PROBES #19
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 #19 we continue to look at the importation of exotic instruments, in this case from Africa, in pursuit of a specifically non-American American expression of culture and politics.
In PROBES #18, Chris Cutler raises lowly percussion high and introduces us in the hyperreal world of hi-fi stereo, pure listening and exotica.
Auxiliaries
In this auxiliary Chris Cutler meets more repurposed African instruments in several fields, and takes one glimpse at the reverse traffic. Interestingly, for the first time, there’s hardly any adoption in contemporary classical circles. Answers on a postcard, please.
In PROBES #19 Chris Cutler continues to look at the importation of exotic instruments, in this case from Africa, in pursuit of a specifically non-American American expression of culture and politics.