Perhaps even more than Cage's 4'33", these works by Young, Brecht, and others seriously challenge our preconceptions regarding the requirements for a musical performance. In 1961, Young composed a series of 29 pieces, Compositions 1961, all of which were repetitions of a previous work Composition 1960 No. 10 (which was the work with the instruction "draw a straight line and follow it"). He had rejected the assumption that a composition needed to be different from works written before it. At the same concert, Henry Flynt, a mathematics student who had left Harvard University to work on a book linking avant-garde aesthetics and mathematics, refused to include a piece on the program. Flynt explained that the works on the program--even Young's Compositions 1961--were not bold enough for his tastes. He therefore did not present a work and decided to schedule a concert of his own pieces that was to be performed in his own mind.[34] Flynt referred to his own as well as Young's compositions as "concept art" and is perhaps the first person to use this term. Both Young's and Flynt's "word pieces" began to move away from the art equals life paradigm because they entailed a level of philosophical abstraction that did not refer to the real material world.

Maciunas admonished several of the founding members of the Fluxus movement for their "anti-collective attitude." In 1963, Dick Higgins and Allison Knowles presented a series of Fluxus concerts in Sweden without Maciunas's approval. As a result, Knowles and Higgins were excommunicated by an angry and overzealous Maciunas. The ease with which the movement began to splinter as a result of such an insignificant set of circumstances points to an observation made by George Brecht and several other artists associated with Fluxus. Brecht warned that it may be a mistake to consider Fluxus a movement since it encompassed an extremely wide variety of artistic personalities and activities.[35] Maciunas's influence had kept the movement together and when his leadership began to falter, Fluxus began to fall apart. A devastating blow came in 1965 when Maciunas and Flynt decided to picket a performance of Stockhausen's Originale because of the composer's alleged racist remarks concerning African-American music. Many of the performers in the concert were also members of Fluxus and the demonstration failed miserably. It may have marked the beginning of the end of the Fluxus movement. Fluxus continued until the late 1970s and many agree that with Maciunas's death in 1979 the movement also perished.

III

This essay began by citing a commonly held observation that avant-garde art is no longer possible at the end of the twentieth century. Whether this claim is true, however, depends on our understanding of a term that has been defined and redefined in a variety of contexts. In its well-known military usage, the avant-garde constitutes the leading edge of an invading force. Similarly, in aesthetics and cultural history the avant-garde functions as a vanguard paving the way for developments in artistic language.

But the meaning of the term is far more complex, for it embodies socio-political as well as artistic issues. The notion of an avant-garde was first applied to the arts in the early nineteenth century by the utopian socialist Henri de Saint Simon. Saint Simon envisioned a society led by artists and scientists--an avant-garde whose role was to act as a socio-political vanguard spearheading a radical transformation of society.

The association of the avant-garde with socio-political radicalism continued in Europe throughout the nineteenth century.[37] However, despite its long-standing historical association with political radicalism, avant-gardism today is often solely equated with artistic activities that have little or nothing in common with philosophies dedicated to social change. Radical innovation and experimentation have in many cases become the sole criteria for the avant-garde.[38] For example, the Ars Nova, the New German School, and the post-World War Two generation of composers including Boulez and Stockhausen have all been characterized as avant-garde movements.[39] Such a general definition of the avant-garde, however, is not without its difficulties because innovation and experimentation are not the only prerequisites for avant-gardism.

But defining avant-garde aesthetics solely in terms of radical stylistic changes does raise an interesting question that relates to the history and the purported demise of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Since innovation and experimentalism have been hallmarks of so much twentieth-century music, it is reasonable to wonder whether we have exhausted our creative resources and to question whether any significant progress is now possible. Moreover, the very notion of stylistic development may not apply to late twentieth-century music. Composers today do not hesitate to juxtapose quotations from remote stylistic periods and, as a result, style has been objectified and divorced from its context within the historical continuum. We have arrived at a point in time which, as Frederic Jameson has observed, "all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of these styles in imaginary museums."[40]

Today, there are so many schools of composition that is it is very difficult to speak of common threads within the history of late twentieth-century music. Postmodern cultural theorists, in the face of the present-day confluence of stylistic orientations, have claimed that a unified and teleological view or "meta-narrative" of history is no longer possible. Without a single mainstream it is difficult to apply notions of progress and innovation in the same way that these concepts have been used in the past. Assuming that a meta-narrative of history in the arts is no longer viable, innovation is no longer dynamic and the avant-garde seen as the forefront of radical stylistic change loses its relevance.

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