[demonrail666]

It's a word that gets thrown around a lot here (as much by me as anyone, I admit) but one that rarely receives any attention as to what it actually IS. I'm not so bothered about what sites like Wikipedia say as much as what you think.

Here's hoping that this turns into something interesting.

[SynthethicalY]

I would say avant-garde is something out of the ordinary, and really away from the mainnstream. I think that is just a generelized statement.

[jon boy]

well its a good point. i am not really sure what i mean by it but i use it a lot when i try to dexcribe music i like to people who dont really know that particular style. either that or they say it first.

[pbradley]

*hugs Residents albums*

Don't wish them away!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

It's a word that gets thrown around a lot here (as much by me as anyone, I admit) but one that rarely receives any attention as to what it actually IS. I'm not so bothered about what sites like Wikipedia say as much as what you think.

Here's hoping that this turns into something interesting.

avant garde literally is the advance force of an army (vanguard)and this harks back to the time when artists saw themselves as a forward moving cultural force that would change society. they took that from bolshevism if im not mistaken. then again one of the first "avant-gardes" were the protofascist futurists. (!!)

[Rob Instigator]

the "avant garde" in anything means "the leading edge"

[Rob Instigator]

avant garde , becaus eit IS the leading edge of wahetevr field you are talking about, is out of the ordinary, but being out of the ordinary is not a criteria for the avant garde.

[demonrail666]

The thing about the Bolshevik/Futurist thing tends to make it quite era specific. There are those who think of it as just that: an exclusively European movement that was a response to WWI and which died off with the rise of Fascism in the 30s.

[!@#$%!]

yes, the avant-garde proper died out around the 30s maybe with the surrealists.

the term however has stuck to accept broader connotations as cheeto implies, minus the political implications.

it is definitely a military term

vanguard/rearguard

vanguard in french is avant-garde.

but properly speaking, it's roughly between cubism and the 40's.

maybe starting with german expressionism actually... hm...

[noumenal]

From Grove:

A term derived from French military history where it signified an advance group clearing the way for the main body of troops. The connotations of frontiers, leadership, unknown territory and risk accompanied the term as it was appropriated for and by artists. An early instance of such appropriation was Saint-Simon's proposal that artists might serve as an ‘avant garde’ in the establishment of his new secular and scientific utopia (Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, 1829). This is of some significance, as it already suggests that an avant garde might be motivated both by intellectual specialization and by social dissent.

In our own age the term is often used loosely to describe any artists who have made radical departures from tradition, but it has also been freighted with particular meanings, and these have supported a more specific usage referring to art histories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the era of cultural history usually labelled ‘Modernism’. Here an avant garde would be differentiated from an ars nova and from an ars subtilior, neither of which need be period-specific. Thus an avant garde shares with an ars nova its experimental profile, and with an ars subtilior its élitist taste-public, but it carries two additional burdens, both relatable to Saint-Simon's use of the term. First there is a commitment to the idea of continuous progress within a single, notionally unified culture (underlying even its most anarchic manifestations), together with an acknowledgment that such progress is barely compatible with any suggestion of limits or boundaries to our knowledge and experience. Secondly there is an active engagement – whether critical (as in Adorno's interpretation) or reintegrative (as in Peter Bürger's) – with a social world from which it feels itself separate. In both respects an avant garde is historically contingent, and thus may have a defined end as well as a beginning.

Within the historical period of Modernism we can sharpen the categorical focus of avant-garde music by distinguishing it from two opposing categories. The first is ‘classical music’, a category that emerged in the 19th century and was institutionalized above all in the public concert. The second is ‘popular music’, distinguished by its untroubled acceptance of the commodity status inherent in a middle-class ‘institution of art’ (to use Bürger's phrase). Relative to these repertories, an avant garde began to take on a clear profile in the late 19th century, though it was made up of aesthetically and stylistically contrasted elements. One variety is associated especially with the so-called New German School, notably through the programmes (and rhetoric) of Modernism – a ‘music of the future’ – proposed by Wagner and the Liszt circle. This prepared the ground of Schoenberg's blatant defiance of the cultural market-place. His Society for Private Musical Performances represented a powerfully symbolic moment in the development of the avant garde, closing off the populace in the interests of preserving musical language from further degeneration.

A considerable pretension attaches to this increasingly specialized ‘project of greatness’ in art, and that pretension, itself a function of aesthetic autonomy, might be viewed as a prerequisite for the Modernist aesthetic. Music was much more than an object of beauty; it was a mode of cognition, a discourse of ideas whose ‘truthfulness’ should be protected. It was from this vantage point, predicated on the authority of an avant garde (understood as ‘the most advanced stage of the dialectic of expressive needs and technical means’, Paddison, 1996), that Adorno surveyed the entire history of Western music. Significantly, he distinguished between the spirit of the early 20th-century avant garde and the New Music of the 1950s and 60s (Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti). This too has been labelled an avant garde, and some of its devices (multiple serialism, electronic composition, aleatory procedures and so on) described, often pejoratively, as ‘avant-garde techniques’. Certainly the New Music shared with early Modernism the commitment to a specialized, progressive and ‘authentic’ art, and to a ‘rhetoric of endless innovation’ (Williams, 1989). Yet there is also a sense in which it represented an ‘official’ Modernism, supported by the institutions (‘growing old’ was Adorno's formulation), and as such it was far removed in tone from the explosive, campaigning and dissenting Modernism of that earlier period, when the bourgeois-romantic project of greatness reached its apotheosis.

A very different face of the avant garde was the subversive, anti-bourgeois protest associated with Dadaism and surrealism, given musical expression by Satie, and further developed in the radical aesthetic promoted by Cage and others in the aftermath of World War II. For Bürger this was the true avant garde, distinguished conceptually from Modernism through its rejection of the ‘institution of art’ and of aesthetic autonomy (paradoxically it represented for Bürger an attempt at reintegrating the aesthetic and social spheres). Yet from today's perspective Bürger's position seems a development of Adorno's rather than a major departure. More recent critical theory has been compelled to go further, addressing a growing perception (it may be disillusioning or cathartic) that any notion of a single culture, on which modern art was predicated, is no longer viable. Where music is concerned, those explosive tensions between the polarized repertories (avant-garde, classical, commercial) of a unified, albeit increasingly fragmented cultural world have been defused with astonishing ease. Disparate musics can apparently co-exist without antinomies or force fields.

Within critical theory the responses to this ‘postmodern condition’ have ranged from Andreas Huyssen's cautious welcome of postmodern art, provided its critical potential is acknowledged, to Jürgen Habermas's proposal that Modernism remains an ‘incomplete project’, now in search of a new communicative pragmatism. Elsewhere, and especially outside the Adornian tradition, postmodernism has been eagerly embraced by cultural theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard, by musicologists such as Lawrence Kramer, and by many composers for whom it seems to offer a cathartic sense of release from the prohibitions of postwar Modernism. In such a climate the fate of an avant garde is clearly open to question. Arguably the concept can have only a narrow, and perhaps a rather emasculated, definition within today's culture, associated with a continuing but now decentred Modernist project. That project is sanctioned rather than dissenting. It occupies a single corner of a plural cultural field. It is neither threatened by, nor threatens, the politics and aesthetics of mass culture.

By Jim Samson
broken into paragraphs by request

[noumenal]

Or, less specifically:

The pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period. For example, Beethoven.

[mangajunky]

I don't like that term. I don't think I've ever used it.
I like music and art that challenges me or makes me split my sides laughing.
If you have to classify it into a term, then the emotional impact and originality of the artwork is somewhat lost...or at least taken away....just a little bit by the over analyzation.

Dig it, think about it, let it go through you, let it effect you. Don't put it in a box and confine it.

Boy...I sound like a fucking hippie. I'm gonna go drink a beer.

[Rob Instigator]

or myself in the field of bad-assitude

[cryptowonderdruginvogue]

 

[!@#$%!]

oich my eyes man. paragraphs please...

[!@#$%!]

yeah but during the avant garde proper, artists believed they were leading the masses into world revolution. years later auden would write that "poetry makes nothing happen".

in that sense punk & hardcore could be properly called avant-garde as they saw themselves as the voice of a revolution/rebellion.

[noumenal]

I don't necessarily agree with that article comepletely, but I don't see how there can be an avant-garde within popular music. There is no "continuous progress within a single, notionally unified culture." It's almost the opposite: static repetition of the same music (with surface variations) in a huge constellation of cultures. I don't think that an avant-garde is possible at all anymore because I see no continuous progress within a practice anywhere.

I am optimistic that I'm wrong or that it's only a matter of time though. I guess it depends on how you define "notionally" though. Whatever. Lame.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by noumenal

I don't necessarily agree with that article comepletely, but I don't see how there can be an avant-garde within popular music. There is no "continuous progress within a single, notionally unified culture." It's almost the opposite: static repetition of the same music (with surface variations) in a huge constellation of cultures. I don't think that an avant-garde is possible at all anymore because I see no continuous progress within a practice anywhere.

I am optimistic that I'm wrong or that it's only a matter of time though. I guess it depends on how you define "notionally" though. Whatever. Lame.

i hate to sound like a cultural studies twat, but you[re speaking of the postmodern rejection of great narratives.

(seriously! )

[Savage Clone]

I think it has something to do with beards.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

I always thought it meant "against the grain"