What is 'avant-garde'?

Not just "what does 'avant-garde' mean?", but "What makes something 'avant-garde'?"

Is it just a sense of newness, is it some kind of overt experimental quality, a strangeness or oddness? How quickly can something 'avant-garde' become normal, prosaic, boring?

Thread inspired by me describing Hot Buttered Soul as 'avant-garde' and a friend not understanding why because it sounded "straighforward".

It's an anachronistic term, isn't it? Or at least it no longer means what it did in its modernist heyday. Today's "avant garde" is not the advance guard of anything, it's not a glimpse of how the future will look, rather it's a slipstream kind of art that coexists with and defines itself against the mainstream.

Yeah, I think it does mean that, these days, which I think is sad, really. When I described HBS as 'avant-garde' I meant that nothing like it had come before, not that it was 'outsider' or 'weird'.

yeah I would have to agree that there should be some experimental quality in there to describe something as avant-garde

I have no problem with using the term in that way

avant-garde is no longer avant-garde. Modernism is no longer modern. you can use it to describe something historical that feels "ahead of its time" i guess. i have no idea what experiments are left for music to conduct.

but it's one of those phrases that you can use and people will know what you mean, because it doesn't really have much of a meaning left.

I look at it in a formalist sense, not a historical sense. I would call Whitehouse avant-garde not because of its historical position but because it (still) conducts itself in opposition to the mainstream.

when a thousand oppositions to the mainstream are thriving in their ecological niches then i'm not sure what the mainstream is or why it needs opposition

some 16 year-olds will always need something that bewilders their parents i guess but what if yr parents grew up immersed in their own avant-garde?

and ironically a whole swathe of Pop music is invested in progression and the New, the mainstream is seething with avant-gardes

but having said all this there's some value in having fluid, semi-empty terms like "avant-garde" maybe - its flexibility doesn't mean you can't use it to point out something that you mightn't wanna label quirky or off or pretentious

but in musical terms I would say that avant-garde music would include some formal quality which makes it avant-garde e.g. dissonance, serialism, atonality

but Sick's initial difference of opinion with his friend re: Hot Buttered Soul points a problem - one person's avant and one person's straightforward

xp

those qualities have their own names so why label them avant-garde unless that term is doing some extra work?

there's something bizarre about describing formal elements of music that have been around for over 100 years as avant unless you're using it contextually.

that Flaming Lips parking lot boom box thingy.

I think its a fluid word that most non-pedants use to describe anything that runs the opposite of popular expectations. Like The Who and Jimi Hendrix's use of feedback was certainly avant-garde at one point, but not exactly any more since we're so familiar with those sounds.

I would say soul-singer Isaac Hayes stretching a country song into a 19 minute exploration was pretty fuckin avant-garde for 1969 or 2012

I think there's a few "avant-gardes"!

- where we look back historically at something and deem it "ahead of its time", meaning it sounded a bit like something which was popular later. eg Hot Buttered Soul

- when we mean something which is clever and innovative but not - in our reckoning - commercial (yet!) - eg something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_symphOny

- a slinky way of saying "fashionably and wilfully awkward" eg any time avant-garde is ever applied to indie-rock

also I think there has to be middle-class theory attached? If you can't stroke your chin to it, it's not avant.

Oh dear, Thomas, I was all set to be complimentary towards your post, but then you go and raise the spectre of 'bourgeois theory'. Tut tut tut. Then again: Stockhausen Serves Imperialism.

I'm a bit worried about answering this question, to be honest, because so much of my work is on it that if I phrase lazily and people tear me down then I may have to just quit my entire academic career. But yes, I'd say that there is a clear distinction between 'avant-garde' as a historical/genre descriptor, and 'avant-garde' as a stylistic descriptor.

Oooh, what's your academic work on, specifically?

xp emily yeah I was being flippant - and what I said is just as annoying to people working and thinking in the humanities as people gleefully admitting innumeracy is to mathematicians. So I totally take it back.

Well, it is actually an English PhD, so not musical in itself, but I take a lot of work from arguments like Cardew's. Essentially I'm studying the possibility of a working-class avant-garde, hence my tutting at Thomas.

xpost, haha

emil.y I *think* I would be interested in reading some of your work, but I certainly don't envy you the task of piecing it together...

did you see the BBC docs on class & culture? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01cmxbb

I watched a bit of that when it was on - pretty interesting, I guess more of a personal narrative with historical overview than heavy on overarching theory?

The cynic in me says that 'avant-garde' as a stylistic descriptor would be mostly used used as a marketing label, like 'alternative'

So, that would make "Love Me Do" by The Beatles, avant garde in 1962.

I think its influences were too obvious for Love Me Do to be ahead of its time?

I saw this and though: now there's an old thread.

Noise music is chaotic..painful and dissonant..It represents the crazy underworld, the subconcious , the non sensical and the unexpressed . In a world where knowledge,habit and routine must be grounded. One aches to be shook to the core. To break out and break free.

Society demands citizens to fit into the rhythm, and rhyme of the world! To shrink our spirit into a puzzle piece that jives with the beat and notes of society. But noise music is a cathartic release. A smash, shatter and splatter of established routine .

At the Arts Block saturday at midnight...roaming and joking with dischordant noise....a band takes the stage .called Egg eggs! Fitting to name Egg eggs hatched new ideas while mockingly asking to be jeered. They played a fun, freeing and fantastical performance. Exploding and breaking..frying then stinking. Lead vocals sung by a "angry santa" look a like. Egg Eggs contained 2 bass players , a violinist and 2 drummers in its carton.

Egg Eggs blasted on stage... singing sometimes choir like noise! Harmonizing and changing their chorus of echoes.
The second song had a fast beat. The band members were all moaning, whining and shrieking very often in convuluted patterns. Brilliantly they switched up every element of music from pitch to rythm to beats to vocals.

As for "angry santa's" vocal stylings...the high pitched murmuring and whining was feminine in tone. A long painful nagging of day to day caged suffering expressed. He wailed this slow rap of rythym. These elements of harmony come from the noise. Thier songs flow on toward the underworld. Egg eggs gains like a tidal wave toward the subconcious .

The band also used elements of theater and spectical. Of a dark and subdued type, part coyote trickster, mostly free and unplanned There were random yelps, moments of honesty. Sometimes jokes and gestures. The audience delightfuly felt like voyeurs to a band just hanging out rehearsing. Naturally, this band never pandered or thanked the audience.

The bass player Brett even eat 9 cookies after offering them to the audience. Just sat on the amp and ate surrounded by the sounds. They had many gestures of naturalness.
Their bare simplistic spectical contained much trickery. This band pretending to be "dorks" but joking. They were capitalizing on the failure and playing with humiliation. Wisely Above because they can act so below, and freely living out echoes of the past. Sometimes they applauded themselves loudly and mockingly cheering each other on. They were watch 6 kindegardeners.out of control..having fun getting in trouble yet happily mixed with teenage angst. Joyful informal spontaneity; Egg eggs provides a recess from the expected.

Toward the end the "santa" dramtically tied up Brett. by wrapping yellow caution tape all around him. Symbolic of fear and restraint bound on us since childhood... Yellow caution tape is a trap! A dramatic metaphor of fear. We are all spell bound.

At many moments one was able to seep and disappear in the endless sea of mismatched melodies. The band was splitting endlessly off in whirl winds of crazy expressions. Yet transe like they come together. These whispers would bind. Thier volume and power would gain. Their transcendence abounded with vibrations.

The band ended simply ....musicians fading out or halting and finally the lingering simple melody of a violin, short to close.

<3 Egg Eggs

"avant-garde" strikes me as a useful term. to the extent that we're talking about music in general and not about a particular movement tied to a time & place, it seems to me that we invoke three general qualities when we describe something as "avant garde":

1) formal investigation, exploration and/or experimentation. the avant-garde must in some formal sense "explore new territory", must push at the boundaries of genre, habit and expectation. this innovative imperative demands that the avant-garde be dramatically unlike that which is popular and commercially viable, and this in turn creates the reciprocal suggestion that anything popular cannot be truly avant-garde.

2) [as a corollary to point 1...] an attitude of direct, deliberate and often aggressive non-conformity. the avant-garde seeks not merely to experiment, but to challenge, to subvert and to unsettle, perhaps even to destroy. there is in this a sort of hostility, even if that hostility is disguised.

3) deliberate positioning as "fine" or "high" or otherwise "real" art. the avant-garde arises from within and responds to the concerns of a self-consciously "serious" arts culture. this arts culture need not necessarily be academic, but often is.

it should be noted that as a product of these demands, the avant-garde requires a sense of opposition to the supposed complacency (and other imagined failures) of a perceived "mainstream". the avant-garde must construct the "inferior ordinary" from which it estranges itself, for it is a sense of superiority to and alienation from that which "others" accept that justifies the avant-garde's oppositionalism.

I don't think it's just investigation/exploration, though. It seems to me that it's always coupled with an explicitly modernist-oriented aesthetic. So, I'm not sure about the Isaac Hayes example. Not that there isn't any modernist component to that song, but it's not like Schoenberg!

"perceived" mainstream vs "perceived" transgression. pah!
if i chose to define the label "avant garde" it wouldn't be in opposition to anything.
it all relies on a passive assumption lazy whitebread distinctions.
acknowledging these "envelopes" that need pushing. a fool's errand ! nowt wrong w/ a fool.
"exploring new territory" new to who? always so condescending - do they think we ain't schooled, do they think we have no imagination, do they think we do not dream? evil self absorbed tosspots.
same old shit. tired old, silence, noise, performance art, collage, improv, commodifiable gigs & Cdrs / cassettes, faeces, semen, aleatoric methods, the drone, the supposed "non-sequiter" ( o stop it your melting my tiny flipin mind )
@fozzy "the avant garde" is a term and not an entity, movement or group of people that require or demand anything.
a lazy heuristic for established methods & me-too bandwagoneering, oneupmanship & "hear my song!" antics for folks who don't do songs n that

o, a passive assumption OF lazy whitebread distinctions.
it's late.

"expect the unexpected" grew old

lol, i'd hoped it would be clear that in talking about "the avant-garde" i meant "that which is typically considered avant-garde". i described the externally perceived quality of avant-ness as a set of demands, and from there speculated about the types of values & ideas that would likely engender demand-satisfying work.

and the thread dies

tarfumes! speaking of avant garde you gotta come to the store in june. christoph heemann and his posse are coming to town to play. we are making a day of it like last summer. maybe you would want to do a solo thing? its gonna be western mass/germany appreciation hands across the world day. i'm excited already.

I tend to think of avant-garde as ending in the '50s. Too many things challenging modernism's claim to modernity by the '60s. So, with jazz, say, hard bop seems more like avant-garde music to me, but I'd be less inclined to use the term for free jazz. Not crazy about the term for rock either unless you want to say Henry Cow, but only because they maybe had a substantial spirit-of-modernism aspect. Honestly can't think of any others.

If someone called Captain Beefheart avant-garde, I think about the gradations down from that pedestal. First to the Hampton Grease Band. Then maybe to the first NRBQ album. Then to just about any band's weird album from 1968. Is it all avant-garde? Only some of it? I understand that someone might say that "Inna Gadda Da Vida" is avant-garde, but the term resonates stronger for me if you're talking about Morton Feldman.

Honestly can't think of any others.

OK, Red Krayola.

My current obsession is this catholic folk label
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7036/6835016838_4c430045f6.jpg

tarfumes! speaking of avant garde you gotta come to the store in june. christoph heemann and his posse are coming to town to play. we are making a day of it like last summer. maybe you would want to do a solo thing? its gonna be western mass/germany appreciation hands across the world day. i'm excited already.

― scott seward, Tuesday, March 13, 2012 10:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

and the thread dies

it was dead when i got here. this this this isn't blood, i mean it's someone else's, probably, someone else's blood.

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— Deutsche Grammophon (DG) (@DGclassics) July 21, 2023

lol i saw that too!

time for a late bday present from ilx

This sounds like a rich book.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/radio-waves