Ràdio Web MACBA presents Probes #1

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’. Probes 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 inaugural episode sets the scene and investigates early reconsiderations of pitch: probes that postulate new scales to be constructed through the ever-greater subdivision of the inherited intervals of equal temperament. For more information on this episode, visit RWM Curatorial.

Series transcripts available here. For more information on this series and other podcasts, visit Ràdio Web MACBA. For more of Chris Cutler's work, visit his website.