Avant-garde

Avant-garde music is music that is considered to be at the forefront of experimentation or innovation in its field, with the term “avant-garde” implying a critique of existing aesthetic conventions, rejection of the status quo in favor of unique or original elements, and the idea of deliberately challenging or alienating audiences.

Distinctions

John Cage during his 1966 concert at the opening of the National Arts Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Avant-garde music may be distinguished from experimental music by the way it adopts an extreme position within a certain tradition, whereas “experimental music” lies outside tradition. In a historical sense, some musicologists use the term “avant-garde music” for the radical compositions that succeeded the death of Anton Webern in 1945, but others disagree. For example, Ryan Minor writes that this period began with the work of Richard Wagner, whereas Edward Lowinsky cites Josquin des Prez.  The term may also be used to refer to any post-1945 tendency of modernist music not definable as experimental music, though sometimes including a type of experimental music characterized by the rejection of tonality. A commonly cited example of avant-garde music is John Cage’s 4’33″(1952), a piece which instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during its entire duration.
Although some modernist music is also avant-garde, a distinction can be made between the two categories. According to scholar Larry Sitsky, because the purpose of avant-garde music is necessarily political, social, and cultural critique, so that it challenges social and artistic values by provoking or goading audiences, composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, George Antheil and Claude Debussy may reasonably be considered to have been avant-gardists in their early

Diamanda Galas

works (which were understood as provocative, whether or not the composers intended them that way), but Sitsky does not consider the label appropriate for their later music. For example, modernists of the post–World War II period, such as Milton Babbitt, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, György Ligeti, and Witold Lutosławski, never conceived their music for the purpose of goading an audience and cannot, therefore, be classified as avant-garde. Composers such as John Cage and Harry Partch, on the contrary,

Artist and Bands

John Cage
John Zorn
Diamanda Galás
Terry Riley
Laurie Anderson
Yoko Ono
Björk
Moondog
Luigi Russolo
Einstürzende Neubauten
The Velvet Underground
Mr. Bungle
György Ligeti
Henry Cowell
Naked City
La Monte Young
Can
Meredith Monk
Buckethead
Harold Budd
Throbbing Gristle
Bill Laswell
Glenn Branca
Scott Walker
Ulver
David Sylvian
Kraftwerk

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