"If you like avant garde,"
but what was avant garde?
Noise? Tangents? Music people like because nobody else gets? Weird music for the sake of being weird? Were Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu even avant garde? I eventually tested the waters by buying an LP on Nonesuch, but my confusion grew. avant garde seemed more like the bits of music that emphasized the movements of actors and dancers, but there were no actors and dancers for me - just a cryptic illustration of the composition. music best suited for films or something.
intellectual masturbation. people geting off believing they "got" something that was never really there. self-congratulatory. pompous. art for the sake of art.
After hearing Tangerine Dream's Rubycon and Brian Eno - Another Green World I became obsessed with ambient music, and forgot about avant garde.
That was thirteen years ago.
In 2009 I found a $4 LP in the sound effects section called Voice of the Computer. The music reminded me of Walter Carlos - Sonic Seasonings, but Computer Suite from Little Boy predated the Carlos LP by several years.
after re-watching the BBC Four documentary The Alchemists of Sound, my interest was renewed. two things occured to me. 1.) I haven't been listening to any electronic music pre-1969 2.) how the synthesizer would have appealed to the school of avant garde
I checked out The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center to get an idea of what was going on with synthesizers in 1964.
The Mark II synthesizer and collage of found sounds makes these compositions a bit more interesting than the use of "conventional" instruments. If the Mark II was replaced with such instruments, you would have an LP quite similar to the one I bought 13 years ago.
I now think of avant garde as experimentation - theories exemplified by the composition. [like the shepard tone in the The Little Boy]. It's not necessarily about writing music to make good music - the recording is the "actualization" of theory. In the case of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, theories are used to write the compositions, and the Mark II "realizes" it. Some of it fits within my old generalization...
...and some does not.
it pays to be open minded.
after re-watching the BBC Four documentary The Alchemists of Sound, my interest was renewed. two things occured to me. 1.) I haven't been listening to any electronic music pre-1969 2.) how the synthesizer would have appealed to the school of avant garde
I checked out The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center to get an idea of what was going on with synthesizers in 1964.
The Mark II synthesizer and collage of found sounds makes these compositions a bit more interesting than the use of "conventional" instruments. If the Mark II was replaced with such instruments, you would have an LP quite similar to the one I bought 13 years ago.
I now think of avant garde as experimentation - theories exemplified by the composition. [like the shepard tone in the The Little Boy]. It's not necessarily about writing music to make good music - the recording is the "actualization" of theory. In the case of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, theories are used to write the compositions, and the Mark II "realizes" it. Some of it fits within my old generalization...
...and some does not.
it pays to be open minded.
Milton Babbit Hates this music.
ReplyDelete..."aye Babbit!"
Sincerely,
-The CTC.