PROBES #22
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 #22, as we conclude our examination of the incorporation of exotic instruments into western musical contexts, we move away from considerations of novelty and timbre to look into wider questions of meaning, intention and interpretation.
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.
Chris Cutler tackles the issue of noise - and what we mean by it – before examining the toy symphonies and the musical career of the infamous toy piano.
Auxiliaries
In this auxiliary Western forms, in their hunt for timbre - and sometimes meaning - raid, amongst others, the musical resources of Australia, China, Mexico, The Alps, Turkey, Japan, Brasil, Korea, Peru, and Armenia.
Chris Cutler finishes his survey of the importation of exotic instruments, looking past their sonorous and timbral values, to the way they are deployed as vectors of meaning, language and symbolic representation.