Post-1945 and terming ‘Avant garde’

I recently finished two books - Paul Griffiths’ Modern Music - The Avant-garde since 1945 (1981) and Since ‘45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art by Katy Siegel. As they both focus on the art world post-1945, I had hoped to better understand in what ways the visual arts and the musical arts are similarly and differently analyzed during the same period in time.

The predominant difference in approach between the books is that Siegel’s study is America-centric, while Griffiths’ focuses predominantly on Europe. Though musical influence from the United States expanded exponentially following World War II, there remained (and remains to this day), a focus on composers of Europe from a musicological perspective. Griffith’s discussion around cultural practice and aesthetics of western classical music, particularly related to the avant-garde, remains European. For the (visual) arts, however, the cultural epicenter shifted to New York following WWII (Siegel 2011, 11). In addition to producing its own art, Siegel argues that past European values like “sophistication”, “history” and “avant-garde” were no longer applicable or appealing to (American) artists after WWII (Siegel 2011, 12). Furthermore, “American artists were seen not as American, but as global” (Siegel 2011, 12). This can be said also of American composers, particularly non-serialists, who began to gain wide-spread international recognition following WWII.

A recent email from a fragrance boutique advertising ‘avant garde perfumes’ reminded me that the word itself is not inherently nefarious. Anything can be avant garde if it is considered new, innovative, radical, experimental or unorthodox. Its appeal, whether in an advertising campaign or assignment of cultural or societal value, lies in its tendency to be initially unacceptable or perceived as unacceptable to a given standard or practice. Understanding avant garde in relation to art goes beyond the content of the art itself and reflects tastes, values and expectations among artists, patrons, and observers. Not only does the labeling indicate only a loose approach, but as Siegel writes, “throwing out the models of avant-garde and academy, and that of a progressive, Hegelian history, we can think more productively of artists who work with extreme ideas, expressions, or forms, not as pushing forward in a single direction but as operating under extreme social and cultural conditions” (Siegel 2011, 16). While there is a chronological and linear trend in art that relates to the aesthetics of its own predecessors, it is also subject to the unique geographic and regional social and cultural distinctions that shape place.

The global significance of 1945 as a time marker hardly needs explanation, but Siegel frames the post-1945 period geographically while Griffiths makes it stylistically. The global shift and focus to American art post-1945 reflected a re-opinion of American culture: “…America had long stood in distinct contrast to ‘old Europe’, and this trope became more pressing than ever after 1945. Up until that moment, the United States had represented a lack of culture, in contrast with European sophistication; after World War II, it came to represent not only the possibility of a radical beginning - and an even more desirable break from the weight fo the historical past - but also the future of modern culture” (Siegel 2011, 19). Siegel argues that western art pre-1945 was European-driven, post-1945 it was American-led. A perceived ‘lack’ of culture by some European artists/musicians/composers persisted into the second half of the twentieth century, but a new found recognition of contribution was a distinct shift from pre-WWII.

This shift in western classical music took place later, around the 1960s. Unlike Siegel, Griffiths argues that the deaths of dominant pre-war artists like Bartok and Webern in 1945 and the diminishing influence of Schoenberg and Stravinsky by the end of the war created a gap: “the year 1945 provides a convenient starting-point for a study of recent musical history, not only by virtue of its political significance but also for reasons more closely connected with the art… 1945 marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, for the composers who have shaped music in more recent times” (Griffiths 1981, 12). The argument is that there was a clear stylistic break, despite the fact that Schoenberg and Stravinsky, even the late-recognized Ives, continued to influence western classical music practice especially in the orchestra life in the United States after the end of WWII. That a post-1945 can be classified as a new stylistic period in western classical music is indicative of a continued focus on European music as the basis of classical music from 1945 until minimalism really became established in New York City as a distinct American style in late 1950s and 1960s.

Griffiths himself divides his study of the post-war period in two - 1945-1960 represents “the advent and transcendence of total serialism” and “the rise of an international avant garde”, while the 1960s-70s demonstrates “a dissolution of the creative fellowship amongst composers” and the rise of “plurality, which is the single distinctive feature of contemporary music” (Griffiths 1981, 12). Though the immediate post-war period until 1960 is presented geographically and chronologically through discussion of the music situations in Paris, New York, Darmstadt and Cologne, it is argued that there is aesthetic and stylistic uniformity between these musical centers. The inclusion of New York as a geographic center is misleading; it does not reflect a movement of ideas from west to east, but rather a “new strain” of European serialism that took hold through Milton Babbitt and others mostly in the east coast academic institutions. Griffiths argues that a chronological and geographical model no longer works post-1960, but the music from this point on ought to be themed by aesthetic (computer music, improvisation, musical theater, the role of melody, etc.).

Rather than picking specific art movements like minimalist, abstract, conceptual, pop, Siegel’s analytical themes are based very roughly on race, capitalism, and individualism (she does not use these terms). I think that this method reflects, or strives to achieve, a greater understanding of the connection between social/societal culture and art culture in American art. As Siegel writes, “…the ideological and marketing structures of the avant-garde, with its associated ideal of higher culture, ahead of its time and in need of interpreting, were not native [to the United States], and did not really ‘take’” (Siegel 2011, 31). Study of art in America, or American art, requires a different framework for analysis and discussion; the various European models, avant garde or others, are not suitable in an American framework. Whether it be because classical music in the United States is a transplanted European tradition or whether it was perceived that mid-century composers were predominantly working from European influence, musicology of this period tends to continue to use European models to explain stylistic development and practice.

However, it is possible to ‘Americanize’ classical music analysis. If one divests of avant garde from its European associations, disassociating it from higher culture and allowing broader audience appeal, avant garde can be applied to the Fluxus and Downtown ‘classical’ art movements on the 1960s more so than the so-called "avant garde” American serialists. Though not discussed as such in Griffiths, the American minimalist music movement in the United States has been described as an avant garde art movement; it certainly broke with institutionalized classical music culture in the United States and was a radical innovation at the time. Griffiths writes, “minimal music appears a peculiarly circumscribed and American phenomenon: American in its ability to ignore most of European tradition (or come to it afresh) and to draw with equal readiness on exotic cultures, circumscribed in its happy neglect of any device for the communication of complex thought” (Griffiths 1981, 181). This readiness to ignore European models and reject a need for complexity parallels the approach by many American artists in Siegel’s study, particularly those involved in pop and minimal art.

Griffiths’ argument about the proliferation of European avant garde aesthetics in the United States post-WWII also requires a separation between composition and performance, or at least composition from operatic and orchestral performance in the United States. The ‘avant garde’ of Europe (Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, etc.) had their own festivals, conductors, foundations (like the Domaine Musical), and publishing houses (like Universal Edition). These systems of performance did not exist in the United States to promote a European-style avant garde. In the US, university institutions and the culture of academia, where many serial composers worked, is systematically very different. However, they ultimately have had a similar function to the European “lingering aristocracy” that fueled “the avant garde disavowal of money” (Siegel 2011, 92). Though different in many ways, both systems established a unique performance culture, sites of performance, and enabled certain musical aesthetics of complexity, experimentalism and difficulty to persist in an increasing capitalist system.

In this regard, I saw a certain commonality between certain artists and the Babbitt, Wuorinen, and Davidovsky as Siegel describes: “…the initial relationship between artists like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning and American society was only deceptively like that of the avant-garde in Europe, in that the artists lacked the characteristic small wealthy coterie of investors, supporters, admirers” (Siegel 2011, 139). Like a European avant garde, these artists and composers existed to a great extent outside the majority of American society. However, “by the mid-1950s… educational and democratic impulses overtook the elite aims of art in America, even as the New Deal and wartime economies gave way to the full flush of capitalist revival…” (Siegel 2011, 139). Whether the impulse was educational, democratic or economic, a ‘middle class’, or popular majority, re-exerted its influence in the 1950s and 1960s. Signs of conflict between popular and ‘high’ art, or middlebrow and highbrow, could be seen in art criticism, music criticism, and programming practices in the concert hall (like my study of 1960-1975 programming practices in New York). Different institutions - galleries, museums, concert halls, orchestras, foundations, festivals, universities - became the home for differing aesthetic philosophies with different audiences and different expectations.

In closing, I admit that writing this post and trying to synthesize these two texts seemed at the outset like trying to equate apples with oranges. What I take away from Siegel’s book is the strength in studying a subject like art not from purely aesthetic or stylistic perspectives, but rather greater societal themes that connect the art with the people that produced it. I also find similarities in the non-European impulses of American art and American composition that developed in the second half of the twentieth century and the global refocus on the US as a cultural producer in non-mass-appeal art (as I try to find new ways to say “higher art” or “elite art”). There are similarities in aesthetic aims and institutionalizing systems between American serialists, and even the American non-serialists like Cage or Ives, and the abstract modernists of the mid-twentieth century. Parallels have been draw also between American Pop and minimal arts with American minimalist composers. What I found myself missing in Griffiths was acknowledgement or discussion surrounding the systems and institutions that perpetuated the composers he focuses on. These are composers that existed, for the most part, outside of the predominant classical music institutions in the United States - orchestras and opera houses.

There is a willingness to ignore the performance aspect of classical music and when discussing mid- and late-twentieth century composers. Even Griffiths does not reconcile the apparent contradiction; in discussion Boulez’s passion for innovation, he writes, “Boulez has been the most vociferous spokesman for this position, despite his work as a conductor in the museum of musical tradition” (Griffiths 1981, 188). Whether one prefers to view orchestral or operatic performance as the mausoleum or the lifeblood of classical music is a discussion for another time. However, ignoring its function and the way it has affected classical composition, especially in the United States, can misrepresent the motivations and impulses for stylistic and artistic choices on the part of composers. Griffiths’ discussions center around Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and Babbitt but what about the structures and systems that made them become so central to the discussion?

Pausing there, as I go start Born’s Rationalizing Culture…

Cited Works

Griffiths, Paul. 1981. Modern Music. 1. print ed. New York: Braziller.

Siegel, Katy. 2011. Since '45. London: Reaktion Books.