Freak Out: The 1960s Musical Avant-garde Revisited Essay -- Musicals

Freak Out: The 1960s Musical Avant-garde Revisited â€Å"This is my happening and it freaks me out!† Z-man Barzel in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) The title of this essay â€Å"Freak Out: The 1960s Musical Avant-garde Revisited† invites me to explore the explosion of new ideas that permeated many forms of western musical expression in the 1960s. When I was given a new course to teach at the University of Guelph called â€Å"The Musical Avant-garde† (2002) no one could quite tell me what they meant me to teach, except that it would cover all that â€Å"difficult music† of the second half of the 20th century. By this my colleagues meant serious European art music by gold-plate composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, and Gyorgy Ligeti. Shortly after the end of WWII, the â€Å"new music† coalesced around the Darmstadt summer courses in composition where these young European composers, cut off from each other during the war, rediscovered the music of early 20th century modernists such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and especially Anton von Webern, and were inspired by their radical ideas of creating new systems for composing music. Young European composers didn’t try to write music like Schoenberg and Webern, rather they took to heart these composers’ basic principles: the idea of pre-ordering musical elements (serialization) and the idea of treating each sound as a discrete event, independent of the sounds around it. From these two premises, all sorts of exciting new ground was opened up – from rigorous compositional control to the notion that one could choose to leave things wide open to chance - so that by the 1960s musical elements such as tone colour and texture took the place of tr aditional ha... ... our site but under no conditions are the texts and images to be copied and mounted onto another site server. Researchers using the site should accredit it following standard MLA guidelines on how to do so. Correct citation of information from the site is as follows: Waterman, Ellen. Sounds Provocative: Experimental Music Performance in Canada. University of Guelph. 2005. . This research has been approved by the Research Ethics Board at the University of Guelph who can be contacted at 519-824-4120 x 56606. The project is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the College of Arts, and the School of Fine Art and Music, University of Guelph. Copyright  © 2005 Waterman, Ellen. Sounds Provocative: Experimental Music Performance in Canada. University of Guelph. All Rights Reserved