Table of Contents
Web page
https://www.bowerbird.org/event/david-tudor-a-view-from-inside/
” January 15 to March 21, 2026
Pearlstein Gallery
3401 Filbert St
Philadelphia, 19104
Free
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David Tudor: A View From Inside celebrates the life, work, and legacy of David Tudor (1926–1996), a Philadelphia-born pioneer of experimental music and sound art, on the centenary of his birth in 2026. Over the course of his career, Tudor treated sound not as something merely to be played, but as something to be set into motion. He built circuits and performance systems the way he once worked through a music score: by patient trial, calibration, and attention to what the materials disclosed. The result is a body of work in which the line between performer and composer repeatedly dissolves—interpretation shading into engineering, engineering into composition.”
https://www.bowerbird.org/event/rainforest-composers-inside-electronics/
March 6 Concert
https://www.bowerbird.org/event/forest-speech-and-piano/
Friday – 8:00pm (ET)
March 6, 2026
Community Education Center
3500 Lancaster Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19104
$15 – $30
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Bowerbird is pleased to present pianist Amy Williams and a performance of David Tudor’s Forest Speech led by Composer Inside Electronic’s Phil Edelstein with Daniel Fishkin, Michael Johnsen, Victoria Keddie, Eugene Lew, and Gianna Santucci.
This concert celebrates David Tudor’s dual legacy as both a revolutionary pianist and electronic music pioneer. The program opens with Amy Williams performing works by Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Earle Brown that were written for and premiered by Tudor in the 1950s. As one of the most sought-after interpreters of piano music in his generation, Tudor’s performances transformed indeterminate scores into vivid sonic experiences, establishing new possibilities for what piano performance could be. Williams, a composer and pianist known for her deep engagement with contemporary repertoire and her acclaimed recordings of Morton Feldman and other experimental composers, brings her own interpretive insight to these historically significant works.
Michael Johnsen performs Tudor’s Untitled (1972), a seminal work of live-electronic music in which modular electronic components are configured to form feedback loops that generate sounds without exterior input. Composed for simultaneous performance with John Cage’s vocalization of his Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham, Untitled represents Tudor’s pioneering experiments in creating electronic sound without oscillators, tone generators, or recorded natural sound materials.
The evening concludes with Forest Speech (1976), a rarely performed work from Tudor’s Rainforest family that uses amplified objects as “instrumental loudspeakers.” Developed in 1976 and expanded as a group version in 1978, Forest Speech transforms sound into vocal-like illusions through formant resonances and vocoder-like circuit networks. This performance version utilizes everyday objects fitted with sonic transducers—metal barrels, plastic tubing, found materials—that resonate and shape electronic sound, creating a dense acoustic environment where physical materials become active participants in the composition.
PROGRAM
Morton Feldman: Intermission 6 (version 1) (1953)
Earle Brown: Four Systems (1953)
Morton Feldman: Extensions 3 (1952)
John Cage: Water Music (1952)
Morton Feldman: Intermission 6 (version 2) (1953)
Amy Williams, piano
David Tudor: Untitled (1972)
Michael Johnsen, electronics
David Tudor: Forest Speech (1976)
with Phil Edelstein, Daniel Fishkin, Michael Johnsen, Victoria Keddie, Eugene Lew, Gianna Santucci
March 7 Concert
https://www.bowerbird.org/event/tudor-works-for-live-electronics/
“Saturday – 8:00pm (ET)
March 7, 2026
Community Education Center
3500 Lancaster Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19104
$15 – $30
This event has passed
Bowerbird is pleased to present Composers Inside Electronics—Phil Edelstein, Ron Kuivila, and Michael Johnsen, with Daniel Fishkin—performing works by David Tudor.
Composers Inside Electronics (CIE), formed in 1973 with David Tudor, pioneered a collaborative approach to live electronic music that treated circuits and components as instruments in themselves rather than as tools. This closing concert of A View from Inside: David Tudor at 100 features an evening of Tudor’s electronic compositions spanning 1970 to 1984.
The program opens with Pepscillator, one of Tudor’s sound environments created for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Using chains of audio processors creating multiple self-oscillating feedback loops, Pepscillator exemplifies Tudor’s approach to designing systems of electronic components whose interconnections define both the work’s structure and its real-time performance. Pulsers (1976) explores rhythms created electronically by analog circuitry, with time-bases that can be varied and destabilized by the performer. Dialects (1984) transforms vowel-like and fricative sound sources—the beating of insects’ wings and modulated alpha waves—through vocoder circuits and percussion generators triggered by Jackie Matisse’s vibrating wire flower sculptures.
The concert offers a rare opportunity to experience Tudor’s electronic works performed by artists who worked directly with him and who continue to realize and evolve his vision through their own research and performance practice.
PROGRAM
David Tudor: Pepscillator (1970)
Phil Edelstein and Daniel Fishkin, electronics
David Tudor: Pulsers (1976)
Michael Johnsen, electronics
David Tudor: Dialects (1984)
Ron Kuivila, electronics and sculpture by Jackie Matisse”