VARIATIONS #3
The Approach
Curated by Jon Leidecker
As the sixties came to a close, the progressive optimism of World music collages were met and tempered by a new strain of self-examination and critique. Composers shifted away from using obscure, generic, or safely public domain sources for their pieces, and began to work with instantly recognizable samples from commercial pop music on a much wider scale. As the focus turned from global to cultural, Utopian visions gave way to a pragmatic sense of musical research and development.
This episode documents the collages of the 70’s that began demolishing the distinctions between art and popular music, from concrète to dub to disco to the attention-deficit-disordering world of FM radio.
Transcript
Transcript of VARIATIONS #3. The Approach, curated by Jon Leidecker.
The Globe
The second episode of this series presents an overview of the sixties, starting with the world music collages of Richard Maxfield, Teiji Ito and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and following through to the impact of John Cage and Marshall McLuhan on the Beatles.
Transition
As recording supplanted sheet music in the 20th century, the presence of communal influence became unavoidably obvious once again as composers began to use recordings to make new recordings. From the beginning, recordings have been instruments.
By Jon Leidecker
"Radio Music" connects three examples from the history of the potential of the radio receiver as musical instrument.
Transcript
Transcript of VARIATIONS #4. The Explosion, curated by Jon Leidecker.
The Explosion
An overview as the art music tradition of collage music is joined by the popular culture tradition of hip-hop, which would establish many of the same aesthetics and practices solidly in the mainstream.