Splendid performance of David Tudor’s work here on Rainforest IV (NEUMA RECORDS Neuma158), realised by a collective called Composers Inside Electronics (CIE), and recorded in America in 1977. It’s a beautiful 68:57 minutes of glorious electronic sound which I recommend unequivocally. I’m only slightly surprised that it’s taken so long for this particular manifestation of Tudor’s work to surface, also that I never heard of this CIE group before.
The group seems to have formed out of a group of young electronics enthusiasts who gathered at a summer music festival in New Hampshire. Tudor – by then let’s assume he was widely regarded as a pioneer and maestro of new music – taught the youngsters how to play Rainforest, or rather he passed on the general concept of the idea to them, empowering them to realise the work. Thus a small “family of collaborators” was born, which turned into the CIE. I think this was around 1973. By 1977, the group included Paul DeMariniis, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, David Poyurow, Prent Rogers, Tudor himself, and Bill Viola – presumably the same genius who went on to become a renowned artist in experimental video and installation art. Other names – appearing the photographs at least – include Ralph Jones and Martin Kaive, which I mention to indicate that CIE might have had a rather fluid membership and also that a piece like Rainforest lends itself to this form of collaborative endeavour (even if the group wasn’t exactly a model of gender balance). At the start of 1977, Pauline Oliveros invited them to perform a residency for a few days at the University of California in San Diego; she was director of the Center for Music Experiment, and they performed there. By this time the CIE knew they needed certain “objects” they could turn into miniature sonic sculptures – more on this shortly – and they picked up bric-a-brac at local markets in the area. Rainforest became a fixture at the Center for several days, more like a music installation than a conventional concert. On February 2nd, David Dunn and Warren Burt recorded the music we now have before us, using binaural microphones. (There’s a mildly interesting anecdote here on the cover about how Dunn acquired these Sennheiser devices, which were then quite new, at a bargain price.) Dunn himself of course went on to play as part of the Harry Partch Ensemble, and there’s also a good CD of his electro-acoustic compositions from the 1980s and 1990s available from Pogus Productions.
Like many of Tudor’s compositional ideas – showing the influence of John Cage, of course – I suppose the idea behind Rainforest is very simple. As early as 1965 he had the vision of “an orchestra of loudspeakers”, and his understanding of circuitry and electronics enabled him over time to remake bits of obsolete equipment (including surplus military gadgets from the Korean war) as small, self-contained electronic instruments – it involves a basic knowledge of physics which I lack, but has something to do with radio waves, feedback, magnets, motors…Tudor was thus able to repurpose common objects, looking for particular “resonant properties” such as steel, glass, wood and plastic, with his trained eye. It may seem simple, but it takes a powerful mind and imagination to realise ideas like this, let alone scale them up into something that becomes an entire small Ensemble like the CIE. And don’t forget the achievement here is to call into question the idea of the “orchestra” as we previously understood it, based on its European classical model, and indeed the idea of what a musician / performer is supposed to do. If you worked with Tudor, all you needed was a basic understanding of circuits and a soldering iron, and you stood a chance of becoming part of the Rainforest phenomenon. This is why it’s not inappropriate to think of a table full of miniature sonic sculptures (see above). The achievement of a group work like this is, as the name suggest, to create a kind of ecosystem of small sounds, where everything has a place in the seething primordial soup of creation. A binaural recording such as this one does a lot to bring home the sense of an environment, a true surround-sound experience.
Driscoll and Edelstein (and other CIE people too) continue their good work and have recently realised installation versions of Rainforest V in America, Europe, and the Middle East; intriguingly, these recent versions are described as “self-playing”, perhaps indicating the advances that have been made in technology. But so much of it stems from the radical, visionary ideas of David Tudor. Indispensable record, from 10 May 2022.