ABSTRACT
What distinguishes the interpretative approach of the experimental musician from that of other musicians? The pianist David Tudor, arguably the single most significant performer in the history of experimental music, described his emergent feelings in 1963 concerning performing experimental music:
When I play a piece that is notated, even though I may have a freedom of choice, for instance as in Stockhausen, I feel … er … it’s a curious, er … sensation that I’m trying to describe, but the whole thing is … whatever you do, is like a stream of consciousness. And if I play something which is so notated I notice now, aĞer having done it for several years, that it has the tendency to put me to sleep. It wants all the time to … er … recede into an area where my feelings are called upon more and more. And all the features which seemed to be so striking when the works were first composed now become much less striking. They don’t seem so important and so the whole thing recedes into a stream which is mainly of feeling. Whereas if I play music which doesn’t have any such requirement, where I’m called upon to make actions, especially if the actions are undetermined as to their content, or at least let’s say undetermined as to what they’re going to produce, then I feel like I’m alive in every part of my consciousness.1
