Announcement card (9.9 x 21 cm) – printed on green stock - for: 2 RECITALS BY DAVID TUDOR, PIANIST

Item Details

New York, Carl Fischer Concert Hall, 1954

mint

WEDNESDAY EVENINGS, APRIL 14 AND 28 AT 8:40 P.M.

AT THE CARL FISCHER CONCERT HALL. 165 WEST 57TH STREET

 

BOX OFFICE OPENS THURSDAY, APRIL 1. TICKETS $1.80, 2.40

 

ADVANCE RESERVATIONS: ALGONQUIN 5-7240

ADVANCE MAIL ORDERS: ADDRESS JOHN CAGE

12 LAST 17TH STREET. NEW YORK CITY 3

KINDLY MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE 1O DAVID TUDOR. ENCLOSE STAMPED SELF ADDRESSED ENVELOPE FOR RETURN TICKETS.

 

THE FIRST PROGRAM, APRIL 14, WILL INCLUDE WORKS BY EARLE BROWN, JOHN CAGE AND CHRISTIAN WOLFF

THE SECOND PROGRAM APRIL 26, WILL INCLUDE WORKS BY PIERRE BOULEZ, OLIVIER MESSIAEN, MORTON FELDMAN AND STEFAN WOLPE

MANY FIRST NEW YORK PERFORMANCES ON BOTH PROGRAMS

 

Most probably the second performance of Cage's 4' 33".

One evening after the concert a certain J.B. wrote in the New York times about Tudor’s performance the following review:

 

LOOK, NO HANDS!

AND IT'S MUSIC'

"Work' by Cage, 4 Minutes,

33 Seconds of Silence, Is

‘Played' by Tudor, Pianist

 

The pianist, David Tudor, played a program of contemporary works at Carl Fischer Concert Hall last evening.

The opening selection was a new piece by John Cage, entitled 4' 33". It was in three movements, entitled 30”, 2' 23” and 1' 40". At the appropriate time, Mr. Tudor seated himself at the piano, placed a hand on the music rack—-and waited. Gradually it became apparent that the "new work" was a silence four minutes and thirty-three seconds in duration.

Tho opening number was lucidity itself compared to what followed. Another Cage work, "Music of Changes," proved to be forty extraordinarily long minutes of fragmentary motifs mercilessly repeated. The next piece heard Earle Brown's Pages, which can be played in any order the performer chooses, or, for that matter, upside down. When the piece was performed, the reason for this became apparent. It was a random, designless thumping of notes, and could not be less coherent even when played upside down.

An advance note on the concert says that the brown work is "in the tradition of those contrapuntal works having a similar usage." If what is meant here is the contrapuntal device of inversion, an important point to keep in mind is that tie contrapuntalists turned music upside down in such a way that it still made musical sense.

Christian Wolff's "For Piano II" ended an evening of singularly graceless uninspired music.

Works of this sort have nothing in common with the disciplined art of Palestrina, Handel, Mozart and the obvious B's; they are hollow, sham pretentious Greenwich Village exhibitionism. Oddly it is less easy to fool a naïve audience with such things than a sophisticated audience that does not know every much about the structure of music: an audience, that is, more adept at the intermission chatter than at working counterpoint. J.B.