PROBES #15.1
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. In PROBES #15 we look at experimental uses of the more intractable folk instruments: bagpipes, hurdy gurdy and harmonica. Is nothing sacred?
Transcript
In PROBES #16, banjos, mandolins, balalaikas and the jew’s harp are made to do unaccustomed and groundbreaking things.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #14, curated by Chris Cutler.
Auxiliaries
In PROBES #16.2, we wonder how far you can go with banjos, mandolins, balalaikas, jew’s harps and ensembles of folk instruments. And it’s pretty far.
Auxiliaries
In this new auxiliary, bagpipes, zithers, harmonicas and hurdy-gurdys do things they aren’t supposed to do in contexts in which they aren’t supposed to do them... rather brillantly.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #15, curated by Chris Cutler.
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.