PROBES #23
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 #23 we tackle the issue of noise – and what we mean by it – before examining the toy symphonies and the musical career of the infamous toy piano.
In PROBES #24, toys, music boxes and balloons find new roles in contemporary compositions, pop performances, film scores and jazz improvisation, as composers explore alternative acoustic sources for extended, non-electronic, sounds.
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.
Auxiliaries
This auxilliary digs deeper into the many faces of the toy piano and introduces the fiendish dactylion.
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.