Ozark Soundscape (and my other musical projects)

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 Dean wrote:

 Andy Webb wrote:

My one piece of constructive criticism is learn music theory. Know all your scaled and chords and progressions and whatnot. Not that I think you should apply them to your music because obviously that's not what your trying to accomplish, but I believe it was Picasso who said first you have to learn the rules before you can break them.

There is a lot more to that quote than mere literal meaning of the words. It's not just learning the rules but knowing how to apply them, in Picasso's case this was not just knowing the rules of pigment, composition, perspective, light and shade and all the technical theory of painting, but knowing how to use them, break them and then use those new rules within existing rules:

...painted by Picasso when he was 12 - he can paint, but there is still a juevenile quality to the composition and you don't get the sense that the girl is actually sat on the chair, or that the chair itself has any dimension or substance - we can see the back, but there is no indication that the rest of it even exists from the girl's posture or positioning.

Four years later, we get this:

Eventhough we cannot see the chair the doctor is sitting on very clearly we know it is there, the painting conveys the substance and dimension of the chair by the composition of the painting and the positioning of the doctor in relation to the chair.

...and from that (if you follow his painting chronologically) is a progression of applying the rules and breaking them that leads to cubism, neoclassicalism and surrealism in his work:

Woman in an Armchair - painted when he was 29 - heavily abstracted and superficially nothing like the previous two paintings, except that it is a similar subject to the first and shows all the compositional merits that the second possess. It is abstract but there is nothing random or improvised about it, it is avant garde but it is still following the rules of composition in the use of light and shade, balance, focal points and all those other techniques that depict the substance and dimension of the chair without showing it realistically.

For me this is what separates good avant garde music from random notes - the use composition and the use of music theory "rules", breaking those rules knowingly and resolving them effectively (or at least satisfactorily)

Oh god yes, that quote is far deeper than the textual meaning, but I was just making a point. Picasso was an undisputed genius of his craft and a master at the pure philosophy of artwork. 

On avant-garde music, I completely agree. There's a big difference between "avant" music that is just to be avant (perhaps Metallica's Lulu), and then "avant" music that goes against the stream of music for a purpose (such as Henry Cow, Univers Zero, etc)

Edited by Andy Webb - September 10 2012 at 19:25