Pardon Me, Which Way Is The Avant-Garde?

One of the pursuits in which I spend those portions of my days not occupied with composition or coursework is that of finding new and unfamiliar music. My main territory for exploration is the music of the twentieth century (and what of the twenty-first has so far elapsed), excluding the areas I have found to have little interest, such as minimalism. Within that territory there is still an immense variety of music, ranging from the impressionist Romanticism of Vaughan Williams to the strict constructivism of Berg and Webern (and, in a different sense, the members of the Darmstadt School) to the highly individual modernism of composers like Penderecki and Carter (incidentally, since they're both still alive, wouldn't it be more correct and respectful to refer to them as Mr Penderecki and Mr Carter, or perhaps Dr if their educational achievement permits [something I haven't researched]? Ah well, that's a topic for another note.) to the pretty much unclassifiable composers, like Dutilleux.

There is one thing I have not yet found, though, despite an increasing focus in recent searches on the music of living composers. I can't deny that much of the music I found was quite enjoyable to listen to, and I'd like to hear more from many of the living composers I've found so far, but none of it was on either the cutting or the bleeding edge of music as I know it. Perhaps it's just a sign of over-familiarity with twentieth century music that I don't consider pieces like Carter's Piano Concerto or Berio's Sequenzas or anything at all by Ligeti to be particularly revolutionary -- oh sure, they were revolutionary in their time, but I've heard nothing similarly revolutionary for our time, a time that has grown up with music like that as part of the mainstream (and likewise Cage et al.'s experiments with aleatoricism, and Birtwhistle et al.'s experiments with theatre and performance ritual).

There are two reasons for this, I think. The first reason is that, unless you're me, it's probably not in the mainstream at all. Lovers of "classical" music still listen mostly to Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The twentieth century is a specialty item, apart from a few pieces (all written early on in the century) that have been accepted into the glorious and immutable canon of classical music which shall never die (since as long as the life support machine is still running, the person attached to it isn't technically dead, right?). The second reason is that I was searching libraries for commercial CD recordings. Obviously, only music that is acceptable to the establishment is likely to wind up in a library, and a record label is unlikely to invest in potentially risky artists -- and the avant-garde is by definition risky. Especially nowadays, in a post-information-scarcity* age, when record companies' livelihood is somewhat precarious and it's a far more guaranteed deal for them to re-release old recordings of dead conductors in the hope that the people more likely to recognise the name and buy the record won't be technologically literate enough to know how BitTorrent works.

So in summary, the avant-garde I was looking for most likely doesn't exist (since very few people spent their formative years listening to Stockhausen, Xenakis, Finnissy etc); and even if it did, I would have been looking for it in the wrong place.

I've concluded that, if there are people doing things in music that are entirely new and of their time, these people will not be working within the confines of "classical" music, and therefore will be easiest to find in clubs and other such venues, most likely as "alternative" or independent bands or soloists -- unless the idea of performance is something else they are doing away with, in which case they might be even harder to track down -- which, however, does make them annoyingly location-specific.

Thus, I pose the open question: Where is the avant-garde (if it exists), and what is it doing? The answer, I hope (even if it turns out to be "there is no avant-garde"), shall be informative.

J.G.
20:25, 12.3.10

* Kinda. This always comes to mind when I see the phrase "post-information-scarcity."

Currently listening to (at time of posting): Stravinsky, Praeludium for Jazz Ensemble