Thirty Minutes Dept. - With The Avant-Garde

Vaudeville funsters Joseph Beuys and Pina Bausch slapstick, yesterday. Copyright Foam-O-Graph© for Artificial Ignorance Corp.

 (This is work in progress, and I'd appreciate some thoughts before I wrap it up.)

Defining avant-garde is as tricky as defining art; a quick study of musicologist brow-furrowing on the subject leads to the conclusion that a precise or useful definition is impossible, due to the extreme variety of works that either claim to be or are cited as avant-garde.

The gimlet-eyed among you will have noted the subtitle to this collection: Volume I Challenging Societal Mores. It includes the type of music that most would agree is avant-garde; the difficult, antagonistic, atonal, dissonant, ugly, joyless, dreary, pretentious ... okay, you get the drift.

I've used as my template Justice Potter Stewart's view on pornography - essentially, I can't define it but I know it when I see it. Nobody is going to whistle this shit in the shower. Volume II, should I recover enough to curate it, will be music that doesn't stray too far from what the man in the street (who is me, woh-oh oh-oh-oh, I talk the way I wanna talk) might consider interesting at worst, enjoyable at best. To shoe-horn Debussy into Vol. I would be ridiculous, but he'll be in swell company for Vol. II.

I already have some of the usual suspects up against the wall for this, but if you have any suggestions, they will be treated with my usual patronising indifference. Please bear in mind that the closer they are to recognisable music, the further they are from the concept. This is one Thirty Minutes that nobody in his - or hey! her! - right mind, or even armchair, would sit through voluntarily.

Use space below for your notes - use regular ballpoint or Sharpie:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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