PROBES #1
Curated by Chris Cutler
In the late nineteenth century two facts conspired to change the face of music: the collapse of common practice tonality (which overturned the certainties underpinning the world of Art music), and the invention of a revolutionary new form of memory, sound recording (which redefined and greatly empowered the world of popular music). A tidal wave of probes and experiments into new musical resources and new organisational practices ploughed through both disciplines, bringing parts of each onto shared terrain before rolling on to underpin a new aesthetics able to follow sound and its manipulations beyond the narrow confines of ‘music’.
This series tries analytically to trace and explain these developments, and to show how, and why, both musical and post-musical genres take the forms they do. This first programme sets the scene and investigates early reconsiderations of pitch: probes that postulate new scales to be constructed through the ever-greater subdivision of the inherited intervals of equal temperament.
All the 'normal' music we listen to is out of tune, especially when it’s 'in tune'. So, should music be in harmony with the laws of physics, or adjusted to fit the wishful thinking of stave notation?
Transcript
Transcript of our new Curatorial series PROBES #1, curated by Chris Cutler.
Auxiliaries
In this music selection we look further at microtonal divisons based on equal temperament.