Hearing Spaces: David Tudor's Collaboration on Sea Tails

Perloff, Nancy

2004

Leonardo Music Journal 14: 31-39.

Language: English

In 1983, David Tudor collaborated with kite artist Jackie Matisse and filmmaker Molly Davies on a six-monitor video piece called Sea Tails: Davies filmed Matisse's underwater kites, and Tudor recorded sea sounds from which he later mixed a score. Using notes and correspondence found at the Getty Research Institute, as well as interviews conducted with Matisse and Davies, the author reconstructs the collaborative process of making Sea Tails. Points of contact between the media of film, sculpture and sound reveal Tudor's post-Cagean form of collaboration, in which Tudor ceded control over compositional process and performance to outside forces - Matisse and Davies and the reverberation of the performance and sea spaces.