UNTITLED

David Tudor had little patience with commercial analog synthesizers, which he felt required a lot of work to produce decent sound. After considerable effort he discovered that by combining gain stages, phase shifting, and feedback, he could produce complex patterns of modulation and sounds that held a hint of vocal identity. He used this approach for a series of pieces he made in the early 1970s, culminating in Untitled and Toneburst. In John Fulleman's words, these works "were based on his ability to assert just enough control over the equipment to get through a concert."

Tudor's notation for Untitled reveals that "formant shifting" is central to the electronic network. Formant shifting is accomplished by passing a signal through high pass and low pass filters and multiplying those outputs together. The filters create a resonant frequency, establishing the pitch at which feedback forms. But the multiplication transposes sounds at that resonant frequency to zero hertz, canceling out the feedback.

In concept, Untitled required close to sixty components, too many for a live performance. So Tudor prepared source tapes of material to be played at random within the overall performance. The piece was composed in 1972 for a concert tour where it was performed concurrently with John Cage shouting out his Mesostics Re: Merce Cunningham. Cassette recordings of one of these concerts reveal Cage's voice just breaking the surface of Tudor's wall of sound. Later, Cage commented that while he was quite fond of the piece he would never perform it again, as it had left him hoarse for a month.

In 2015, Michael Johnsen and You Nakai were is residence at Wesleyan University Music Department at the invitation of Ron Kuivila with support from the David Tudor Trust to further research the electronic boxes used for Untitled.  Progress is being made in the understanding of the circuit functions and restoring some of the devices to a functional state.

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Reference: R. Kuvila - Open Sources: Words, Circuits, and the Notation/Realization Relation in the Music of David Tudor (2001)

                                                                                                                                          UNTITLED - System diagram