PROBES #8
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 #8 explores ways to coax some highly unusual sounds out of strings.
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.
In this ninth instalment, Chris Cutler investigates some extraordinary extended techniques for wind instruments and percussion and how they have been used.
Auxiliaries
This auxiliary explores extended techniques for strings.
In this eighth instalment, Chris Cutler presents modifications of string instruments that seek to move away from tonality while maintaining coherence.