Creativity Quote by David Tudor

"I persist in performing" reads like a refusal to let the job description swallow the person. David Tudor wasn’t just a pianist clocking recital dates; he was the premier human interface for mid-century avant-garde music, the player John Cage and Morton Feldman could trust with scores that behaved less like instructions and more like provocations. In that world, performing wasn’t a polished delivery of a finished object. It was a form of research, an ongoing negotiation with systems, chance operations, electronics, and the limits of what a body can reliably reproduce.

The verb persist does the heavy lifting. It suggests resistance: against the conservatory model that treats interpretation as reverent fidelity, against an audience’s desire for mastery on display, even against the idea that experimentation “ends” once the premiere is over. Tudor’s career arc makes the line sharper. As he moved from virtuoso pianist to electronic music builder-performer, “performing” expanded to include designing circuits, inventing instruments, and accepting that the work might fail in public. Persistence becomes an ethic: show up anyway, keep the signal alive.

There’s subtext, too, about authorship. Cage gets the headlines, but Tudor’s persistence argues for the performer as co-author, the one who makes the piece exist in time. In a culture that often treats musicians as interchangeable vessels, this is a quiet assertion of agency: not “I perform,” but “I persist” - I keep choosing the risky, live, unrepeatable act over the safety of the fixed recording or the museum-like repertoire.