tube Box (Instrument 0448)
TB Toneburst Generator (Instrument 0118)
TC Tone Controls
TC PH t.c. electronic XII B/ K Programmable Phaser
TP Electro- Harmonix Talking Pedal Speech
Synthesizer (no #)
TP Triggered Pulser
US1/U S2 Maplin Ultrasonic Intruder Detector (no #)
VCDR Vocoder
VCO Voltage- Controlled Oscillator
VF C/ G Vesta Fire CG- 1 Compressor/ Gate (Instrument 0320)
VO Variable Oscillator
VOX or VX Vox Repeat Percussion (Instrument 0257)
WN or W.N.GEN or WH. NOISE White Noise Generator (Instrument 0493)
Z1/Z 2 Z- amp (Instrument 0175/0 176)
In
The Other Side (A Likely Story)
1
On November 8, 2007, I visited the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles,
California. The research center of one of the richest art institutions in the world had
then recently added a new acquisition to their archive of twentieth-c entury avant-
garde: the materials of Yvonne Rainer, who choreographed thoughtful dances in the
1960s before switching her focus in the early 1970s to directing very thoughtful films.
I admired Rainer’s work, especially her films where language and moving images
(and to a lesser extent, sound) shared a complex of strategies to bring down what she
called “the tyranny of narrative.”1 So together with theater director Yelena Gluzman,
I had begun working on the reconstruction of one pseudo-t heater piece Rainer had
created in 1972 called Grand Union Dreams. It was the last major performance the
choreographer had made before she turned herself into a filmmaker, and I was inter-
ested in the strangeness of this work which was both dance and theater yet also nei-
ther, for it appeared to reflect the nature of the transformation she was going through
at the time. Our revival was taking place at the Yotsuya Art Studium, an alternative art
school in central Tokyo I had helped set up three years earlier. Yelena and I co-t aught
a peculiar “English” class there, where we could teach whatever we wanted as long as it
was in English. Since language plays a significant role in Rainer’s films, using them as
material for our class seemed like a good idea.
That early November in 2007, I happened to be in San Diego to attend the
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) with Kenjiro
Okazaki, the director of Yotsuya Art Studium. We were co-p resenting a paper
on Kenjiro’s work with the choreographer Trisha Brown (who happened to be a
dear friend of Yvonne Rainer and who had appeared in the original production of
1 Yvonne Rainer, “A Likely Story (1976),” in A Woman Who: Essays, Interviews, Scripts (Baltimore, MD,
and London, UK: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 138. Rainer explains, “let me insert here that my
own involvement with narrative forms has not always been either happy or wholehearted, rather more
often a dalliance than a commitment. The reason lies partly in the predominating form of narrative film.
The tyranny of a form that creates the expectation of a continuous answer to ‘what will happen next?’ fa-
natically pursuing an inexorable resolution in which all things find their just or correct placement in space
and time; such a tyranny, having already attained its epiphany in the movies (I think of Gertrud, Senso,
Balthazar, Contempt, Lulu) such a form has inevitably seemed more ripe for resistance, or at least evasion,
than for emulation” (ibid.).
Reminded by the Instruments. You Nakai, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780190686765.001.0001.
