Kevin Sutton wrote:

>...  But one more question/observation:  Most of the avant garde works
>that people have mentioned are either from the 60's or by composers
>who flourished in the 60's and are still around.

That's not surprising, because the 1950/60s were the years when composers
really experimented and therefore could be called avant-gardists.

>Who is in the current avant garde and what are they doing? I am not
>trying to be a smart-ass here, I really want to know.

The interesting thing is that it's the older composers - the ones who
were avant-garde in the 1950-60s (the generation born in 1920s and earlier)
- who are really modern nowadays while the younger ones tend to be
conservative.  Even the avant-gardists from the generation born in 1930s
turned around and became conservative.

So who's writing really modern stuff nowadays? It's still Boulez, Ligeti,
Stockhausen, Xenakis (when did he die? about a year ago, I think), Berio.
Nono died about 10 years ago, and wrote modern stuff until the end.  The
old, 1920s-born guard.  Still avant-garde.  Of older ones, Carter (now in
his 90s), Babbitt.  They are still more modern than the next generations.

Then there are people writing mostly electroacoustic music, nowadays
specifically computer music, such as Paul Lansky or Larry Austin.

Except of Lansky's works (a sort of musique concrete), I'm a bit out
of this loop, but I can suggest:  Lansky's works on several Bridge CDs
and the computer music series on Centaur (various composers from various
centres).  Personally, I feel that while the analogue electronic music
(1950/60s) brought very interesting artistic results very soon, the digital
electronic music didn't.  There were some interesting computer music works
by Jean Claude Risset and by John Chowning - but that was late 1960/70s -
but not all that much really exciting development afterwards.  When one
think what primitive techniques Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer had at
their disposal in 1950 when they were composing "Symphonie pour un homme
seul", one of the first musique concrete works= , created within the first
few years of the existence of electroacoustic music, one can't help being
amazed.  (Similarly, Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge" is a fairly early
(1956, I think) work of electronic music and stupendously beautiful.) And
one can't help being a bit disappointed that when digital electronic music
became possible, such masterpieces just didn't happen.

I suspect that we have to wait a bit for the next wave of avant-garde.

The pendulum always swings, and right now the young composers are the
conservatives and conservative music is "in".  Maybe a new avant-garde is
already growing up, but I don't hear them yet.

-Margaret Mikulska