PROBES #24
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 #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 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.
PROBES #25 continues to trace the importation of non-instruments into compositions and performances as, in their search for new sonorities, early jazz and blues musicians, contemporary composers, film composers, rock groups, sound artists and improvisers hit the toyshop and the hardware store.
Auxiliaries
This auxiliary follows a variety of toys as they strut their stuff on rock stages, movie soundtracks, concert halls, galleries and recordings.
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.