Zephos is dicking with you guys lol but this reminds me
like, forgetting some wikipedia stuff that may not mean anything to you because just copy pasting stuff doesn't say anything, let me try to help
:::
as a music scholar/shithead tbh i have only ever used the words avant-garde to describe works from a music epoch prior to ours because I think that matter of classification only works in the music century and a half predating when blues music became popular. If i ever call anything past the 50s avant-garde, it will be atonal works like this and I flat out stop using the word after 1970 as a MAX
and honestly? it's easier to call it improvisational, noise, they do other stuff that's kind of leaning more towards free jazz too with scatting and wailing
like if something is being called avant-garde it doesn't tend to be about classifying its sound, it's classifying a method of composition and when shit like this has already been around a while, dang son you sure are the FRENCH VANGUARD! Or something!
Like maybe to someone [1893]'s erik satie's VEXATIONS is avant-garde because it's 840 instances of playing the same few bars in succession on a piano over and over again and it lasts about 9 hours minimum and this was fucked up in the late 1800s when tonal music was being messed around with and aleatoric works hadn't seriously been pondered over, but it's not like it was ever gonna be something more widely seen as kosher or taken seriously until 1900s after his death.
supremo extreme!
[hilariously i've read the instructiosn over before and I'm not even sure if you're SUPPOSED to play it 840 times it's just how everybody understands it and I'm certain if that wasn't his intent, it's better off this way]
i'd buy that. although i think vexations is a lot easier to categorize under "hilarious piano piece"
i've sort of lazily called stuff "avant-[genre]" before as shorthand for implicitness, but I could never have actually seriously classified something as avant-metal, or avant-rock.
When I think avant-garde i just think of a different time and after the 70s, most stuff that's in that range of sound and ideas pretty bluntly tends to fall between improvisational noise and improvisational percussion. Prepared noise or prepared percussion. Sound collages and stuff. free jazz. Things that are very easily classified. Clasifications have to embody both an era and a sound at the same time and avant-garde isn't a very necessar label IMHO
far out dudes bodacious!
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the words avant-garde are also heavily related, to me, primarily to 20th century experimental works (like legitimate sorta-scientific experiments and not just someody unsure of what to call a music genre) where they were messing with electronic instruments for the first time