PROBES #4
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.
PROBES #4 concludes our excursion into portamenti, looking at its use in popular music, before moving on to wholly unpitched probes that begin to map the many aspects of differentiated noise.
This fifth programme sets the scene for a wide range of very different approaches to the exploration of timbre and looks at ways of modifying or preparing the traditional piano.
This is where pitch becomes weightless and all that is solid melts into air: futurism, noise, electricity, ecstasy and uncertainty. We look at the lure and power of sliding tones.
Auxiliaries
In this music selection we look further into sliding pitches, concentrating this time on their use in popular music, before moving on to wholly unpitched probes that begin to map the many aspects of differentiated noise.
This fourth programme looks at another dimension of portamenti, and moves on into early twentieth century ideas of colour, timbre and the contested territory of noise.