Word: avant
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...radical post-war avant-grade split into those wishing to fulfill the logic of dense twelve-tone organization, represented by such composers as Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, and those desiring to create music with the least possible constraints, represented by Cage and Stockhausen. The latter reacted against the old ghosts of Kingsor and Vienna, Wagner and Schoenberg himself. The new principle was that the legitimacy of music flows simply from the auditor's effort to feel sheer sounds. Music is the sensitized constancy of the world's masses. To borrow a term from language studies, music is mimetic...
...esthetic of chance would eliminate Cage himself. The universality of the art would have been destroyed as well as all reasonable artistic communication, since that presupposes some conscious relation between at least two people. I suppose that the reason for anxiety over the death of music is that the avant-garde will lead unswervingly to solipsism, in which each sound in heard not in terms of itself, but in terms of oneself. In solipsistic art, there would be no style, only epiphanies. But the death of music seems impossible so long as there are sounds to be heard, minds...
...AVANT-GARDE spirit is in the most general sense a reaffirmation of the sanctity of irreverence. Precisely because its challenges are so dramatic on one level and yet so familiar on another, it draws strength from an inescapable tradition. Igor Stravinsky, almost certainly the century's greatest composer and one who moved independently of the orthodox avant-garde, more a less stated this tradition in his Poetics of Music...
Stravinsky himself, as well as the other non avant-garde master, Bela Bartok, was able to come to intellectual terms with the esthetic crisis of post-romantic music. Each one of Stravinsky's works, especially Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Symphony of Psalms, Agon, and the new Requiem Canticles, represents a new solution in considerably more traditional terms to the problems of contemporary musical speech. If the avant -garde chooses to ignore his principle, if it is possible to ignore it, then renewal will have become chaotic...
...quality of the conscious human act is something about which we should concerned. The fundamental purpose of the avant-garde esthetics, reeducation of mind and reinvigoration of sense, is pertinent to all of the plastic arts. Because of the grim market character of our hourly entertainment, we are having to struggle simply to hang onto our pathetically shrinking vocabulary for art. The avant-garde's attitudes have not yet ossified into a Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service. No calcine theosophy encircles it. It is healthy. It will remain healthy so long as it spurns pretensions to evangelicalism, insouciance...