PROBES #26
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 #26, Satie, Cocteau and Avraamov prise open the musical door that grants free interchange between the world of things and the practices of art. We examine some of the consequences.
Auxiliaries
In this episode typewriters invade every imaginable musical genre, while hoovers, bicycles, lightbulbs, foley work, the Eiffel tower and mail-franking are all conscripted into musical employment in quest of novel sonorities.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #27, curated by Chris Cutler.
In PROBES #27 Chris Cutler tracks the modern composer from the scrapyard to the office, then through the living room and into the kitchen in search of new musical resources - including scrap-metal, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, dot matrix printers, industrial quantities of paper, telephones, and the humble bean.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #25, curated by Chris Cutler.
Auxiliaries
Chris Cutler sends a snapshot of a variety of integrated musical incorporations of car horns, auto-parts, doorbells, scrap metal, asphalt, foghorns and power tools, in the worlds of rock, pop, contemporary music, jazz and film scores.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #26, curated by Chris Cutler.
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.