Word: avant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more contemplation. Amos' last album, Boys for Pele, took a completely different turn from the path so unabashedly carved out by her two previous release. Fraught with musical experimentation on Amos' new harpsichord and lyrics so bizarre that they must have been in code, "Pele" may have impressed avant-garde musical connoisseurs but left many of her long-time devotees confused and in the dust...
...bother? According to Gockley, Houston Grand Opera, which is internationally renowned for its avant-garde productions, had come to be seen by its hometown as elitist. "The political and funding community," he says, "was telling us, 'We know you have a certain stature, but if you don't begin to reach and touch more people, you're going to gradually drop off our priority list.'" So he asked Billington and Foy to create a fully portable stage suitable for special performances aimed at young, TV-oriented viewers unfamiliar with opera. "What does rock 'n' roll do? That was our mandate...
...about what art could be or how it could be made; never had new art been the subject of such impassioned controversy or reached so large an audience. Museums, especially in the U.S., had to embrace newness or look retro. The century didn't see the birth of the avant-garde--that had happened earlier--but it did bring its death, after experiment and eccentricity became the norm. Inevitably, all that had seemed startling or threatening came to look normal, even classical, within a few decades. In the end, the new lost its power to shock...
Portrait did not sell well enough to relieve Joyce's chronic financial worries, but his work by then had attracted the attention of a number of influential avant-gardists, most notably the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, who believed a new century demanded new art, poetry, fiction, music--everything. Such supporters rallied to promote Joyce and his experimental writings, and he did not disappoint them...
...millions of fans worldwide, these albums mapped a path through the puzzling and sometimes scary '60s. The paths of Lennon and McCartney, however, were diverging drastically. Each took a wife (John married Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, and Paul wed American rock photographer Linda Eastman) and drifted even farther apart, Lennon growing bitter, McCartney adopting the air of the contented family...