avant-garde

literature

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  In novel: Avant-gardism

  Many innovations in fiction can be classified under headings already considered. Even so revolutionary a work as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake represents an attempt to show the true nature of a dream; this can be regarded as a kind of Impressionism pushed so far that…

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• France
  • 
    In French literature: The avant-garde

    These dislocations and disruptions were the dynamic that generated a violent and vigorous resurgence of the avant-garde, attacking the bourgeois rationalist certainties they held responsible for Europe’s decay. The Dada movement, founded in Zürich in 1916, joined forces with the writers clustering round the…

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music

• Antheil
  • In George Antheil

    …artistic circles of the Parisian avant-garde. Antheil’s most celebrated work, Le Ballet mécanique, scored for player pianos, automobile horns, electric bells, and airplane propellers, produced a hostile outcry in Paris (1926) and New York (1927); on its revival in 1954 it was considered fairly tame. In 1936 Antheil moved to…

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• Berio
  • 
    In Luciano Berio

    …leading representatives of the musical avant-garde. His style is notable for combining lyric and expressive musical qualities with the most advanced techniques of electronic and aleatory music.

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• Brown
  • In Earle Brown

    …the leading American composers of avant-garde music, best known for his development of graphic notation and the open-form system of composition.

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• Ligeti
  • 
    In György Ligeti

    …composer of the branch of avant-garde music concerned principally with shifting masses of sound and tone colours.

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• Penderecki
  • 
    In Krzysztof Penderecki

    …a leader of the European avant-garde. His later works include the two-part Utrenja (1969–71; Morning Prayer), Magnificat (1973–74), Polish Requiem (1980–2005), Cello Concerto No. 2 (1982; Grammy Award, 1998), the opera Ubu Rex (1990–91), and the choral work Phaedra (2002).

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• Satie
  • 
    In Erik Satie

    …his musical aesthetic, epitomized the avant-garde ideal of a fusion of art and life into an often startling but unified personality. He sought to strip pretentiousness and sentimentality from music and thereby reveal an austere essence. This desire is reflected in piano pieces such as Trois Gnossiennes (1890), notated without…

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• Stockhausen
  • 
    In Karlheinz Stockhausen

    …serial music who strongly influenced avant-garde composers from the 1950s through the ’80s.

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painting

• Jack of Diamonds
  • 
    In Jack of Diamonds

    …years the leading exponents of avant-garde art in Russia. The group’s first exhibition, held in December 1910, included works by the French Cubists Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, and André Lhote; other paintings were exhibited by Wassily Kandinsky and Alexey von Jawlensky, both Russian artists then living in Germany. The…

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• Kandinsky
  • 
    In Wassily Kandinsky: Munich period

    …an active animator of the avant-garde movement in Munich, helping to found in 1909 the New Artists’ Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung). Following a disagreement within this group, he and the German painter Franz Marc founded in 1911 an informally organized rival group, which took the name Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue…

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theatre

• France
  • 
    In Western theatre: Avant-garde in France

    At the beginning of the 20th century, France was the international centre for innovation in the visual arts, but such was not the case with the theatre. In Paris theatres were dominated by wealthy patrons eager for the farces of Georges Feydeau…

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• United States
  • 
    In Western theatre: Off-Off Broadway and regional theatre

    During the 1960s, a strong avant-garde theatre movement known as Off-Off Broadway emerged in New York City. The name is a play on the term Off-Broadway as well as a geographic description: most of these venues tend to be far removed from Broadway theatres—indeed, some have argued that all American…

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