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From: gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Re: mainstream avant-garde?
Message-ID: <201@astroatc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Oct-85 11:11:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: astroatc.201
Posted: Wed Oct 16 11:11:07 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Oct-85 21:15:22 EDT
References: <850@decwrl.UUCP>
Reply-To: gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP (The Rev. Thinning Weasel Foliage)
Organization: Astronautics ATC, Madison, WI
Lines: 81

Good old Karl Malik comes once again to the aid of the maligned avant
garde: Doug seems to have performed a neat ahistorical shift wherein
several of his favorite performers are on the cutting edge by virtue
of mediating between what we'd historically call the avant-garde (we're
talking both high culture and those parts outside of high culture that
get co-opted by high culture) and what is "popular". 
Neat trick, but I don't think that you could call that the cutting
edge without laying out all the extra baggage that such an argument
packs: For starters, it's possible that the confusion of the idea
of "cutting edge" (thank you MTV) with the historically grounded
formal notion of an "avant-garde" is at the root of a lot of Karl's
(and my) difficulty. Secondly, I'd say that it's pretty debateable
that anyone who mediates between the avant-garde and the public
like KB or PG counts as the edge. I'll try out of courtesy and
the desire for self criticism to gracefully avoid the
problems of the kind of elitism involved in knowing about someone
who's popular and yet unpopular here, because there are very few of
us who avoid it successfully (Conlon Nancarrow? Merzbow? Anthony
Braxton?). That's a kind of power and secret knowledge all its own,
isn't it. A currency we can scarecely avoid using, and one traded
readily in the marketplace. The insatiable hunger of the Machinery
of Music demands novelty to run. Maybe we should be talking about *that*
Rather than debating the relative deification (reification, maybe...)
of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush (much as I respect them, I am a 
monotheist)). By Doug's definition, the cutting edge is sorta like
the bridge between Asgard and the lower worlds, and KB the messenger
who commutes between the two. Her work is extremely useful, as
is Gabriel's...but I wouldn't call that cutting edge. Maybe a different
way to look at it is to find someone who does a sort of work that is
formally similar to what the "mediators" are doing and hunt up earlier
and more flawed versions of the samea stuff that didn't make it.

If this begins to sound a little like the arguments on historicism 
raging away in net.religion.christian, its because its the exact same
kind of issues. Are we talking succeses or are we talking *winners?*

>>People like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, I feel are definitely on the
>>cutting edge.  (In fact, the most important cutting edge.)  
>
>Ah, so there's more than one?  If so, we're talking about apples and
>oranges.  If you're talking about well-made, sophisticated, complex,
>popular music that is still accessible, then yes, they belong there.

Bravo. And let's add the little codicil about wondering why *they* are
so successful about it where others fail. Doug would, I suspect, don
his Romantic garb and argue "genius". How about you, Karl?

>>They (innovators) may tend to use a lot of
>>knowledge that already exists about music, rather than just throwing
>>away the book, like a lot of avant-guarde musicians do, but that's
>>probably an even better approach.  It means I can relate to it (because
>>how music is perceived is largely a cultural phenomenon), rather than
>>just saying, "Hmmmm, that's interesting".  Distortion of what you
>>already know is much more powerful emotionally than things totally new.
>>Just ask any surrealist.

A couple of quarrels here. Your assumption that the avant-garde
throws out the book is, I think, a little naive. Certainly they
question the Orthodox notions of whatever discipline, but you've 
loaded your description of them somewhat by suggesting something
other than the fact that the AG traditionally isolates the central
(and occasionally hidden) notions of the mainstream and them tweaks
that in such a way that the assumptions are made visible. What's at
stake here is a question of emphasis rather than rules. One could argue
further that in the present era the book is never "Thrown out" at all
because the AG now operates with the self-consciousness that in some
way they *are* Orthodox.

I am not sure that a Surrealist would readily accept your notion of
distortion. Given the S. interest in the way that the unconscious
world pokes into the "real" conscious world, they might easily
argue that what you'd call a distortion is the true shape of the
sign in the real world rather than the "illusion" of the predictable
construct. This view does little to defend PG or KB, though.


-- 
_____________________________________________________________________
die lange nachte ist viel zu heiB/ich traume nur noch in rot/die welt 
da-drausen is swartz-weiss/nur eine farbe tod/oh biko................
Gregory Taylor/ (wherever)!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor /Madison, Wisconsin