Word: avant
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...frustration, through irritation--it was hot, the air fairly visible--rumor (Is he stricken? Sane? Obstinat?) anger, shouting, disgust, and finally mass departure. What is music coming to...?" Only to renewal. The pianist, by refusing to "play," gave rhetorical expression to one of the dramatic esthetics of musical avant-garde composer John Cage. Our matronly subscriber almost certainly goes to ten concerts, sits on the left, prefers the Steinway, adores podium gymnastics "if not excessive" (meaning horizontal and unconscious), parades at intermission. She listens with equal stolidity to Scheherezade and Mahler's Sixth Symphony, gazes transfixed at the flashing brass...
...AVANT GARDE worthy of the appellation necessarily combines violence with recreation, but it seems that only the irreverence implicit in renovation is ever noticed by the tranquilly respiring keepers of art. The detractors of the avant-garde typically abuse it by denouncing its supposed vagaries, rather than intelligently approaching it as a source of pleasure. At the same time, a minority champions it to suffocation...
...period of the 1920's and upon the exceedingly astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern astringent works of the meticulous Anton Webern (1883-1945), as their sources of inspiration. The genuinely revolutionary effect of the turn-of-the-century ferment, and the principle which has animated today's avant-garde, was that expressionism and impressionism were subsumed by a new language. Schoenberg had termed his achievement the "emancipation of dissonance." Insofar as the avant-garde moves toward the conclusion that music is the audible world itself, subject to its own capricious organization, the responsible avant-garde is esthetically atavistic...
Diabolical Ping. This fondness for movable sculpture qualified De Maria as a progenitor of the busy school of "Optional art," whose practitioners in vite viewers to play a sort of game by rearranging various objects in a composition to suit their own tastes. Avant-garde collectors began to buy De Ma ria's work. He was soon able to have them made up in steel rather than wood, and the games became more diabolical. His 1965 Instrument for La Monte Young looks like an innocent, slender metal box with a ball in it. But De Maria designed it with...
Earthy Aphorist. If the public was slow to discover Blair, young avant-garde artists were not. Such radicals as Edward Kienholz and Billy Al Bengston forgathered at the old house Blair had bought in Los Angeles, admired his paintings and delighted in his company. Blair always gave them coffee (he kept careful records on just how each guest preferred it) and his own home-baked bread, for which he won many prizes at county fairs. Afterward, everybody pitched horseshoes in the backyard and listened to Blair's inexhaustible tales of his and other people's pasts. His speech...