David Tudor: Forest Speech
Performed by Lea Bertucci, John Driscoll, Ed Potokar, Margaret Anne Schedel, and Philip White
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
November 17, 2019
Sunday afternoon, after my daughter attended a performance of David Tudor's Forest Speech at the Museum of Modern Art with her mother and me, I asked her what she'd thought. "It was amazing," she proclaimed. "It was my second-favorite concert, ever." Surprised and delighted, I had to know: what had been No. 1? The Girl thought hard, evincing some frustration. "You know what it was… I can't remember the name." Prompted for some kind of recognizable detail, she said, "The one with all the animals."
Ah: Aesop's Fables, performed by Isango Ensemble at the New Victory Theater earlier this month. That made sense: a vivid show, still fresh in her memory. Still, thinking back on her strong response to a concert she'd seen in March, I had to ask: "But what about Kiss?!" The Girl thought for a moment, grinned, and held up three fingers.
How perfectly remarkable to think that a piece Tudor completed in 1979 – meant to reshape the avian chirps, simian hoots, and leonine roars of the Rainforest menagerie, which he'd cultivated with his fellow explorers in Composers Inside Electronics, into something more closely resembling speech – might thoroughly captivate a not-quite six-year-old listener in 2019.
Then again, what's the surprise? As I mentioned in a previous post, Rainforest V (variation 1) remains as beguiling and enchanting as ever: an uncanny arboreal soundscape, fashioned with Seussian assemblages of junk, electricity, and ingenuity. "Collectively they become a kind of urban jungle, suspended like Calder mobiles with the anti-utilitarian aesthetic of Duchamp readymades," Alastair Macauley wrote in an elegant, perceptive review for The New York Times, which also includes an account of a previous Forest Speech performance.
The present installation is the latest development in a long historical process, boiled down concisely on the MoMA website (where you also can download a longer essay in PDF format):
Tudor’s first Rainforest, from 1968, served as the musical score for choreographer Merce Cunningham’s dance of the same name. In 1973, working together with a group of young artists and musicians, Tudor expanded the work from a musical composition to a performance installation titled Rainforest IV. Composer Gordon Mumma described their collective artistic process as “a garden of shared ideas with minimal fences.” The group would later be named Composers Inside Electronics (CIE) (active 1973–present), and to this day includes John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein, among others. Tudor continued to work with CIE on multiple iterations of Rainforest over the next several decades. This last evolution of the work, Rainforest V (variation 1), transforms an installation once activated by performers into a rich visual environment animated by a computer program.
Rainforest V (variation 1), now part of the permanent MoMA collection, has been chirping, hooting, and howling autonomously since the museum reopened in October, its sounds perceptible not only in its assigned alcove, but also throughout a fair portion of the closest neighboring fourth-floor galleries. But Forest Speech transforms the installation back into something activated by performers—here, John Driscoll of Composers Inside Electronics, along with fellow composers, improvisers, and inventors Lea Bertucci, Ed Potokar, Margaret Anne Schedel, and Philip White.
Sliding wall panels, which I'd not noticed on my previous visit, closed off the Kravis Studio space from the adjoining gallery. The floor-to-ceiling window that dominates one side of the space was covered, creating a no-frills performance chamber. Audience members sat on benches surrounding the installation, or grabbed pillows on the floor underneath it.
The music sounded good in the space: clear and well defined, loud at times but never too loud. Familiar Rainforest sounds mingled with new voices (almost literally, at times) as the five musicians shaped a not-quite hour-long performance using laptops, weight- and touch-sensitive pads, controllers covered with ranks of identical buttons, and other gadgets not so easily recognized—I'm thinking now of the foil-wrapped whirligig on Driscoll's desk. You heard murmurs, snatches of conversation, bursts of laughter. At one point everyone converged into a zone of steady rhythm patterns—incongruous, maybe, but no less appealing for it.
Rainforest V (variation 1) remains on exhibit through January 5, 2020; it's open to all visitors at no additional charge, and makes for a charming encounter for visitors of all ages. One last round of Forest Voices performances is coming up in December, featuring Ginny Benson, Cecilia Lopez, Daniel Neumann, Sergei Tcherepnin, and C. Spencer Yeh. Tickets for the evening events on December 12 and 14 are sold out already, so remaining availability is limited to two daytime performances on December 15, at noon and 3pm. Those events are free with museum admission but require a separate ticket, available at the fourth-floor information desk. (Be forewarned: studio capacity is extremely limited, so you can count on tickets going quickly.)
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