"The basic notion was the idea that the loudspeaker should have a voice which was unique and not just an instrument of reproduction, but an instrument unto itself"
About this Quote
Tudor is smuggling a quiet revolution into a plainspoken sentence: stop treating the loudspeaker as a transparent window and start treating it as a performer with a personality. Coming from a musician who made a career inside the messy seam between composition, circuitry, and chance, the line pushes back against the hi-fi fantasy that technology’s highest calling is faithful reproduction. For Tudor, “faithful” is often just another word for obedient.
The intent is practical and philosophical at once. Practically, it licenses the composer/engineer to design systems where feedback, distortion, resonance, and spatial projection aren’t defects to be minimized but materials to be shaped. Philosophically, it relocates authorship: the “voice” isn’t only in the score or the player’s touch, but in the behavior of an electro-acoustic body. A speaker “unto itself” implies temperament. It can surprise you, refuse you, misbehave in ways that become the piece.
Subtextually, Tudor is also arguing against a museum-like relationship to sound, where the goal is to preserve an original somewhere else (a singer in a studio, an orchestra in a hall). His world is closer to sculpture than to documentation: sound as something built, situated, and contingent on the room, the gear, and the moment.
Context matters: postwar experimental music, the Cage orbit, early electronic performance, and an era when “good sound” meant disappearing hardware. Tudor flips that. He asks us to hear the machine not as a delivery system, but as a collaborator with its own grain, its own accent, its own agency.
The intent is practical and philosophical at once. Practically, it licenses the composer/engineer to design systems where feedback, distortion, resonance, and spatial projection aren’t defects to be minimized but materials to be shaped. Philosophically, it relocates authorship: the “voice” isn’t only in the score or the player’s touch, but in the behavior of an electro-acoustic body. A speaker “unto itself” implies temperament. It can surprise you, refuse you, misbehave in ways that become the piece.
Subtextually, Tudor is also arguing against a museum-like relationship to sound, where the goal is to preserve an original somewhere else (a singer in a studio, an orchestra in a hall). His world is closer to sculpture than to documentation: sound as something built, situated, and contingent on the room, the gear, and the moment.
Context matters: postwar experimental music, the Cage orbit, early electronic performance, and an era when “good sound” meant disappearing hardware. Tudor flips that. He asks us to hear the machine not as a delivery system, but as a collaborator with its own grain, its own accent, its own agency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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