PROBES #27
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 #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.
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.
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.
In PROBES #17, we trace how the gamelan collided with western notions of music and exotic percussion spread like a virus into every field.
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.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #28, curated by Chris Cutler.