Hardcover, 2020, New York City and Oxford: Oxford University Press, http://www.oup.com.
You Nakai's book on David Tudor is a masterful investigation of archival and published doi:10.1162/COMJ_r_00597 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 trickster-like 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...