David Tudor’s Rainforest series is a beautiful artistic use of resonance, a well that never runs dry. So as I was going through some teaching notes today, I found myself returning to Tudor’s thoughts on the piece, plus a 360-degree record of a recreation at MOMA a few years back.
Rainforest started its life as a sound score for a 1968 Merce Cunningham piece of the same name. The idea was to use materials for modulating a signal instead of electronics, “the source sounds, when transmitted through the physical materials, will be modified by the resonant nodes of those materials.” See the davidtudor.org site for that background (ancient website hosted by New York’s EMF).
There are great schematics of the electronics on that site, as well.
The composer describes the evolution of the project:
“In the first version, I made objects which I could travel with. The object were so small, however, that they didn’t have any sounding presence in the space, so I then amplified the outputs with the use of contact microphones. Then for the second version, I wanted to have a different kind of input… because for the first I had used oscillators that made animal and bird-like sounds. In the second version I wanted to use a vocal input to the system, the natural resonance of the object and its subsequent amplification. Its a kind of mechanical filter.
The third version had to deal with the ability to have any input go to any transducer. I made that system for a simultaneous performance with John Cage (Mureau). It was one of those pieces that changes all the time so I needed to have a sort of continuous thing, so I used tape sources, but having the ability to mix them or separate them into different output channels.
So the next step was “Rainforest IV”… the object was to make the sculptures sound in the space themselves. Part of that process is that you are actually creating a an environment. The contact mikes on the objects pickup the resonant frequencies which one hears when very close to the object, and then are amplified through a loudspeaker as an enhancement.” (this transcription is partially edited from the original)
– David Tudor, form interview by John Fullemann 10/12/85
There’s this beautiful video of him showing version IV:
In 2019, NYC’s Museum of Modern Art restaged the installation, hosting three artists who worked on the 1973 iteration – John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, and Matt Rogalsky, who dubbed their collective Composers Inside Electronics. It seems now is a great time to form experimental electronics bands, actually! Who’s in?)
The curators accompanied the exhibition with this history:
The Evolution of David Tudor’s Rainforest
Or read Alastair Macaulay‘s review for The New York Times:
At MoMA, a Musical Pioneer’s Rainforest Squeaks and Chirrups
— from a time when NYT headlines were better and made use of the word “chirrup.”
MoMA also made a 360-degree capture. It’s really fun – on mobile, you can move your device around to explore; on desktop, drag your mouse.
Musicians Inside Electronics had regularly recreated the installation – of course, it’s really an approach as much as it is a piece. You could practically create a whole genre around this idea. Here they go a little further into the process of prep for a 2011 version:
See also The Getty Research Institute.
Image at top – Rainforest IV as [erformed at L’espace Pierre Cardin, Paris, France, 1976. Photo: Ralph Jones – via MoMA’s story.
It’s such a beautiful way of working with sound. And you can recreate these techniques digitally, too, as an exercise – but that’s a story for another time.
Previously, on resonance: