I think this is a very important question to make here in this forum...we have so much great music that was very much Avant-Garde in it's day, but what about the present? Has music and art reached it's creative zenith? I know many feel that the Avant-Garde in the visual arts is long since dead, should music be considered to be in an equal situation? Has everything been done/said that could possibly be said within our current level of understanding? Is today's Avant-Garde, if it does exist, even worth considering as such? For that matter, has culture itself gone as far as it can go? We're in a new millenium now, and very little seems to have changed in the way of human nature...perhaps the only way we have to go now is backwards...that's a depressing thought...

...discuss.

I think things are still moving along well.

With the development of 'New Weird American Music' of the 21st Century.

Such bands as Pelt, No Neck Blues Band, Charalambides, Sunburned Hand of the Man and such individuals as Six Organs of Admittance, Steffen Basho-Jungans, Jack Rose, Sir Richard Bishop have illustrated a new possibilty of music, with the context of the 21st century.

I guess you can call it 'Free-Folk', and although John Fahey and earlier generation folk artist help push the boundries of folk, the bands/individuals I mentioned go evn fruther than the boundry. Providing refreshing and new forms of avant-garde music.

Hence, I believe that Avant-Garde music is live and well.

There are still some avant-prog bands performing. Free Improvisation still seems to be well in order I suppose.

I don't think any music genre is dead in the sense of the term.

I think you're misinterpreting the question, Floydian; I'm not speaking of the Avant-Garde as some sort of established tradition, I'm speaking of it as a creative spirit based on the breaking of all rules, innovation being the only foundation, forging ahead along a singular path to explore the outer regions of what is possible in art...that said, the basic premise of the question is whether all paths have already been taken, rendering the "true" Avant-Garde (( if there is such a thing )) obsolte...I sometimes wonder if they have...but I'll post my real thoughts on it later...

Hi,
I'm new here.
I think by it's nature avant-garde music can never be dead. If the question is: Is what was avant-garde in the sixties still avant-garde today? The answer would usually be no. The perception of what is avant-garde has to change with the times, including the criteria for what constitutes "breaking the boundaries" or "forging ahead" or whatever. Once upon a time the idea of making a lot of impassioned noise on a saxophone (say Albert Ayler) was new and fresh. A few people still find fresh ideas in that approach, but the approach itself isn't avant-garde at all. The kinds of Fluxus ideas and Cage ideas aren't really A-G anymore either. The element of surprize has gone out of them, they don't challenge people's sets of assumptions today. Good music is still good music (I love Albert Ayler), but what is now derived from it isn't as exploratory. It may be wonderful music, but it isn't still A-G.
I personally don't think culture is exhausted (how would I face the day), just some of the ideas that seemed to lead outward didn't lead as far as we might have thought. An idea that was deep a few decades ago can seem shallow now (consider the kinds of things in feminism or integration that seemed daring in the 50's or 60's that we take for granted now). The A-G has to challenge the received assumptions of its time.
What we have to do is identify the assumptions we are going to challenge. That may seem more difficult in the more diverse and complex world we find ourselves in, but the assumptions are there and need to be challenged. We'll have to challenge them in different ways than Stockhausen, or Cecil Taylor, or Cornelius Cardew did, but then they were challenging them in different ways than Stravinsky, or Monk, or Satie did before them.
"The child is not dead, but sleepeth..." (don't worry I'm not an Xtian -I consider monotheism the single greatest error of the human race).
Anyway.
Hi. Pleased to meet you.

I have been up at the VICTO Fest, so I haven't had the time to check the board.

NO!, to the question at hand.



impassioned noise on a saxophone (say Albert Ayler),WTF?

Anyone that thinks Ayler is noise of any kind really needs to check out Merzbow!

Also, the last I looked & heard, Cecil was still alive and as challenging as ever!!!

As are a great many others!!!!!

The old phrase, "there's nothing new under the sun", is a relevant concept.

Is avant-garde dead? Well not really. If one person out there has the pioneering spirit to try something different then even if it is not a success it is at least still alive.

On Friday I'm off to watch someone who makes music out of close mic'd sparklers and cooling coke bottles, I'd consider that avant garde.

The problem is I guess that in the 60s the concept of music as simply being a movement of air rather than a composed collection of tuned sounds had made the possibility of creating something truly new difficult. If you take any noise made at all then you can't trace it back to normal music or you can trace it back to cage. That isn't going to change.

Anything that is audible will fall somewhere between these two lines but if the sounds being created are new and the way they are being made is new then no, avant garde is still alive.

What I meant by impassioned noise was that the 60's (free jazz) A-G pushed the boundaries of music in the direction of pure (raw) sound as opposed to the 50's (boulez, babbit etc) pushing the boundaries in the direction of pure theory or (cage etc) pushing it in the direction of conceptuality. Cecil Taylor (on any given day my favorite musician of the last fifty years) kind of did all three at once. I wasn't trying to slag anybody, only point out that what was once a new approach doesn't always remain so. This doesn't mean there's nothing there (i.e. Xenackis got to places with very cerebral means that boulez and babbit never dreamed of).
The music of Merzbow (which I also like) doesn't really compare to the noise (not meant as an insult) of the sixties because there isn't any essential physicality in it (sort of like the difference between nascar and marathon running or maybe porno and sex). Something like Lightning Bolt (particularly live) does both at once.
The only limits to the A-G are our imaginations. In any discipline, most experiments lead to dead ends of one sort or another. This doesn't make them invalid or unworthy of undertaking (every human life leadsd to a dead end). Sometimes it seems to me that a lot of musicians who call themselves A-G are only rehashing ideas that were broached and accepted before a lot of us were born and this has a tendency to degrade (in the not-that-interested minds of the more general public) the whole idea of an A-G.
There were contemporaries who thought the rite of spring was the end of music. Like wise, Free Jazz or threnody for the victims of hiroshima, or 4'33". But the music ended up keeping on keeping on.
There's always something else to do.

As always, Geoff, your insights are invaluable here!

I admit to being familiar with only a handful of the artists you mentioned, and wasn't even aware of it being connected with a specific "movement" or "scene", per se, or even if they could be considered of a similar creative "mind"...this was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for in this thread, real concrete examples to contradict my feelings concerning the death of the Avant-Garde...

...I guess it's time for me to get more acquainted w/ 'Free-Folk'...

Hi, OBLOMOV, you're certainly welcome here in our small little community of Avant-Garde music fans!

Your post was wonderful and certainly brings up the issues exactly the way I intended; I may not be able to personally project the advances required of the next generation Avant-Garde (( I'll leave that to the artists )) but I suppose it boils down to having a bit of faith in the creative process.

I think one major future for music will be the common consolidation of all musical forms, or perhaps, the destruction of them! Most of my favorite musicians fuse together disparate forms/ideas into a new direction; I don't think the possibilities of this concept has been explored to its fullest potential quite yet, and the idea of a "one music" being born of many musical parents is very appealing to me, and contains very many possibilities, I think...but we'll just have to wait and see, I suppose, if this path is followed by more musical minds in the future...