Wiring the ear: Instrumentality and aural primacy in and after David Tudor’s Unstable Circuits

Abstract

The early 20th century saw a spate of innovative electronic musical instruments. For instance, the theremin (1919) and Ondes Martenot (1928) not only offered new sound generation techniques, but married them to similarly innovative means of interaction. However, by the late 1920s, the development of novel performance interfaces had stalled, and the familiar organ-type keyboard re-appeared on many electronic instruments of the 1930s (Manning 2004, pp. 4-6). Moreover, as the era of the tape-based studio began postwar, the link between electronic music and live performance seemed to recede (Ibid., pp. 19-74). Compared to the limited timbres of most earlier electronic instruments, the sound creation and manipulation possibilities of tape were more sophisticated. However, splicing together even a short piece could take months of toil. Thus, by the mid-1960s, a number of real-time alternatives had emerged, from Stockhausen’s electronic processing of acoustic instruments, to the modular synthesizer, and the live electronics of David Tudor.