PROBES #31
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 #31 we begin to consider evolutionary pressures and invented instruments and follow the twists and turns that led the xylophone out of Asia and Africa, spun it around the world and metamorphosed it into the vibraphone; with a coda from the intonarumori.
In PROBES #31 we begin to consider evolutionary pressures and invented instruments and follow the twists and turns that led the xylophone out of Asia and Africa, spun it around the world and metamorphosed it into the vibraphone; with a coda from the intonarumori.
Auxiliaries
Chris Cutler takes us on a stroll through music made (variously) with water, stones, stage props, ice, snow, stalactites, Tesla coils, sand dunes, leaves, flowers, grass, twigs, glass and a coffee can.