PROBES #14
Transcript
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.
In PROBES #14 we take a detour to show how a collision of folk mechanisms, social upheaval, sound recording and electrification underpinned the growth of a new polyglot musical language, and a new aesthetic constituency.
In PROBES #15 we look at experimental uses of the more intractable folk instruments: bagpipes, hurdy gurdy and harmonica. Is nothing sacred?
Chris Cutler's PROBES #13 tracks the recovery and reassignment of ancient and folk instruments in unfamiliar contexts.
In PROBES #14 we take a detour to show how a collision of folk mechanisms, social upheaval, sound recording and electrification underpinned the growth of a new polyglot musical language, and a new aesthetic constituency.