Art & Creativity Quote by David Tudor

There is a quiet steeliness in David Tudor saying he is "perfectly willing" for his music to live alongside "somebody else's taste". It sounds generous, even casual, but it’s also a refusal to audition for approval. Tudor, the pianist-composer who became John Cage’s most fearless interpreter and later a pioneer of live electronics, is staking out a kind of artistic non-possessiveness: the work doesn’t need to conquer the listener; it just needs to coexist.

The phrasing matters. "Exist with" is an anti-marketing verb. It rejects the usual bargain where art flatters an audience into feeling understood. Tudor’s world - postwar experimental music, indeterminacy, scores that behave like puzzles or weather systems - often asks listeners to accept uncertainty as part of the sound. In that context, "somebody else's taste" isn’t a rival faction to be defeated; it’s the ambient reality any serious artist works inside. People bring their preferences, their impatience, their need for melody or meaning. Tudor isn’t pretending those preferences disappear. He’s saying the music doesn’t have to submit to them.

Subtext: my music doesn’t require conversion, and I’m not embarrassed if it’s heard as strange. That’s a radical stance in a culture that measures value by consensus and legibility. Tudor frames experimental sound not as a gated community for the initiated, but as an object with enough integrity to share space with pop, classical, noise, silence - whatever the room already loves. Coexistence becomes the point, and it’s more daring than it looks.