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Music
David Tudor »
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Andy Warhol »
David Tudor studied organ, piano, composition and analysis, beginning his career as an organist. He subsequently became known as one of the leading avant-garde pianists of our time, giving highly acclaimed first or early performances of works by many significant contemporary composers. Tudor began working with John Cage in the early 1950s, as a member of Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) and with Cage’s Project of Music for Electronic Tape. He gradually ended his active career as a pianist, turning exclusively to the composition of live electronic music. As a composer, Tudor chose specific electronic components and their interconnections to define both composition and performance, drawing upon resources that were both flexible and complex. Many of Tudor’s compositions have involved collaborative visual forces: light systems, laser projections, dance, theatre, television and film. Tudor had been affiliated with MCDC since its inception in the summer of 1953, and in 1992, after Cage’s death, took over as Music Director. Cunningham commissioned numerous works from him.
Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. Through the 1950s he was a successful illustrator, winning numerous awards for his whimsical style of drawing. Warhol based his first Pop paintings on comics and ads in 1961, and this marked the beginning of his celebrity due to his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans series, movie star portraits Marilyn, Elvis and Liz and his series of Death and Disaster paintings. In the 1960s Warhol created hundreds of films ranging from conceptual experiments and simple narratives to short portraits and features.
In June 1968 Warhol was shot and seriously wounded, but went on to create some of his most ambitious paintings during the 1970s, including monumental paintings of the communist leader of China, Mao Tse Tung. Warhol also co-founded Interview magazine and wrote numerous books. In the mid-1980s two television shows, Andy Warhol’s T.V. and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, were broadcast in the US. His final two exhibitions, the series of Last Supper paintings and Sewn Photos, opened in January 1987, just before his death.