Terry Riley may look rediculous, but he is one of the leaders of a principal post-modern avant garde movement.
I’ve been thinking a ton about where classical art music is going these days, and I consistently get drawn to looking back at prior avant-garde movements that developed into important musical movements. Consider the early modernist avant-garde movements in two different countries, France and Germany.
In France, the modernist avant garde was led by people like Edgar Varese, the musical Dadaists, and Darius Milhuad. This music was highly experimental in a different way from their counterparts in Germany, who following the lead of Schoenberg seemed to stick closer to the tradition of Brahmsian style and structure. The French composers of this time seemed a bit more adventurous rhythmically and with the tone quality of the instruments they used. They were far ahead of the curve in experimenting with electronic music and highlighting music as a function of sound in time.
The Germans on the other hand, had the Vanguard of the 2nd Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern leading the pack. Their important contribution was the attempt at dissolving tonal harmony (they largely failed) along with the invention and propagation of the twelve-tone technique. As I said before, their music emphasizes structure and radicalizing pitch systems while sticking to traditional instrumentation , instrumental use and stricter form. These two schools developed, eventually, into the most prominent threads of musical thought, especially as we entered the post-modern era where a few new avant garde movements sprout up.
In the Post-modern era, which I’ll loosely define as 1945-present(?), the avant garde of the past became the central musical movements, albeit far more radicalized. Total serialism of the likes of Milton Babbitt seems to be an extension of the 2nd Viennese school. Music that explores non-traditional use of traditional instruments and seeks to create radical new colors like Xenakis and Penderecki, on the other hand, reflects the French avant garde. People like Boulez and Stockhausen draw from both movements, while John Cage writes music that becomes the ultimate definition of sound in time. The music is of these composers are edgier than anything heard before, but seem to be more of a further development of past practices.
Another avant garde thread that popped up in the 1960’s is Minimalism. Largely kicked off by Terry Riley’s In C. The minimalist movement uses a more tonal approach but emphasizes repetition. In Minimalism there are quick surface changes that repeat over and over (and over and over and over) to create a macro-texture that changes very slowly over time.
Hindsight is 20-20, and it gets even easier to distinguish musical periods and movements as we become further removed (temporally) from them. I’ll do the best I can to extract from a small portion of music I’ve been listening to what current the avant garde is.
World music would be an almost too easy claim. But, I’d rather say that it isn’t the avant-garde because it has already reached, or is near a mainstream status in the art-music world. I’ve taken a sample of the music that New Amsterdam Records puts out, and they seem not to have any world music at all in their sample recordings. What I’ve found from this tiny sample size is a reliance on folk (fiddling), jazz and pop music. In a way this music is an undercurrent that I’ve heard called Indie-Classical, which incidentally, the recording company uses as a label to promote their current performance series. The “indie-classical” music seems to take some of the coloristic qualities explored in the past 50 years but then attempts to use them in a way that is overtly expressive and referential or intentionally accessible, which can’t be said for much of the music I’ve discussed before. That young composers are rejecting the aesthetic of their teachers is an interesting reaction. I am sure I’m not the only one who is happy that when my own teachers tell me of a time in the 70s or 80s, where if you weren’t writing serial music you weren’t a composer, it is a thing of the past.
In this upcoming transitional period, we (upcoming composers) would do well to caution against turning against the use of the ugly and depressing in our music because music that is dogmatically sublime in the view of the human condition is just as bad as music that unilaterally damns us.