David Tudor is regarded as one of the most important pianists of the twentieth century, both for his performances of contemporary music and, in Europe, for championing the New York school of piano performance. He studied organ with William Hawke and piano with Josef Martin and Irma Wolpe Rademacher, later taking composition lessons with Stefan Wolpe. In 1948, he met John Cage, with whom he would collaborate closely until Cage’s death in 1992.

Tudor gave the US premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Deuxième Sonate at Carnegie Hall in 1950. He went on to premiere — and was often the dedicatee of — numerous works by leading avant-garde composers. These include Sylvano Bussotti’s Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor (1959), Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke V-VIII (Piano Pieces, 1954), Mauricio Kagel’s Improvisation ajoutée for organ, (Added Improvisation, 1961-1968), and Franco Evangelisti’s Proiezioni Sonore (Sound Projections, 1956). He also premiered John Cage’s Music of Changes (1951) and 4'33" (1952), as well as pieces by Earle Brown, Conlon Nancarrow, Christian Wolff, Stefan Wolpe, La Monte Young, Bo Nilsson, and Henri Pousseur.

Tudor played a key role in introducing American experimental music to European audiences, having been invited to the Darmstadt Summer Courses by musicologist Wolfgang Steinecke in 1956, two years before Cage’s pivotal visit to Darmstadt. During Cage’s legendary 1958 lecture, Tudor performed Variations I and participated in performance seminars alongside Boulez and Luigi Nono. Although Tudor only attended Darmstadt four times (in 1956, 1958, 1959, and 1961), his influence on the next generation of composers was enormous.

Over the course of the 1960s, Tudor gradually shifted away from piano performance to focus on composition. He became a pioneer of live electronic music, emphasizing real-time improvisation and the reintroduction of chance and human presence in the creative process — challenging the fixed, studio-based model of electronic music production. By developing his own electronic circuits, Tudor was able to perform works such as Bandoneon! (1966) himself.

Tudor had been involved with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company since its founding in 1953 and became its music director in 1992. This long-standing collaboration led to numerous works, including Rainforest (1968), Toneburst (1975), Forest Speech (1976), Weatherings (1978), Phonemes (1981), Sextett for Seven (1982), Fragments (1984), Webwork (1987), Five Stone Wind (1988), and Virtual Focus (1990).

In 1970, the Experiments in Art and Technology organization was commissioned to design the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka. As part of this multisensory installation — conceived as a total artwork experience — Tudor collaborated with Robert Whitman and Gordon Mumma. His contribution, Anima Pepsi, featured a blend of musical sounds and insect noises, an element that would reappear in later compositions.

In 1989, Tudor collaborated with Intel engineers to create the Neural Network Synthesizer, an analog instrument using a neural chip. This innovation led to pieces such as Neural Synthesis (solo) and Neural Network Plus (1992). His final project, Toneburst: Maps and Fragments 1995-1996, was a collaboration with visual artist Sophia Ogielska. The piece combined graphical scores from his 1972 piece Untitled with translucent paintings and other visual elements characteristic of Ogielska’s style.

In addition to his career as a pianist and composer, Tudor taught at several institutions, including the State University of New York at Buffalo (1965-1966), the University of California, Davis (1967), Mills College in Oakland (1967-1968), and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India (1969).