Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bill Viola - David Tudor - The Delicate Art of Falling - LMJ - v14 PDF
Bill Viola - David Tudor - The Delicate Art of Falling - LMJ - v14 PDF
David Tudor:
The Delicate Art of Falling
Bill Viola
Palongawhoya, traveling through the earth, sounded out his call Chocorua, in the White Mountains
as he was bidden. All the vibratory centers along the earth’s axis of New Hampshire, to share with
from pole to pole resounded his call: the whole earth trembled; the students. I took a Greyhound bus
universe quivered in tone. Thus, he made the whole world an in- from Syracuse, having signed up for ABSTRACT
strument of sound, and sound an instrument for carrying mes- Tudor’s sessions knowing nothing
sages, resounding praise for the creator of all. 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
—Hopi Indian myth of the creation of the First formative influence on his own
about “exciting” physical objects work and thinking. This connec-
World [1]
with sound to discover their reso- tion began with the author’s
nant frequencies. On the first collaboration in the presentation
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor who, working in New York morning, a group of about 15 of us of Tudor’s Rainforest, which
provided an introduction to the
at the turn of the 20th century, revolutionized the applications assembled in a small upstairs room, provocative currents at work in
of electricity with one of the most fertile and visionary imagi- which had already been set out with Tudor’s music and personality.
nations in the history of science. In an era when electricity was tables bearing electronic equip-
still in the experimental stages, Tesla claimed that he could ment and some strange objects.
transmit electricity and illumination without wires anywhere David Tudor was not a man in-
in the world; send sound and speech through the air to ships clined to small talk or social pleasantries; in fact he usually
at sea or people in their homes through a system he called didn’t say much at all. Things got underway with little or no in-
“the transmission of intelligence”; and that, by calculating its troduction, with David talking in halting sentences punctuated
resonant frequency, he could send the Earth into vibration by long silent pauses, rarely looking anyone in the eye. This, plus
with a properly tuned driver of adequate size and specific his formidable reputation, made us all feel quite intimidated at
placement. In 1896 he strapped a driver motor to the central first, and there was a nervous, unsettled feeling in the room. He
beam of his Mulberry Street laboratory and set the building, demonstrated the basic principle behind Rainforest by running
and the ground beneath it, into a resonant oscillation, accel- a sine tone from an audio oscillator into a metal can using a de-
erating in intensity and causing a small earthquake that shat- vice called a transducer, which we soon realized acted like the
tered windows, broke pipes and wreaked havoc and alarm in magnetic driver part of a loudspeaker without the surrounding
the neighborhood. He was forced to stop it with a blow from collar. As the oscillator swept the pure tone slowly up through
a sledgehammer. the audible sound spectrum, the object would vibrate and phys-
David Tudor first introduced me to the work of Nikola Tesla. ically rattle, giving off a loud, complex array of sound frequen-
I was then 23 years old, fresh out of college and ready for wild, cies, or otherwise fall still and quietly reproduce only the
new ideas. I had recently met him at a New Music workshop originally pure sound source. David performed this task silently,
in New Hampshire. In fact, it was Tudor who introduced me with the utmost concentration on the object and the sound.
to a lot of new things at that time—wondrous, mysterious, mar- We were informed that these louder events were the result
velous things all connected in one way or another to the world of resonant nodes latent in that particular metal can and that
of sound and vibration, revelations that have stayed with me all physical objects had them. Pretty soon we were experi-
and continue to inspire and inform my work. 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,
It takes a man to make a room silent.
wood planks. Someone blew out two transducers by trying to
—Thoreau 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-
I met Tudor through his piece Rainforest in 1973, which he had
ningham Dance Company expand into a large-scale singing
brought to a summer workshop at an inn in the town of
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
Bill Viola (artist), 282 Granada Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90803, U.S.A. filled with a sonic “forest” of suspended objects of all shapes
and sizes, each object lending its own unique voice to the var-
Frontispiece. Bill Viola and David Tudor making pasta, August ied, undulating sound field that permeated every corner of
1979. (Photo © Kira Perov) the room.
© 2004 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 14, pp. 48–56, 2004 49
LMJ14_001- 11/15/04 9:18 AM Page 50
into the video inputs of the monitor to mal and natural sounds from research fa- through. Complementing this experi-
create complex, undulating abstract cilities around the world. He brought ence was the fact that the objects and
forms. much of this material with him to their placement created a rich and evoca-
Although I was becoming more profi- Chocorua, as it lent itself very well to the tive visual and sculptural environment as
cient at it, and my ability to control and aesthetic and technical nature of the res- well.
perfect the images and sounds was in- onating objects in Rainforest. The sound Since no one but David had a natural
creasing exponentially, my work began to library was extraordinary—my favorite sound library, one of the important first
feel more and more claustrophobic and recording was of a pack of seals wailing tasks in creating Rainforest was to collect
isolated from the real world. The focus underwater beneath the arctic ice—and sounds. At the time, the medium of
was on and within the electronic circuits it was the missing link that I had been choice for David Tudor, and therefore for
themselves, with the loudspeakers in the waiting for. The exotic birds and frogs on Rainforest, was the audio cassette, at the
room being simply the final output stage. Tudor’s tapes sounded a lot like some of time just coming into its own as a viable
They might as well have been head- the abstract electronic bleeps and high-quality medium (as hard as this is to
phones, which often they were when I whoops I had been struggling with. The imagine in the age of the Walkman). So
worked alone. resonant properties of the found objects we all outfitted ourselves with the new
Video provided the first way out we were using functioned much in the “portable” stereo cassette recorders, with
through the live camera and projection. same way as the audio modulators and fil- headphones and lots of batteries, and hit
This freed the image from the monitor ters of the electronic synthesizer, but the road. The machine quickly became a
box and expanded it to the architectural were more rough and unruly. The world constant companion on all my travels
scale of both the room and, more im- inside of electronic circuits and the world (Fig. 4).
portantly, of the human body. By the time outside in the forests and rivers were re- Some of the most sublime moments of
I left for the Chocorua workshops, I was vealing their common forms and under- my life were spent at the side of a pond
already familiar with the work of Edgard lying principles. in the countryside of upstate New York,
Varèse and his ideas of active space, as Space was the ground and unifying el- recording singing frogs on a warm sum-
well as Alvin Lucier’s electroacoustic ex- ement in which this interaction was being mer’s night. Field recording became a
periments, including the tape feedback played out. For me the most significant kind of ritual act, requiring a surprising
piece I Am Sitting in a Room. Although I thing about Rainforest was that the sound degree of mental focus and attention to
had begun studying acoustic phenomena existed both inside and outside the ob- detail. One would first search out just the
and was running oscillator signals into jects at the same time—the electrical right spot to position the microphones,
rooms to create standing wave patterns pick-ups attached to each object revealed put on a set of headphones and set the
and resonant nodes, thinking of them as its internal vibrations, which were am- levels, then push “record” and settle in
sculptural forms, my main purpose in plified and sent to loudspeakers at the to listen in the darkness. My method was
going to New Hampshire was to expand periphery of the space, while the exter- to record real-time ambient sequences of
my knowledge of electronic circuit de- nal surface of each object was audibly res- long durations, sometimes as long as an
sign, or so I thought. onating within its own local area. The hour.
Several years earlier, Tudor had cre- different characters of these two sounds, Early on I realized that with micro-
ated a large-scale, multi-speaker spatial the inner and the outer, the material and phones, as opposed to a video camera,
array in the dome of the Pepsi Pavilion the ephemeral, the acoustic and the elec- the entire area around the recorder be-
at the 1970 Osaka Expo. For sound tronic, made for an extremely varied and came sensitized, not only for the object
sources, he embarked on a project to complex soundscape, which audience of the recording but for the person doing
gather scientific field recordings of ani- members caused to unfold by walking the recording as well. I found myself in a
kind of Heisenbergian dilemma. Given
the generally low level of the sounds
Fig. 4. Bill Viola making binaural sound recording, Chittenango Falls, near Syracuse, New being recorded and the sensitivity of the
York, September 1979. (Photo © Kira Perov) 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
In January 1977, the Rainforest group was Fig. 7. Audience member intimately listening to Rainforest, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
invited by Pauline Oliveros for a 2-week Minnesota, June 1976. (Photo © John Driscoll)
artists’ residency at the Center for Music
Experiment at the University of Califor-
nia San Diego. On our last weekend, rhythm punctuated with sudden audible be a mile or more away when they resur-
Pauline arranged for us to go out on a bursts of air from their blowholes. As we faced, and that when they are down deep
whale-watching trip to see Pacific gray got closer, the presence of these creatures it is impossible to predict where they
whales on their seasonal migration down as living sentient beings was distinctly dis- might go next. This became the pattern
the California coast. The morning light cernible. of the day.
was magnificent, and our group was quite Occasionally, a set of broad tail flukes While all this activity was going on, I
animated and excited on the way out of rose up high out of the water, signaling a noticed that David had become very
the harbor. David sat on a bench just deep dive, which the animals apparently quiet. I had sometimes seen him recede
under the captain’s windows at the bow did regularly. Within a few seconds they in certain social situations, and I thought
of the boat. The first whale was spotted, had all disappeared without a trace. After that either that was the case here or per-
and soon we had seen several as the boat an interminable amount of time and haps he had become seasick. On the way
maneuvered quite close to a small group. heightening anticipation, they still had back in I sat down next to him. I couldn’t
Their huge, gray, encrusted backs rose not reappeared. I realized then that see his eyes well under his sunglasses, so
up like massive boulders and then sank whale watching entailed a lot of waiting. it was hard to tell what he was thinking.
beneath the waves, defining a regular The captain informed us that they could After a spell of silent sitting, I asked how
he liked seeing the whales. There was an- References and Notes art museums and galleries, and on public tele-
other long pause, and then he said, “I 1. Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi (Ballantine Books,
vision worldwide. His work explores phenom-
could feel them under there.” 1969) p. 5. Originally published in 1963. ena of sense perception as an avenue to
Years later I realized how much of self-knowledge and focuses on universal
2. Ron Kuivila, “Practicing the Imperfect,” lecture at
David there was in that whale watching the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 8 March
human experiences—birth, death, the un-
1999. folding of consciousness—with roots in both
trip: The calm quiet surface suddenly
Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual
broken by a huge form rising up from the 3. Kuivila [2].
traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic
depths, its full size and shape indeter- 4. Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Self-Liberation through Sufism and Christian mysticism. Viola re-
minable, visible for a brief moment be- Seeing with Naked Awareness, John Myrdhin Reynolds, ceived his BFA in Experimental Studios from
fore submerging again, leaving only a trans. (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2000)
foreword, p. x.
Syracuse University in 1973, gaining experi-
disturbed surface and questions of ence while assisting such artists as Nam June
whether what was seen actually happened 5. From the David Tudor Papers, Getty Research In- Paik and Peter Campus in the staging of
stitute (GRI) (980039). Information about the
or what its true nature actually was. archive is available at: www.getty.edu/research/
cutting-edge media exhibitions. Later Viola
Meanwhile, as the rest of us wait to see if conducting_research/digitized_collections/david studied and worked with David Tudor and
it will happen again, the reality behind tudor. participated in Tudor’s Rainforest group, ex-
perimenting with music and sonic sculpture.
the experience is happening somewhere 6. From the David Tudor Papers, GRI (980039) [5].
In 1997, the Whitney Museum organized a
down deep, invisible to the eye—a living 7. Stephen Mitchell, ed., The Enlightened Heart (New 25-year survey of Viola’s work that traveled to
being moving in regions we cannot know, York: Harper and Row, 1989) p. 32. Quote translated
major museums in the U.S. and Europe. In
by Sam Hamill.
navigating by sound, and breaking the 2002, Viola completed his most ambitious
surface only occasionally, each time im- project, Going Forth By Day, a five-part pro-
parting a gift of power and grace that can jected digital “fresco” cycle in high-definition
last a lifetime. Thank you, David. video. A new body of work, The Passions, was
Manuscript received 2 April 2004. exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los
The birds have vanished into the sky, Angeles in 2003, later traveling to the Na-
and now the last cloud drains away. tional Gallery London. Currently, Viola is col-
laborating with theater/opera director Peter
We sit together, the mountain and me,
Since the early 1970s video art pioneer Bill Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to
until only the mountain remains. Viola has created over 150 videotapes and create a new production of Richard Wagner’s
—Li Po, 8th century [7] multimedia installations that are shown in opera Tristan and Isolde.