The title of this essay “Freak Out: The 1960s Musical Avant-garde Revisited” invites me to explore the explosion of new ideas that permeated many forms of western musical expression in the 1960s. When I was given a new course to teach at the University of Guelph called “The Musical Avant-garde” (2002) no one could quite tell me what they meant me to teach, except that it would cover all that “difficult music” of the second half of the 20th century. By this my colleagues meant serious European art music by gold-plate composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, and Gyorgy Ligeti.

Shortly after the end of WWII, the “new music” coalesced around the Darmstadt summer courses in composition where these young European composers, cut off from each other during the war, rediscovered the music of early 20th century modernists such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and especially Anton von Webern, and were inspired by their radical ideas of creating new systems for composing music. Young European composers didn’t try to write music like Schoenberg and Webern, rather they took to heart these composers’ basic principles: the idea of pre-ordering musical elements (serialization) and the idea of treating each sound as a discrete event, independent of the sounds around it. From these two premises, all sorts of exciting new ground was opened up – from rigorous compositional control to the notion that one could choose to leave things wide open to chance - so that by the 1960s musical elements such as tone colour and texture took the place of traditional harmony in creating musical structures. Take for example the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s 1961 piece Atmosphères. Here Ligeti works “at a more complex level than that of individual notes and intervals, handling streams of coloured and textured time” (Griffiths 7 – liner notes). Ligeti slowly builds buzzing clusters of static sound that are at the very centre of the work’s formal organization.

Now I love the European music of this period, but as I began to try to define “the musical avant-garde” I found myself gleefully listening to a wide span of music whose experimental impulses had always turned me on. Here I’ll explore some different notions of the musical avant-garde (and its corollary – experimentalism) as they apply to music of the 1960s. We’ll visit various territories including popular music, jazz, feminism, even Canada in an effort to unpack the assumptions behind academic discourses on ‘avant-garde’ and ‘experimental’ music.

The “Freak Out” of my title, by the way, stems from Frank Zappa’s first album of the same name released in 1966 – not to be confused with Chic’s 1977 disco mega-hit “Le Freak”. As Andrew Boscardin has written “Arguably rock music's first true "concept album," Zappa's aural collage mashes together chunks of psychedelic guitars, outspoken political commentary, cultural satire, and avant-garde musical sensibilities, and then hides it all under cleverly crafted pop melodies.” Zappa, as is well known, was greatly influenced by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (who died in 1965), and had even composed a few early serial pieces after the style of Schoenberg, while still in highschool. (After he finally heard them, he abandoned the style since he didn’t like the way they sounded.)

To be sure, Zappa’s experimental work (such as the collage aesthetic of 1967’s Lumpy Gravy) is not stylistically similar to Ligeti’s, but it does bear many of the hallmarks of post WWII avant-garde music. Its eclectic materials are tightly ordered, carefully orchestrated. It makes use of texture and tone colour as structural devices, employing electronic music, and also extended instrumental techniques (such as plucking the strings of the piano). In my view, and certainly as I teach my course, Zappa is a natural choice for the Musical Avant-garde, but it’s remarkable how widespread this experimental tendency is in music of the 1960s. (There are many, many popular musicians that I look at in my course on the Musical Avant-garde – from punkers to prog rockers to riot grrrls. Try listening to Jimmie Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner – not as an anthem of Woodstock, but for it’s avant-garde innovations in texture, timbre, and instrumental technique. Very cool)

Avant-garde: According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
avant-garde is a term derived from French military history where it signified an advance group clearing the way for the main body of troops. The connotations of frontiers, leadership, unknown territory and risk accompanied the term as it was appropriated for and by artists. An early instance of such appropriation was Saint-Simon's proposal that artists might serve as an ‘avant garde’ in the establishment of his new secular and scientific utopia ( Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, 1829). This is of some significance, as it already suggests that an avant-garde might be motivated both by intellectual specialization and by social dissent. (Samson)

In Western music scholarship since at least the mid-19th century, the avant-garde has been linked closely with modernism, as distinguished from both bourgeois classical music, and from commodified popular music. Whether one is talking about Arnold Schoenberg’s protective, anti-commercial stance (exemplified by his Society for Private Musical Performances) or the “subversive, anti-bourgeois protest associated with Dadaism and surrealism, [and] given musical expression by [Eric] Satie,” the musical avant-garde of the early 20th century sought to distinguish itself from the mainstream of art and culture through the continual development of startling new ideas both in musical structures, and in musical contexts (Samson). Across a wide range of aesthetic expression, avant-garde music remained critical and rebellious. By the Second World War, however, the term ‘avant-garde’ had come to be associated with a more institutionalized notion of artistic development. As Jim Samson has noted, Theodor Adorno (Schoenberg’s champion):

distinguished between the spirit of the early 20th-century avant-garde and the New Music of the 1950s and 60s (Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti). This too has been labelled an avant-garde, and some of its devices (multiple serialism, electronic composition, aleatory procedures and so on) described, often pejoratively, as ‘avant-garde techniques’. Certainly the New Music shared with early Modernism the commitment to a specialized, progressive and ‘authentic’ art, and to a ‘rhetoric of endless innovation’ (Williams, 1989). Yet there is also a sense in which it represented an ‘official’ Modernism, supported by the institutions (‘growing old’ was Adorno's formulation), and as such it was far removed in tone from the explosive, campaigning and dissenting Modernism of that earlier period, when the bourgeois-romantic project of greatness reached its apotheosis.

In the Post WWII era, the notion of avant-garde music became fractured along two lines – the institutional avant-garde of serious young European composers, and the experimental music of United States composers, led by John Cage. Depending on who is talking, either term may be used to praise or to damn. For Michael Nyman – author of an influential 1970’s treatise on Experimental Music, post WWII European art music was “conceived and executed along the well-trodden but sanctified path of the post-Renaissance tradition” (2). For Nyman, the inaugural moment of experimental music was John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds of 1952. In this work, the performer in a formal concert appearance makes no sounds at all, drawing the audience’s attention to the environmental sounds in the room, which Cage argued ought to be perceived as music. Experimental music flourished in the circle of composers influenced by John Cage (David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and LaMonte Young), and with the 1960s socialist British composers such as Cornelius Cardew and his Scratch Orchestra. Cardew, who had been Stockhausen’s assistant for a couple of years around 1960 completely repudiated avant-garde music as elitist. In Cardew’s The Great Learning of 1969 (based on texts of Confucious), the Scratch Orchestra, made up of large numbers of musicians and non-musicians more or less thrown together at random were to sing, play, and drum in a semi-improvisatory manner. “Each of them, whether amateur or professional, was to enjoy exactly the same rights as his or her colleagues…Only when the work was actually performed was the process of creating it complete” (Liner notes Cardew – The Great Learning).

In contrast to Nyman, Roger Smalley dismisses experimental music because he feels that it reduces musical complexity to its lowest common denominator, agreeing with critic Heinz-Klaus Metzger’s 1959 assessment that experimental music “implies that the composers have not mastered their methods …; they are more tinkerers or mad scientists than accomplished artists” (qtd. in Mauceri 189). Smalley is also skeptical of experimental music’s political or metaphysical claims. Quoting Cage, who describes his music as not ‘an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.’” Smalley exclaims “Really? Try telling that to the starving millions; once they have got rid of their niggling desire for a little food I am sure they will be only too ready to agree with you” (24). But is there really such a great divide?

We can begin to understand the conceptual distance between ‘avant-garde’ and ‘experimental’ music by analysing two works from opposite sides of the avant-garde/experimental divide, both written in 1952: Structures I (Pierre Boulez) and Music of Changes (John Cage)

Structures I was Pierre Boulez’s first attempt to create a musical form in which every parameter was pre-determined. Pitches, rhythmic values, dynamics, and articulations were each ordered as series and expressed in charts, and then the composer rigorously followed the logic of those orderings. (This process is called integral serialism, and represents the composer’s rigorous controlling of the musical materials. Boulez describes this as a composers’ responsibility.)

John Cage’s Music of Changes is his very first piece composed by using chance operations (called aleatoric processes). Cage used the ancient Chinese oracle - the I Ching or “Book of Changes” to determine each compositional decision. The idea was completely to remove the composer’s ego from the compositional process. In fact, in practical application, Cage’s aleatoric method was not so very different from Boulez’s total serialism. First Cage set up complex tables with 64 possible permutations of each parameter. “The I Ching indicates action as a result of six tosses of three coins (or yarrow sticks)” (Cope 82). By matching the resulting hexagram with its correlative number in the book, Cage could then apply that number to, say, his pitch chart and thus know what pitch to use. (So once he’d figured out what pitch to use, he’d have to go through the whole process again to see how loud that one pitch was supposed to be, and then again to see how long it was supposed to last etc. It’s a laborious process – Music of Changes took 9 months to compose!) Both composers were committed to the rigorous application of a pre-compositional plan, a structural tenet that continues to underwrite modernist compositional styles today. And both composers created works that are extremely difficult for performers to realize, since the task changes almost literally from note to note. (I should note that both composers subsequently composed more flexible – and more interesting – pieces.)

If the avant-garde and experimental traditions were both rigorous and demanding, both invested in exploring new territory, then what’s at stake in the academic arguments over their value? One answer is a kind of national chauvinism. A definition for ‘experimental music’ is found, not in Grove Music Online, but in the specialized New Grove Dictionary of American Music. Here (British and other experimental composers notwithstanding) Experimental Music is identified as “simple” but “bold” and mainly an American tradition. The NPR radio series “American Mavericks” http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/ (rebroadcast on the CBC in 2004) is steeped in an ideology of American ownership of experimental music from Harry Partch to Henry Cowell, from Charles Ives to John Cage and his circle, to minimalist composers like Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, and members of the New York downtown scene like John Zorn. Experimental music is often presented as proof of American innovation and the pioneer spirit.

Mauceri notes that:
The motivations and effects of this opposition can be traced to cultural, technical, and institutional differences that are implicit in the distinction between European and American vanguards. First the category ‘experimental music’ attempts to construct a tradition of original American art music that aspires to the kind of cultural authority that European concert music enjoys. The category asserts a cultural difference against a background of European culture’s powerful influence and authority. (191)

But of course, early American experimentalists were much influenced by the early 20th century radical breaks from tradition in European music (from Luigi Russolo to Satie to Schoenberg). “The important point” he insists, “is that the category “experimental music” is motivated by a European ideal. The category draws on the “discourse of originality” that characterizes art theory and criticism, and has its roots in the European avant-garde…The uniquely American “experimentalism” is legitimated as an artistic category according to the terms of European culture; it tries to ‘up the ante’ on European avant-gardism by claiming a more radical originality. (191) Also contrasted was the state-supported European artist, vs. the independent American artist. “Central to ‘experimental music’ as an historical category is its claim to outsider status. The struggling (Bohemian) artist, a traditionally romantic European figure, is recast in the mold of American rugged individualism” (193).

What Mauceri fails to interrogate in his analysis of the political stakes around avant-garde prestige is the number of people left out of the discourses on both avant-garde and experimental music. For the rest of this essay I’ll briefly sketch out some examples of avant-garde and experimental musics’ Others.

Jazz
It’s important to state at this point that the term “avant-garde” may be found within all manner of musical discourses. For example, with the advent of Ken Burns’ popular television documentary on the history of jazz (a history curated by the conservative Wynton Marsalis), jazz (itself a much vaunted “original American music”) was represented as having a classical repertoire (including swing and bebop) and a problematic avant-garde repertoire (including the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, the space-age jazz of Sun Ra, and the politically organized jazz of the AACM – all dating from the 1960s). For example, Coleman’s iconic Free Jazz is a 37-minute improvisation with no harmonic structure, and very few pre-determined parameters (except the order of the solos). The two quartets feature respectively Ornette Coleman on alto sax and Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet; trumpeters Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard; drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell; and bassists Scott la Faro and Charlie Haden.

From a conservationist perspective, free jazz betrayed the historical character of classical jazz – by abandoning its highly developed harmonic structures and studied improvisational technique. Free jazz didn’t need composers. By its putative abandonment of structure and technique, free jazz seemed to its detractors to call the cultural respectability of jazz into question. Tellingly, this anxiety coincided with the connections between free jazz artists and the Black civil rights movement on the one hand (Chicago’s AACM or Association for the Advancement of Creative Music replaced the term jazz with Great Black Music), and with the rise of European Free Improvisation groups – such as AMM in Britain (which came right out of the experimental music milieu and included composer Gavin Bryers.).

While the avant-garde may be a disputed territory within jazz, trombonist, composer, and jazz scholar George Lewis has noted a more insidious discourse at work in the erasure of jazz from broader academic discourses on the ‘avant-garde.’ Lewis notes the “coded qualifiers” in academic discourse about innovative music after 1945 “experimental”, “new”, “art”, “concert”, “serious”, “avant-garde” and “contemporary” – are used in these texts to delineate a racialized location of this tradition within a space of whiteness; either erasure or (brief) inclusion of Afrological music can then be framed as responsible chronicling and ‘objective’ taxonomy. In a classic essay reprinted in Fischlin and Heble’s book The Other Side of Nowhere, Lewis gives the trenchant example of the Art Ensemble of Chicago being mentioned in Schwartz and Godfrey’s Music Since 1945 because “their music was as much ‘serious’ or avant-garde music as jazz”. (202, qtd in Lewis). Lewis traces the division in texts on avant-garde music between the use of “chance operations” – which is seen as a legitimate compositional technique and “improvisation” – which when linked to jazz is seen as stylistically derivative (the recycling of known licks). In this turn (advanced among others by Adorno and Cage) “jazz’s supposed dependence upon memorized motifs prevents it from exemplifying ‘true’ improvisation-despite its practitioners’ experience of it.” It’s astonishing, actually, that a composer as similar in orientation to Karlheinz Stockhausen as Anthony Braxton is not included in texts on 20th century music.

Women
In my own experience of texts on 20th century, avant-garde and experimental music, women similarly suffer from erasure or, at best, tokenism. In brief, there are three who are reliably mentioned (at any rate in books written after 1980): Pauline Oliveros (an early pioneer of electronic music); Laurie Anderson (whose multi-media performance art straddles popular and art music categories); and Meredith Monk (composer, singer, dancer/choreographer, and filmmaker). All three have made great contributions to the musical avant-garde, but it’s a bit discouraging to see the same people repeated from source to source (they’re all American too). Just as the discourse around the avant-garde and experimental music is nationalized, and racialized, it is also masculinized.

Here’s a great example! In a course I teach on 20th Century Music History, I rely on a 3-CD set of 20th century pieces put out by the French company Montaigne. It’s useful in that it covers a wide (European) territory from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. One out of 22 pieces was created by a woman. French bassist, improviser and composer Jöelle Léandre crosses many borders – she’s a major figure in free improvisation, and is a valued member of new music ensembles . Hommage a j..., created in 1984, is in the form of a tape composition “which skillfully incorporates the kind of sounds that one most readily associates with [John] Cage.” (liner notes). In the extensive liner notes to the 3CD set From One Century to the Next (which in all other cases describe the composer) Léandre is simply not mentioned. Instead, there is a brief note about the influence of John Cage on 20th century music. (When I mentioned this to Léandre, she told me that she had no idea her piece had even been included on the compilation.)

Canada
Finally, I want to touch on the vibrant experimental music scene in Canada. I promise you that you will hardly find a reference to Canadian composers or performers in any text on the musical avant-garde or experimentalism (or for that matter in a mainstream 20th Century music survey) with the single occasional exception of R. Murray Schafer. This is an appropriate inclusion, given Schafer’s innovations in creating compositions that take into account the relationship between sound and the environment. Schafer’s massive 12-part Patria Series of environmental music theatre works was begun in the mid 1960s. The project was sparked by his first foray into theatrical composition – the bilingual work Loving from 1965-66, which was conceived for television, and broadcast on French CBC-TV. Here was innovation indeed. Robert Ashley’s much touted opera for television Perfect Lives was begun in the mid -1970s, was first performed as a stage work, and didn’t receive its television premiere until 1984 (in Britain).

But there is much evidence to suggest that the 1960s saw the flowering of what is today a vigorous and cross-disciplinary experimental music tradition in Canada. For example, the 1960s saw the first new music series in Canada (at the Av Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, curated by Udo Kasemets); it saw the formation of the Artists Jazz Band (which included Michael Snow, and is a tradition continued in the CCMC), and the formation of the cult noise ensemble, the Nihilist Spasm Band. By the very early ‘70s, institutions such as Array Music in Toronto, and the Western Front in Vancouver had been created. The Music Gallery, Musicworks Magazine, Vancouver’s New Orchestra Workshop and the Montreal women’s experimental music collective Supermusique were all developed in the 70s, and all continue to exist today.

My current research project, Sounds Provocative: Experimental Music Performance in Canada, is a comparative ethnography of experimental music at 8 festivals and 3 full-season venues that span the country. They include artist-run centres, jazz festivals, new music festivals, electronic music festivals, and sound art festivals. Canada is host to a truly amazing array of national and international musicians each summer. Particularly inspiring to me are the multi-faceted composer/performer/improvisers who cross fluidly between genres – from popular to jazz to art manifestations of creative, innovative, musicking. Perhaps the most experimental music flourishes in obscurity!

Click here for a list of resources in Canadian Experimental Music.

Works Cited

Boscardin, Andrew. “Editorial Reviews.” (Accessed 16 August 2005) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000009RT?v=glance

Cardew, Cornelius. “The Great Learning.” Liner notes (1971). Bedford Two Poems; Cardew The Great Learning. Deutsche Grammaphon, 2002.

Cope, David. New Directions in Music. Seventh Edition. Prospect Heights, Ill.:Waveland Press.

Lewis, George. “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajan Heble. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. 131 - 162.

Griffiths, Paul. “Wien Modern: works by Nono, Ligeti, Boulez, Rihm.” Liner Notes. Wien Modern. Vienna Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado. Deutsche Grammophon, 1990. 6-8.

Mauceri, Frank X. “From Experimental Music to Musical Experiment.” Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), 187-204.

Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. London: Studio Vista, 1974

Samson, Jim. “Avant garde”, Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 15/08/05)

Smalley, Roger. “Experimental Music.” The Musical Times, Vol. 116, No. 1583 (Jan, 1975), 23-26.