Bowerbird is pleased to present pianist Amy Williams and a performance of David Tudor’s Forest Speech led by Composer Inside Electronic’s Phil Edelstein with Daniel Fishkin, Michael Johnsen, Victoria Keddie, Eugene Lew, and Gianna Santucci.
This concert celebrates David Tudor’s dual legacy as both a revolutionary pianist and electronic music pioneer. The program opens with Amy Williams performing works by Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Earle Brown that were written for and premiered by Tudor in the 1950s. As one of the most sought-after interpreters of piano music in his generation, Tudor’s performances transformed indeterminate scores into vivid sonic experiences, establishing new possibilities for what piano performance could be. Williams, a composer and pianist known for her deep engagement with contemporary repertoire and her acclaimed recordings of Morton Feldman and other experimental composers, brings her own interpretive insight to these historically significant works.
Michael Johnsen performs Tudor’s Untitled (1972), a seminal work of live-electronic music in which modular electronic components are configured to form feedback loops that generate sounds without exterior input. Composed for simultaneous performance with John Cage’s vocalization of his Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham, Untitled represents Tudor’s pioneering experiments in creating electronic sound without oscillators, tone generators, or recorded natural sound materials.
The evening concludes with Forest Speech (1976), a rarely performed work from Tudor’s Rainforest family that uses amplified objects as “instrumental loudspeakers.” Developed in 1976 and expanded as a group version in 1978, Forest Speech transforms sound into vocal-like illusions through formant resonances and vocoder-like circuit networks. This performance version utilizes everyday objects fitted with sonic transducers—metal barrels, plastic tubing, found materials—that resonate and shape electronic sound, creating a dense acoustic environment where physical materials become active participants in the composition.
PROGRAM
Morton Feldman: Intermission 6 (version 1) (1953)
Earle Brown: Four Systems (1953)
Morton Feldman: Extensions 3 (1952)
John Cage: Water Music (1952)
Morton Feldman: Intermission 6 (version 2) (1953)
Amy Williams, piano
David Tudor: Untitled (1972)
Michael Johnsen, electronics
David Tudor: Forest Speech (1976)
with Phil Edelstein, Daniel Fishkin, Michael Johnsen, Victoria Keddie, Eugene Lew, Gianna Santucci
This event is part of DAVID TUDOR: A VIEW FROM INSIDE, an exhibition at Drexel’s Pearlstein Gallery from January 15 to March 21, 2026.
ARTIST BIOS
Victoria Keddie is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans sound, video, installation, performance, and research. Her practice investigates the architectures of communication—acoustic, spatial, and technological—and explores how gesture, noise, and interference shape human experience. For over a decade, she co-directed E.S.P. TV, a mobile platform for hybrid media and broadcast-based performance. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where she designed a spatial sound studio for the Fine Arts program. She directs the Spatial Sound Consortium in collaboration with Harvestworks, linking international studios to develop new models of access and collaboration.
Keddie has performed and exhibited internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pioneer Works, and Fridman Gallery (US); the Barbican (UK); Berghain (DE); the Goethe-Institut (NY/CO); and MAPS (DK). Recent fellowships include NYSCA/NYFA (2022), the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (2023), and the Bemis Center (2024). In 2025, she was Composer-in-Residence at EMS, Stockholm.
Gianna Santucci is an interdisciplinary artist and percussionist from Merritt Island, FL, currently based in Philadelphia. She received an M.F.A. in Painting at Tyler School of Art with a University Fellowship, and received a B.F.A. in Fine Arts and a B.M. in Music Performance from Florida Southern College. Her work has been recently exhibited in Icebox Project Space, Vox Populi, and Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia. Recent performances include New Ear::SPATIAL at Fridman Gallery, the ‘Low Tech Electronics Faire’ at the Charles Library, and ‘Chilladelphia’ at Thunderbird Hall. Through multi-media installations, her work engages the intersecting spheres of militarized sound, subculture, transmission, and rhythm.
Eugene Lew is a Philadelphia-based guide, producer, educator, and organizer primarily engaged in performance, design, access, management, transformation, (attempted) capture, storage, and playback of shared IRL experiences – with a sound/music bias. The fleeting moment, aggregate independent decision-making, and stochastic phenomena are especially fascinating and vital to his practice and general existence. He welcomes serendipitous collaborations and treasures long-term partnerships that seek to navigate and explore the constant cycle of remembering-learning-forgetting-reconstructing.
more coming soon…
Major support for DAVID TUDOR: A VIEW FROM INSIDE has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia.
