A View from Inside: David Tudor at 100 celebrates the life, work, and legacy of David Tudor (1926–1996), a Philadelphia-born pioneer of experimental music and sound art. Over the course of his career, Tudor treated sound not as something merely to be played, but as something to be set into motion. He built circuits and performance systems the way he once worked through a music score: by patient trial, calibration, and attention to what the materials disclosed. The result is a body of work in which the line between performer and composer repeatedly dissolves—interpretation shading into engineering, engineering into composition.

Tudor first gained prominence in the 1950s as a leading pianist specializing in contemporary music, celebrated for his command of both virtuosic complexity and indeterminate scores—works whose notations and instructions demanded unusual precision, disciplined listening, and a kind of practical problem-solving. He championed new music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez, among others. By the 1960s he shifted away from performance at the keyboard toward building and performing live electronic works, assembling instrument-like systems from tone generators, filters, signal processors, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and custom circuitry. His projects include “Bandoneon!” for Experiments in Art and Technology’s “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” (1966), the immersive sound environment for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, and “Rainforest IV” (1973), in which found objects become resonant bodies for sound, realized with Composers Inside Electronics. From 1953 until his death, Tudor served as Music Director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, shaping the company’s sonic world across decades of choreography and touring. In the 1990s, he collaborated with engineers at Intel on the “Neural Network Synthesizer,” a technology that anticipated current AI systems by decades.

The exhibition brings together nearly 100 of Tudor’s personal electronic instruments and related components—tone generators, signal processors, amplifiers, loudspeakers, custom circuitry, and other performance hardware—along with rare archival material such as photographs, correspondence, diagrams, working documents, and selected audio and video documentation.

This project is curated by You Nakai and Dustin Hurt and includes work and contributions from John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Julie Martin / Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), John D. S. Adams, Composers Inside Electronics (including John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein), Molly Davies, John Holzaepfel, Michael Johnsen, Ron Kuivila, Jackie Matisse Monnier, Fujiko Nakaya, and Nancy Perloff, among others.

In addition to the exhibition, the project includes a public series of talks, screenings, and concerts.

MORE INFO COMING SOON.

On View: January 15 – March 21, 2026.

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 15, from 5:00-7:30pm

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Friday 12 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Saturday 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.

Location:
Pearlstein Gallery
Drexel University
URBN Annex
3401 Filbert Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

More info about the Pearlstein is available here.