I thought this was a really interesting analysis which captures a split in my own musical tastes, as an interest in provocative music co-exists uneasily with a desire for collective experience through live music:
Afro-American music is still cherished for its tragic yet affirmative sense of life. But it got shoved aside in the late 1960s, when a wave of “avant-rock” musicians began to adopt artistic ideas and practices from the European avant-garde.8 The most influential of these adoptions was the notion of performance as an assault by a raging, radical, revolté artist on a dull, conventional, bourgeois audience. The contrast could not be greater with the Afro-American understanding of performance as a ritual led by a musician able to channel and express the full range of emotions felt by a beloved community, whether worshipers in a church, dancers in a juke joint, or patrons in an upscale jazz club.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/america-on-the-brink/articles/taming-the-furies
Those collective experiences are inherently integrative, even if they take place within a self-enclosed musical world distinct from the mainstream. However a deeply conservative thought follows from this which I find troubling: is avant-garde music inherently corrosive of social integration?Obviously there can be a shared experience in being ‘assaulted’ by a ‘raging, radical, revolté artist’ but is it integrative? Does it rely upon and reproduce what Donati calls relational goods?
Mark Carrigan 