You Nakai: Reminded by the Instruments

You Nakai’s book on David Tudor is a masterful investigation of archival and published materials left behind by the composer and his many collaborators, students, and biographers. Rather than clearing out a field of study that had until now been difficult to address, Nakai shows us his path through the dense forest of notes, ad hoc systems, and tricksterlike aphorisms that Tudor left behind as his life’s work. As a performer and composer infamous for open-ended and short remarks, instructions, and comments (contrasting with the gregariousness of John Cage), he certainly did leave plenty of materials; these form, as Nakai so convincingly demonstrates, puzzles of a scale and variety that certainly rival (if not dwarf) the puzzles of new music Tudor himself solved in his early career as a performer of the western avant garde’s most challenging pieces.