Experimental music

Experimental music is a compositional tradition that arose in the mid-20th century, particularly in North America, of music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. The American composer John Cage is seen as one of the more notable composers associated with this music (Grant 2003, 174). In France, as early as 1953, Pierre Schaeffer had begun using the term "musique expérimentale" to describe compositional activities that incorporated tape music, musique concrète, and elektronische Musik. Also, in America, a quite distinct sense of the term was used in the late 1950s to describe computer-controlled composition associated with composers such as Lejaren Hiller. In 1958, Hiller became the first director of the Studio for Experimental Music at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (GRMC), under the leadership of Pierre Schaeffer, organized the First International Decade of Experimental Music between 8 and 18 June 1953. John Cage was also using the term as early as 1955. Composer and critic Michael Nyman starts from Cage's definition and develops the term "experimental" also to describe the work of other American composers (Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Meredith Monk, Malcolm Goldstein, Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, John Cale, Steve Reich, etc.), as well as composers such as Gavin Bryars, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury, Frederic Rzewski, and Keith Rowe (Nyman 1974, 1, 78–81, 93–115).

Avant-garde music

The term avant-garde is applied to music that is considered to be at the forefront of experimentation or innovation in its field. Avant-garde music may critique existing aesthetic conventions, reject the status quo in favor of unique or original elements, and intentionally challenge or alienate audiences.

Usage

In a historical sense, some musicologists use the term "avant-garde music" for the radical compositions that succeeded the death of Anton Webern in 1945, while for others, this period is typically thought to begin with Wagner or Josquin des Prez.

Today the term may be used to refer to any other post-1945 tendency of modernist music not definable as experimental music, though sometimes including a type of experimental music characterized by the rejection of tonality.

Although some modernist music is also avant-garde, a distinction can be made between the two categories. Because the purpose of avant-garde music is necessarily political, social, and cultural critique, so that it challenges social and artistic values by provoking or goading audiences, composers such as Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, George Antheil, and Igor Stravinsky may reasonably be considered to have been avant-gardists in their early works (which were understood as provocative, whether or not the composers intended them that way), but the label is not really appropriate for their later music. Modernists of the post–World War II period, such as Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, György Ligeti, Witold Lutosławski, and Luciano Berio, never conceived their music for the purpose of goading an audience, and so cannot be classified as avant-garde. Composers such as John Cage and Harry Partch, on the contrary, remained avant-gardists throughout their creative careers.

Avantgarde Music

Avantgarde Music is an Italian record label, formed as a continuation of Obscure Plasma Records, focusing on black and doom metal artists. The label has a sub-label called Wounded Love Records, which has released albums by Dolorian and Taake.

Avantgarde Music's first release was the 1994 funeral doom classic Stream from the Heavens by Thergothon. The label has since signed many well-known black, death and doom metal bands such as Behemoth, Carpathian Forest, Mayhem and Unholy.

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