PROBES #20
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 #20, we look at the exotic imports that made arguably the most significant impact on Western music – ideas and instruments from India, which brought with them not only new sounds and tunings but also radically new ideas about music itself.
>>Transcript
>>And here you can find the complete series of PROBES
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #21, curated by Chris Cutler.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #19, curated by Chris Cutler.
Auxiliaries
In this auxiliary, Asian instruments find their way into all sorts of unexpected situations, both at home and abroad.
Chris Cutler's survey of the incorporation of exotic instruments into western musical vocabularies moves from the Caribbean to East Asia, considering, en route, the curious case of world music as a commercial and ideological category.
Auxiliaries
In this auxiliary, Indian classical instruments make the most of their access-all-areas pass to visit every genre and sprinkle kharmic dust.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #20, curated by Chris Cutler.
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.