Integrating the Postmodern Avant-Garde: Art Music(s) at the Intersection of Improvisation

Abstract

In the wake of World War II, American artists and musicians participated in a cultural shift, with dramatic consequences. Musicians and artists engaged with postmodernism through experimentation. They were searching for new possibilities, creating a work that consists of a “field of relation,” or a framework, from which the artist improvises. I posit that avant-garde jazz and avant-garde classical music were not as separate, as they are most often regarded, but a single impulse concerned with expression of intuitive, process-oriented music that grew from a few examples in the first half of the century to a true movement of American experimentalism in the 1950s. Considering composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman alongside Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Sun Ra enriches our understanding of the experimental impulse. While these musicians were from different backgrounds most of them were formally educated in music; they studied the Western European canon, absorbed the music(s) they heard around them, and transformed what they learned into new works. The power dynamic between classical and jazz, serious and popular, heavily influenced the way American pan-avant-garde music was received. Intellectual African American contributions to American culture as a whole have been veiled until the last few decades. This study is an attempt to offer a strategy for the study of postwar American experimentalism. Students who primarily study the Western European canon would benefit from learning about avant-garde jazz as it would provide more context and vice versa. If jazz history courses and history of Western music courses adopt this definition of American avant-garde, students will leave the classroom with a broader understanding of American music.