Toneburst Maps and Fragments

David Tudor’s  last significant collaboration with a visual artist was with Sophia Ogielska on Maps and Fragments. […]  

Tudor immediately saw a correspondence between her methods of working with images and his building performance instruments from disparate parts that could be activated in many different ways. Tudor suggested that he and Ogielska develop a project together that combined sound and images. Ogielska remembers: “He told me,‘I want to see the music. I want the sound to have shape and shape to have color.’” […]

Tudor’s original block diagrams described the “instrument” he used to perform Untitled and Toneburst. The Maps and Fragments and Ideogram Clusters that Tudor and Ogielska created can be seen as descriptions of the possibilities inherent in multiple performances of the works. Tudor felt that they had created a visual language through which the performance of his work could be described. The Maps can be read as scores that can be entered at any point and traversed in any direction, producing, in effect, one performance as well as many performances. As evidenced in recent installations, the collaboration among Sophia Ogielska, Andy Ogielski, and David Tudor produced bright, energetic works that not only act as a visual equivalent of his music but also are the visual expression of Tudor’s commitment to multiplicity, choice, and responsibility that guided his work and his life.

Quotations from Billy Klüver and Julie Martin Sound into Image: The Collaboration between David Tudor and Sophia Ogielska, full text in Literature pages. All photographs by Sophia Ogielska.