VARIATIONS #3
Transcript
Curated by Jon Leidecker
The third episode, of VARIATIONS, an overview of appropriative collage in music, documents the collages of the seventies 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.
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.
The Approach
In the seventies the avant-garde finally crosses the line into wholesale plundering of commercial pop music, and the pop disciplines of disco and dub become increasingly comfortable with manipulating released music into new forms, narrowing the divide between art and pop practices.