On more than one occasion, John Cage noted that all of the music he composed between 1951 and the end of the 1960s was written for the pianist David Tudor-even if it was not composed for the piano. Cage's compliment is not as contradictory as it may appear; like a number of composers of the postwar avant garde, Cage regarded Tudor less as a pianist or even a performer, than as an instrument--an exploratory instrument for musical experimentation.

 For Cage, this experimentation came to its first apex in his Concert for Piano and Orchestra of 1957-58. Moreover, the pianist's part of the Concert, called "Solo for Piano," was a forerunner of much of Cage's music for the remainder of the decade as well as a compendium of notational techniques found in the experimental music of the 1950s. In preparing his performances of the "Solo for Piano," Tudor created two separate and distinct realizations of Cage's score. The first, made for the premiere of the Concert in 1958, remained in Tudor's repertory less than two years. The second, made in 1959 when Cage asked for music to complement his ninety-minute lecture Indeterminacy, reflected an entirely new approach to reading Cage's notations, and eventually became the basis for all of Tudor's subsequent performances of the "Solo for Piano."

 This critical edition of Tudor's second realization of the "Solo for Piano" will reconstruct the pianist's methods in preparing Cage's score for performance. It will examine the problems and challenges found in Cage's notations (and the composer's sometimes unclear instructions for reading them), then trace the steps Tudor took in solving them. By considering these solutions --Tudor's means of satisfying the requirements of Cage's score, his own notations and what they signify, variants in his subsequent performances of the "Solo for Piano" -- the edition will offer scholars and performers an opportunity to view one of the monuments of American experimental music from the inside out.