PROBES #6
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 #6 continues to explore probes into pitch through the preparation and modification of conventional instruments – looking at the many tapings, wrappings, clampings, clippings, attachments and impairments applied across the family of strings, before moving on to the less familiar territory of prepared winds. Some people get up to some pretty strange behaviour in the pursuit of unusual sounds.
PROBES #7 examines some of the preparations applied to percussion and voice before beginning to look at the recovery and invention of extended performance techniques; starting with the piano.
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.
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.