Is it possible to make Avant Garde and ground breaking music and have it be accessible to a general audience?

Is it possible to make Avant Garde and ground breaking music and have it be accessible to a general audience?

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Yes look at Death Grips

Beethoven's 9th

Why would you want to, the normie are gonna fuck it up anyway.

It depends on how the concept of experimentation and avant garde composition is approached.
If you make atonal bleep bloops that never repeat once for 20 minutes like Stockhausen, no.

Faust did it.

no but if your music is genuinely groundbreaking it will probably influence artists who will reach a general audience
see: robert johnson and the guy in your pic

>ground breaking
>doesnt realize they just copped niggy tardust

Magenta Circuit

radiohead is the epitome of this

No. They taint everything they touch and wouldn't accept truly groundbreaking stuff.

>Radiohead
>avant-garde and groundbreaking

Listen to more music you dork.

Really? With which album exactly?

only if you layer the sarcastic contempt that manifests revolutionary ideas within plebified arrangements that dummies will never see past

Autechre

Why would you want to? I'm not even sure it's technically possible.

Robert Johnson wasn't especially innovative or avant garde, he was just the best at the time and relatively well recorded. Blues had been around for 20-30 years before that, Charley Patton has a better claim of being the innovator. Assuming you meant that Johnson.

This.

/thread

I wouldn't say this is ground breaking and some of the tracks aren't particularly accessible, but it's the closest thing I can think of.

The Mothers of Invention took a lot of avant garde elements and put them in a rock context at least, definitely groundbreaking while still being pretty recognisable

>avant-garde while still accessible
Isn't that the while motto of the minimalists?

true but I think OP meant more general by "general audience"

Also Autechre's earlier albums, while great, aren't avant-garde/groundbreaking so maybe a key if you want to accomplish this is to start wiht more accessible musi cthen start breaking ground. Captain Beefheart did the same thing as Autechre now that I thinka bout it

If they mix it with pop music. Lots of avant garde musicians have made incredible pop songs.

Depends what you mean by general audience really. Complete ""normies"" or people with even just a basic interest in music because the former will always just want a dancey beat and lyrics to sing along with.

>Also Autechre's earlier albums, while great, aren't avant-garde/groundbreaking
only incunabula maybe

amber and tri repetae were pretty far ahead for their time

IV

this No normie would ever listen to autechre

I was actually only referring to incunabula/amber. I think Tri Repetae is pretty avant-garde for sure.

Disagree with amber being avant-garde though, I feel like there was plenty of music like that by 94, but it's a great album.

It was being done technically for millennia. But it got a lot tougher come the 20th century because thanks to high levels of technological advancement and globalization, even art got affected to the extent where the most groundbreaking, avant garde stuff is often impenetrable to the layman.

Otherwise I think minimalism has done a somewhat decent job of it...sort of since all it really did was apply South Asia and Southeast Asia concepts (that have existed for a long time) to western music.

Otherwise there was Free Improvisation I guess? Not everything to come out of free jazz was always chaotic, some of it was the opposite.

There's also music AI style avant garde, which isn't dependent on SOUNDING impenetrable. But this may not count as it's more just sheer technical/technological.

no one will make anything ground breaking ever again - music has gone to all extremes and explored everything in between

Got to No. 2 in the UK singles chart
youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE

Yeah, Anatomy of the Heads is doing a good balance act
youtube.com/watch?v=4tZamFKyPwM

People with small brains said the same thing in the 1500s

The problem with that approach is that often the avant garde elements become no more than decorative elements or weird interludes or whatever.

No it's really true, at least in the sense that you can't make anything now that "challenges the definition of music"; that was taken to its furthest possible extent already in the 60s. Literally anything can be music, it's impossible to add anything more to that. What's "new" now is more based around combining various things in novel ways.

The way I see it is like early mediterranean explorers circumnavigating africa or vikings reaching north america. yes, they may have gone to the farthest point, but there is such a huge amount of uncharted territory between where you started and where you went.

it's like just because you proved that free form jazz is music doesn't mean there isn't an incredible amount of things in between that and simple folk music.

like Autechre is a good example. did people go 'further out' before? yes. But did anyone explore anything like what autechre has explored in some of their works?

people didn't come up with new genres by fusing separate ones, it's other by pure coincidence or made by someone who's really creative and not jaded

autechre is your answer

>But did anyone explore anything like what autechre has explored in some of their works?

Well, yeah kinda
youtube.com/watch?v=lYSEtGhHLyw
youtube.com/watch?v=45PQX_2j1Y0
youtube.com/watch?v=QZdC2fNhhls

Microtonality is a good example of that. There's a lot of territory to be explored there.

Typically avant garde means it doesn't have a regular pulse or hummable melody. Typically Autechre even stick to 4/4 time signatures. They only rarely color outside those lines.

none of this is like autechre

>animal collective

It is impossible to make truly avantgarde music that is totally accessible to anyone even moderately normie. Avantgarde is to be against societal trends, ideals, values. Why would a normie like something that goes against them?

this
I would say the vast majority of "casual" music listeners would say one of two things about avant-garde: one, it's "not music," or two, "this sucks."

ehhhh I wouldn't say autechre's done anything truly avant-garde. groundbreaking, sure, but avant-garde?

avant garde just means new, novel, unlike previously existing things in some way
isn't that the same thing? it's groundbreaking if it's new and nothing else sounds like it. that's what avant-garde? the word avant literally means you're there before someone else is, though I guess one interpretation of that only applies to people exploring the edges of what is possible, and not the people digging out the unknowns in between and making them known

>isn't that the same thing?
nah. avant-garde pushes boundaries for sure, but avant-garde music doesn't necessarily need to be groundbreaking. groundbreaking would be something that is innovative, but doesn't need to be avant-garde. I suppose a good example would be certain styles of guitar playing.

i don't know what you mean

avant-garde, by it's very definition, is not accessible. groundbreaking can be accessible.

so it doesn't need to be groundbreaking, and it's necessarily not accessible. so if something is totally impenetrable but is not new/groundbreaking in anyway whatsoever, it's avant-garde?

of course

desu user is right

stravinsky, ravel, debussy, prokofiev were all considered the avant garde in their time. it's only in the late lwentieth century that avant garde came to mean unlistenable garbage

Or if they deconstruct them like Philip Glass.

no
by definition avant-garde means inaccessible
>avant garde just means new, novel, unlike previously existing things in some way
not a good enough definition imo
to me, avant-garde means "unorthodox production methods that produce sounds that exist beyond the traditional boundaries of music"
"unorthodox production methods" can mean an uncommon use of traditional instruments, sound created by objects that aren't normally considered instruments, manipulation of previously recorded material, or even the manipulation of sound as a physical entity
a sound exists beyond the boundaries of traditional music when it lacks any combination of these elements:
>formal structure
>clear rhythm
>consistent tempo
>recognizable harmony / melody

you and your kind are the reason that modern music is in the toilet

yeah I think that's fair. a lot of early musique concrete and electroacoustic music is avant-garde, but stuff by people like iannis xenakis would be considered groundbreaking

explain

duh bitch

who is that?

actually avant garde music almost always has a quite elaborate formal structure, I can't think of a lot that doesn't

how the fuck has no one mentioned Steve Reich yet

pretty much the entirety of free improv doesn't

yeah, and also stuff like Eliane Radigue, but I think that's about it. For the most part it's meticulously organized.

I really only think his process music stuff counts as avant garde

>by definition avant-garde means inaccessible
>avant-garde, from French, "advance guard" or "vanguard", literally "fore-guard"
>ahead of its peers
>advance group in any field
>setting foundation for what is to follow
how do you get inaccessible from this