Editing David Tudor (section)

== Piano realisations ==
From 1951 until the late 1960s, Tudor (mainly as pianist) regularly performed the indeterminate work of John Cage. Throughout this time, "all of the music [Cage] composed", John Holzaepfel contends, "was written with one person in mind", and this person was Tudor.<ref name="Holzapfel">Holzapfel, J. (2002). 'Cage and Tudor'. In D. Nichols (Ed.), ''The Cambridge Companion to Cage'' (pp. 169–185). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</ref> The culmination of this period were works that required a significant imprint of Tudor in performance. ''Winter Music'' (1957), for example, comprises a score of twenty pages, that each contain from one to 61 cluster-chords per page, with the performer deciding which of these to play.<ref name="Iddon">Iddon, M. (2013). ''John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</ref> In his realisations of these scores, Tudor "pin[ned] them down like butterflies", making the indeterminate determined, such that each performance of these works was consistent with the last. He chose to 'fix' his interpretation, such that he never [[Improvisation|improvised]]  from the score, and rather each performance of ''Winter Music'' by Tudor was consistent across time.<ref>Rogalsky, M. (2010). '"Nature" as an organising principle: Approaches to chance and the natural in the work of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier'. ''Organised Sound'', ''15''(2), 133–136. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771810000129</ref> As Martin Iddon explains: "Tudor's practice was, broadly, to create a single realisation and then to use that version of the piece in all subsequent recordings".<ref name="Iddon" />

Despite the significant role Tudor had in the creative act, "during his years as a pianist, Tudor never considered himself as a composer, or even a co-composer, of the music he played".<ref name="Holzapfel" />

However, [[Benjamin Piekut]] argues differently, drawing from the work of [[Bruno Latour]]. These fixed realisations are examples of 'distributed authorship' where "the conception, meaning and sound-world of a given composition is shared across multiple subjectivities".<ref>Piekut, B. (2011). ''Experimentalism Otherwise''. Berkeley: University of California Press.</ref> The conception and meaning of the work for Cage is always created with Tudor in mind, and thus shared across the subjectivities of these two actors. Similarly, the output 'sound-world' is shared in that Tudor's function in realising the score is decision making based on Cage's stimuli (score), and Cage's stimuli does not present a coherent sound-world on its own. Piekut goes on to align this creative-distribution with Cage's Buddhist anti-ego worldview.