Tudor Masala
Thomas F. Bickley

This work pays homage to David Tudor both as a musician and as reknown cook of Indian food. A "masala" is a mixture of spices used in Indian cooking. The words "Tudor" and "Masala" adjacent to each other offer rich associations of interplay of cultures. I used multi-tracked recordings of synthetic and human voices reading Tudor's recipes for lime pickle and mango pickle as the sound sources. I processed those recordings using the digital equivalents of musique concrete techniques. The phrase at the beginning is "lime pickle," and the word toward the end is "salt." The results sound very much like electronic music produced during late 1950's and early 1960's when Tudor was active as virtuosic performer of new music for piano.