PROBES #26
Transcript
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.
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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.
PROBES #26 looks at the pioneers who drew the soundscape of the world into the realm of music and, in so doing, eased the way for the emancipation - or aestheticisation - of noise, which led to the inclusion of everything from helicopters to roofing felt, ice to polystyrene, scrap-metal to fax machines in (non-electronic) music compositions and performances.