Avant-Garde

Avant-garde is the umbrella term for music that deliberately breaks with the conventions of its time, testing new systems of pitch, rhythm, timbre, form or performance. It spans the concert-hall experimentalism of composers such as *John Cage* and *Karlheinz Stockhausen*, who introduced chance operations, electronics and spatial sound, and the underground rock and improvisation scenes that adopted the same label, from *The Velvet Underground* and *Captain Beefheart* to free improvisation and noise. What unites the category is intent: the work positions itself ahead of accepted practice and treats that friction as its subject.