PROBES #5
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. This fifth episode looks at timbre and the many routes to its extension, and then explores the somewhat exotic range of modifications, preparations and ways of subverting pianos that have been tried to date.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #6, curated by Chris Cutler.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #4, curated by Chris Cutler.
Auxiliaries
This music selection investigates further preparations of stringed and brass instruments, in the quest for novel sounds.
There's no end of things that have been laid on, tied to, screwed into or otherwise attached to alter the sound of conventional instruments. This sixth programme draws a map and explores some of the outer reaches of string and wind preparations.
Auxiliaries
This music selection investigates further ways of piano preparations: will the torture never end?
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #5, curated by Chris Cutler.
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.