What is experimental music?

Other questions :
How does John Cage work with sound?

Is there such thing as musical silence?

What is a sound in-itself?

What is experimental music?

Experimental music is supposed to change consciousness. What is changed

and why?

What is the route from experimental art to social transformation?

Experimental music is definable perhaps only by the process from which it comes into being.
It is a praxis rather than a genre in the traditional sense of the term, a term that implies identifiable
generic features. It is a music that is anti-genre, but not intentionally so. Its outsider status is the
product of an innocent curiosity for play and exploration, rather than of a destructive approach to
existing forms and aesthetics. Experimental music is music that is “trying” new approaches and
processes, not “striving” to define itself in relation to an existing model, whether by adoption or
opposition. It deliberately explores areas of expression outside of the normative, which in turn exacts
from the listener to listen without familiar points of reference. As a result of this, experimental music
delays, if not suspends, the need for evaluation and judgment, because all of the traditional evaluative
tools and criteria that the audience might be used to will prove themselves completely irrelevant in
that particular instance. After a brief survey of the history of experimental music, this essay will
investigate the possible epistemological roots of the movement and discuss some of the problems and
controversies surrounding experimental music.
Experimental art has come into existence in the early 20 th century, as a consequence of the
Modernist agenda who rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and futurism, which was
concerned with the machines’ roles to play in art and in everyday life. Early examples of experimental
art include Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Luigi Russolo’s noise music (1913-4). However,
if early examples were indeed interested in redefining the rules and demanding a new way of
experiencing art, they were still interested in the creation or destruction of a canon. Fountain was
essentially an attempt at mocking the establishment and was submitted to the Society of Independent
Artists in New York with the desire to shock and be refused. Similarly, although Luigi Russolo’s
noise music concerts (1913-1914) can be seen as experimental (as they don’t use the conventional
orchestra instruments but noise instruments instead) without any intention to provoke the
establishment, his 1913 manifesto “anticipates” the existence of a futurist orchestra made up of six
families of noise instruments replacing the traditional families of strings, woodwinds, brass,
percussions (etc.) and the development of audiences’ "multiplied sensibility, [which] having been
conquered by futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears, and . . . every workshop will become
an intoxicating orchestra of noise.", therefore implying that his initial “experiment” will ultimately
become normative. In the example of Fountain, although we can draw similarities with experimental
art in the originality an unorthodoxy of approach, the obvious desire for aggressive controversy in
relation to a generally accepted norm is contrary to the innocent character that experimental art will
become associated with after the World Wars. On the other hand, the Russolo example is not anti-
establishment, but, on the contrary, aspires to be the foundation of a new establishment, which is
again not what experimental art seeks to do.
Interest in the practice of experimenting gained real momentum after the 2 nd World War, in
the 1950s and 1960s. These two decades saw the emergence of experimental art as a disciplined,
conscious practice. One can observe a shift of artistic priorities: whereas before artists were
experimental until they found an idea that they committed to explore in depth and turn them into a
system (see the two examples discussed above: Duchamps’ ready-mades and Russolo’s noise music),
artists were suddenly interested in carrying out single, isolated experiments, and the more different
they were to each-other, the better. One sees this rather clearly in the work of one of experimental
music’s main exponents and theorists: John Cage. His work is very difficult to describe because of the
breadth of his artistic, experimental endeavours. His work shows that he was not interested in
systematizing every new idea he had – on the contrary, he seemed to have made it his duty to keep on
finding new processes to follow. A common obsession within experimental art and music exists
around permutations, combinatorics and the number of possibilities. The study of probabilities is very
appealing to the experimental artist as it provides the incentive to keep working, systematically,
through them all, and connects with the ideas of “discipline” and praxis that it is linked with. In this
sense, experimental art neither (and also both) Classical and Romantic: it connects Art with the
disciplined and craft-centeredness of classicism but also admits that through this conscious refusal to
use one’s taste (a very Classical notion), one is able to transform and transcend their nature and reach
a new state, which in itself is quite a Romantic idea.
There are a number of problems and controversies around experimental art. For a start, its
ambitions of asking the audience to engage with the art independently of any other past experience
cannot be realistically realised without a substantial amount of discourse to explain how to listen
“freshly”, which is very paradoxical. Secondly, the fact is that, experimental art, although
fundamentally different to conceptual art as the former relies on the following of an original praxis
and the latter relies on imbuing the artwork with a particular idea often end up looking quite similar.
Therefore, experimental artists must have a firm belief in the power of intention, and in that the
process of an artwork’s creation, i.e. the part that the audience does not witness, is the most
characteristic and valuable thing about it. In 1996, George E. Lewis denounced this idea as being
conductive to racist ideologies, notably around the question of the invention (and therefore, cultural
ownership) of ‘improvisatory composition’, or ‘indeterminacy’. He quotes Anthony Braxton in his
essay, who says: “Both aleatory and indeterminism are words which have been coined ... to bypass the
word improvisation and as such the influence of non-white sensibility" (Braxton 1985, 366). He is
saying that there was a refusal to endow two artistic results with the same value despite their
similarity, and suggests this refusal was made on grounds of race. This statement exposes the crux of
the problems and paradoxes in the relationship between process and result. Many art movements that
emerged in the 20th century tended to give less importance to the result than in the process. This,
accompanied by the intellectualist and elitist tone of the discourses explaining the process (see
Morton Feldman’s conversations with Francesco Pelizzi for an idea), is often met with skepticism by
audiences, who either wonder about the sincerity with which the process was carried out, or simply do
not see the value of privileging process over result. This supremacy of the establishment in deciding
what counts as high art was well summarized by American art philosopher and aesthetician George
Dickie, writing in 1974: “There is no property of being a work of art other than being deemed to be
such by authorized members of the art world”. A last problem with experimental art and music is that
its “experimentalness” is temporary, and what was deemed experimental yesterday has become
normative today. There is a natural process of “embourgeoisement” for ideas: now the prepared
pianos of Cage and musique concrete, things that were considered experimental as they redefined the
relationship we have with sound, have lost their novel element and are instantly recognized and
labelled by music students. The passing of time has made it impossible to listen to these works
“afresh”, or at least, listening to the works of John Cage come with a comparable amount of pre-
conceptions as listening to the works of Mendelssohn does.
To conclude, one could question the validity of the process-centeredness of experimental
music as being somewhat utopian, because of its desire to combine childlike, innocent
experimentation with effective intellectualist and elitist agendas. Experimental music not only seeks
to redefine what it means to produce music but also redefine the role of the artist within society. The
artist is not bound to produce anything worthwhile, but is expected to search and keep searching.

Bibliography
Feldman, M., & Pelizzi, F. (1986). A conversation on music and art, February 16, 1986.
Kostelanetz, R. (1993). Not wanting to say anything about John Cage. Chicago Review Vol.
38 No. 4, 169-180.
Dickie, G. (1974). Art and the Aesthetic, an institutional analysis.
Russolo, L. (1913). L'arte dei Rumori.

Names of experimental musical artists may include John Cage, Fluxus artists, Morton Feldman,
Cornelius Cardew, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Maryanne Amacher, Conlon Nancarrow, Arnold
Schoenberg (he died in 1951). When considering historical events or factors that might have permitted
or accelerated the interest for experimental art, one might suggest the realization that societies and
societal norms had the power to estrange people from a personal relation to reality and lead to
extremes such as fascism. Experimental art was then an attempt at reconnecting with spontaneity of
approach

John Cage, Fluxus artists, Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Maryanne
Amacher, Conlon Nancarrow, Arnold Schoenberg

This movement really blossomed after the Second World War, with many artists choosing to write
about what experimental art meant to them, notably: John Cage,

Anthony Braxton

Asemic writing, Oulipo

Admiteddly, the initial unacceptability of experimental art can only be temporary. Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s web of meaning expands as years go, and the experimental of yesterday might soon
become familiar and therefore, judgeable.

Controversies and problems with experimental art.

1. Even though it asks for audience to experience it ‘freshly’ and free of labels and
language, it has to engage in extensive forms of discourse with the audience to ask
them to let go of their preconceptions.
2. The intentions of experimental art are fundamentally different from those of
conceptual art, but the results of the two are often indistinguishable since both will
result in “off-topic” creations.
3. The “embourgeoisement” of experiments is arguably unavoidable