What makes music avant-garde? The name sets out differences from other genres, but it can span improvisation to composition, noise to classical, and so forth. But a lot of avant-garde music has recurring tropes, and those of us who listen to a lot of it come to recognize some of them. In rejecting the usual notes and rhythms of classical and popular musics, numerous musicians have faced the same problems—what should they work with instead?
As a listener to a lot of avant-garde, contemporary classical, and experimental music, I began to notice that a lot of works began on one note, dwelling there for a while before moving on. That one note was usually enriched timbrally in some way or another, sometimes by adding more instruments, sometimes with extended techniques, sometimes with close-range acoustical beating. 8 or 9 years ago, I started keeping a list of these pieces, organizing them by what they had in common. And two weeks ago, my article about these pieces was published in the open-access academic journal Music Theory Online.
My article covers a lot of music, showing that the avant-garde has converged on at least one shared bit of vocabulary: the unison opening. Dwelling on one note encourages attention to drift between pitch and timbre, shifting our listening beyond the note-based norms that much of this music rejects. But the unison opening is also a new norm of its own, showing similar strategies that I trace across a lot of repertoire.
My examples span a wide range of music. The unison opening might have a clear allegiance to acoustics and psychoacoustics, as shown by composers like James Tenney or Catherine Lamb. But it persists in experimental music’s further ranges, from the electronic improvisation of Pamela Z to the jazz/classical/hip-hop fusion of Ambrose Akinmusire. Within the assemblage of genres that we call the experimental or avant-garde, musicians share ideas, and we can hear them doing so.
