David Tudor is remembered today as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His bold reinterpretation of Cage's Variations II and his idiosyncratic performances using homemade modular instruments inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output--which began with the organ and ended with visual art--have kept Tudor a puzzle.

Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. Author You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal a new perspective on Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose work always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his dissection of electronic circuits, Nakai transcends discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

You Nakai, Assistant Professor, Kyoto City University of Arts

You Nakai creates music(ians), dance(rs), haunted musical houses, nursery rhymes, and other forms of performances as a member of No Collective (nocollective.com) and Already Not Yet (alreadynotyet.org). He is Assistant Professor at the Kyoto City University of Arts, where he teaches "Fake Western Music History," "Experimental Pet Sounds," and other curiosities.

Input: The Other Side
Chapter 1: Piano
Chapter 2: Amplified Piano
Chapter 3: Sound Systems
Chapter 4: Bandoneon!
Chapter 5: Pepsi Pavilion
Chapter 6: Island Eye Island Ear
Chapter 7: Natural Objects
Chapter 8: (Likeness to) Voices
Chapter 9: Reflections
Chapter 10: Neural Syntheses
Output: Maps & Fragments

Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Notable Realizations
Appendix B: Rainforest Amplifiers
Appendix C: Redrawn Matrix Maps
Bibliography
Index