A Quote by Jonny Greenwood

It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.
Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel. They'd be strange teenagers if they didn't. But cross-pollinating happens too - Aphex Twin did more interesting things with electronic music than most trained composers, who seemed to approach samplers with undue caution and reverence in those early days.
Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel.
The majority of people probably think that Damien Hirst is avant-garde. Look at the amount of people who say 'What is this rubbish? Who is running our galleries? Why are they spending all this money on the avant-garde?' That doesn't make it avant-garde to me.
Cornelius Cardew very famous in Britain, because he was the darling of the avant-garde, and he played in a band called AMM, which was an improvising band in the '60s. Paul McCartney used to come watch them. Later on in life, he became disenchanted with avant-garde music, because he felt it couldn't reach the public. It didn't have a wide enough appeal. So he'd take these tunes of old English folk songs and write Stalinist lyrics over the top of them. I do think that when he changed to folk songs, he actually lost the tiny audience he already had, which is quite interesting.
If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?
Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.
At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.
I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?
There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.
Melody was banned from music by the composers of the avant-garde. I was unique among them in always using and writing melody and so I think this is why I've shared my music, why they can have also pleasure, not only an interesting structure.
We will have to create an avant-garde.... We could have a Union for the enlarged Europe, and a Federation for the avant-garde.
My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant.
I'm a fan of 20th century orchestral music, the experimental avant-garde composers of the '50s, '60s, and '70s. In horror movies you can write music that if it was performed on the concert stage would have the audience running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. But in a movie all of a sudden it becomes incredibly accessible and appreciated.
The generation of composers that are just preceded me, people like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Pierre] Boulez, and, well, [John] Cage for that matter,[Morton] Feldman ... That was a kind of experimental music that was very isolated. It had no real public.
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