INTERRUPTIONS #1
Pastoral V.2
Curated by Jon Leidecker
“Pastoral V.2” is a curated overview hoping to underline the history of those classic works of electronic and concrète music which sought to mimic and extend the voices and sounds of our pastoral landscape, which can be closer to the heart of the medium’s inherent potential than the more common identifications with inhuman or alienated expressions of industrial culture.
The emerging medium of electronic music found its way to a wider public audience in the 1950’s, accompanied by descriptions of the sounds as inherently unearthly, fantastic, or cold and inhuman. Partially this was in response to the medium’s instant adoption as sound effects for science fiction films and television shows, as spearheaded by Louis and Bebe Barron in their score for the film “Forbidden Planet”. But electronic musical instruments also possessed the ability to closely emulate and extend the voices of the animal world to a greater degree than any musical instrument in history.
A gated tone oscillator or untempered synthesizer gives a player a better chance at creating melodies that sound like birdsong than any violin or flute – save perhaps for a recording of a flute that’s been sped up several octaves, using the techniques of musique concrète.
In PROBES #29 composers turn to nature, not as pastorale but as concrete musical resources. Chris Cutler looks at animals, vegetables and one or two minerals as they are directly incorporated into musical works, as leading voices: there are birds, wolves and whales, obviously, but also less cuddly creatures, plants, cacti, rocks and stones. We also consider some of the motives and ideologies at work, and hear minerals make sounds that are hard to credit.
Transition
As recording supplanted sheet music in the 20th century, the presence of communal influence became unavoidably obvious once again as composers began to use recordings to make new recordings. From the beginning, recordings have been instruments.
The Library
Sound libraries are collections of sounds explicitly designed or collected for further use, presented as unfinished ingredients. Sounds increasingly detach from their sources and are used by new authors less as references than as simple objects.
Transcript of VARIATIONS #6. The Library, curated by Jon Leidecker.
Auxiliaries
In this new PROBES Auxiliary by Chris Cutler, composers and performers expand their classical, contemporary, avant garde, jazz, rock, electronic and installation art vocabularies by incorporating real or virtual collaborations with wildlife, soundscapes, insects, amphibia, birds, whales and wolves. And we learn what a whale has in common with a nightingale.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #34, curated by Chris Cutler.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #29, curated by Chris Cutler.
By Jon Leidecker
"Radio Music" connects three examples from the history of the potential of the radio receiver as musical instrument.
In PROBES #34 a sequence of new, purely electronic, instruments appear – amongst them (the) electrophon, kurbelspharophon, ondes Martenot, dynophone, croix sonore, pianorad, trautonium and mixtur trautonium – none having any obvious place in the existing vocabulary of musics. In parallel an alien aesthetic begins to redefine the parameters of ‘musical’ sound.