The Brooklyn Rail

This past year was the centennial of one of the greatest avant-garde musicians of the last 150 years, someone who was not only an essential figure inside the world of art music, but whose work has been heard by millions of people. There’s a crucial difference though between being widely heard and widely known, and certainly the number of people who know such an artist is a smaller percentage than those who have ever been exposed to their work. Perhaps that’s why, despite the easy marketing of a one hundredth birthday of a famed (via the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey) artist, only the New York Philharmonic put any real effort into celebrating the life and work of György Ligeti.

Across five concerts, the Philharmonic played a concentrated representation of the different stages of Ligeti’s career, from his early music when he was working his way through the influences of Bach and Bartók, through his “clocks and clouds” period of hard core avant-gardism, to his later music where he picked up the pieces of the compositional tradition he shattered and put them back together in a way that recognized history while creating entirely new ideas. The central event in all this was an incredible concert by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who mixed together Ligeti’s Etudes with etudes and bagatelles from Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy. Surrounded by metronomes from an opening performance of the composer’s Poème symphonique, for one hundred metronomes, Aimard not only underlined what is self-evident, which is that Ligeti’s Etudes are of the same aesthetic and historical stature of those of the older greats, and played so brilliantly that it began to sound like Chopin and Debussy learned lessons from a composer born well after their deaths.

But this is less about Ligeti and the strange lack of interest in him than in the hole he left in the musical avant-garde when he died in 2006 at the age of eight-three. We’re a quarter of the way into this new century, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the living avant-garde in music, the literal cutting edge that marks the point where the present is urgently pressing its way into the future. Or at least where it used to.

“Avant-garde” (and “experimental”) gets tossed around promiscuously in contemporary music writing, but as the saying goes it does not mean what many writers think it means. There is an historical modernist avant-garde legacy that goes back to the Futurists and wound its way through John Cage and the New York School, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Conlon Nancarrow, Cathy Berberian, Can, Steve Reich and the early minimalist composers (including Meredith Monk), spectralists like Kaaija Saariaho; all this coming through in a sound world and ethos that connects drone music, noise, improvisation, even punk rock and electronic music. It’s easy to find this music on Bandcamp, or catch it live (see the two articles that precede this one), and it can be exciting and fulfilling to hear—it’s often made with skill and judgment and passion. But it’s avant-garde as a genre, not a practice. It revives historical ideas the same way playing a Mozart sonata does and doesn’t push music past where it currently is to where it might someday be.

This is a loss, one no less puzzling than the lack of attention to Ligeti. It can’t be possible that there are no avant-gardists out there—music has always had an avant-garde, that’s how knowledge about how to make and form music has developed and accumulated for thousands of years. And there are outposts of the avant-garde in Europe and South America, Africa and Asia. But where in America? Where in New York City, which has been the central point for avant-garde and experimental arts for two hundred years and more?

The avant-garde genre is not a bad thing to have around per se, but when it stands in place of the actual avant-garde, people taking chances and not knowing exactly what they’re doing and being willing to fail while aspiring to discover things they hadn’t anticipated, the result is stagnation, and that’s a problem. And a paradox.

The last revolutionary period in American music happened across genres from the 1960s to arguably The Sex Pistols’ last performance and RUN-D.M.C.’s eponymous debut album. There were several posts- after that, post-minimalist, post-punk, post-rock, and there was also the rapid and pervasive administrative demand that musicians and composers had to have conservatory training and, especially for the latter, advanced degrees. The criteria for a PhD is ostensibly advancing scholarship in a field, but the musical product that has been coming out of the PhD programs (and the arts administrators who come out of their own programs) in practice has been reinforcing a consensus about what deserves credentials.

Making music is also really, really expensive, not just in terms of cash but time, especially the time that must be stolen one way or another to get musicians together to rehearse and prepare for gigs and concerts. Conservatories and graduate schools are great places to steal that time, and their infrastructures cover some of the costs. But to work there, and get opportunities after, you need to be part of the consensus.

The idea of the avant-garde is to be against any such consensus, to break out past it and move tradition to a new place. Avant-garde as genre is another consensus, and one that Ligeti would never have belonged to. The foundation to his greatness was his individuality, which he may have held with particular strength after his dangerous escape from Hungary during the brief and doomed revolt against the Soviets in 1956. Ligeti never wanted to belong to the Western modernist consensus, nor did he want to be identified as part of any avant-garde. He just wanted to be himself, to the point where he even mocked Cage with his Three Bagatelles, for David Tudor, a parody of 4’33”. Aimard used this as an encore, first talking about Ligeti’s joy and humor, then sitting down to play the single C-sharp of the first movement, and pretending to play the keys for the remaining movements. It was irreverent, and that’s where the avant-garde lives.