Avant-garde music is a term used to characterize music which is thought to be ahead of its time, i.e. containing innovative elements or fusing different genres.
Historically speaking, musicologists primarily use the term "avant-garde music" for the radical, post-1945 tendencies of a
modernist style in several genres of
art music[ Griffiths, Paul, "Modern Music: The Avant Garde since 1945" in Music Educators Journal, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec., 1981), pp. 63-64] after the death of
Anton Webern in 1945.
[Du Noyer, Paul (ed.) (2003), "Contemporary" in the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music. Flame Tree.p.272. ISBN 1-9040-4170-1] In the 1950s the term avant-garde music was mostly associated with
serial music.
Today the term may be used to refer to any other post-1945 tendency of modernist music not definable as
experimental music, though sometimes including a type of experimental music characterized by the rejection of
tonality.
See also
