CHAPTER 2:
COMPOSITION AND PROCESS

Learning from Tudor’s Rainforest IV

In a 1995 interview with Matt Rogalsky, David:

Tudor described Rainforest as a piece that ‘teaches itself’.

Below is an audio routing diagram David Tudor illustrated to describe basic assembly of Rainforest IV equipment. It is a visual guide for performers to build their own version of the electronic resonance system [Fig. 3].

Modular Approaches

In many ways, I view the SHAPE project as a continuation of David Tudor’s work, Rainforest IV, to the degree that it liberates music to include new types and degrees of interaction by untrained participants. The above diagram is evidence of how a highly conceptual and open-ended approach can produce successful pieces of sound art. Rather than relying on written notation to communicate specific ideas with highly skilled performers, Rainforest IV engages performers implicitly without preformed notions of strict interactions or behaviors.

This interactive “openness” enables performance in a wide variety of situations and encourages people to construct their own version of the work by assembling electronic networks with audio cables, amplifiers, filters, voice coils, and pick-ups. The illustration below includes my annotations on Tudor’s routing diagram [Fig. 4]. Delineated are fixed and variable parts of the assembly, which exist inside the flow of an installation event.

Figure 3. David Tudor’s Rainforest IV (1973) (© Estate of David Tudor) audio equipment routing diagram. Image taken from davidtudor.org.7

6 David Tudor, Interview with Matt Rogalsky, 28 March 1995, Tomkins. Cove, NY. Published electronically at http://www.jaimeoliver.pe/courses/ci/pdf/driscoll-rogalsky-rainforest.pdf.