[Glice]

This topic annoys me. Thinking about music in terms of its 'avant-garde-ness' is ridiculous, and unhelpful. Music is, predominantly, an organic social event/ process, not something that's contrived. For me, the most interesting 'far-out' stuff, aesthetically as well as intelectually, at the moment, is spectralism, but even that's clearly a dead-end of sticking more and more intervals into an octave (cf Radelescu) and the 'man-machine' synthesis promised by futurism (near the begining of the last century). It's more important that people continue to be creative, and do things that interest them than it is for people to contrive a 'new' music. Most musicians, nearly all musicians, are too stupid to contrive something genuinely new. That doesn't mean that they can't do something good. For instance - the Ramones. Idiots, but great tunes.