Music, the Avant-Garde, and Counterculture : Invisible Republics

Abstract

This book studies how the complex relationship between music, the avant-garde, and counterculture challenges all sorts of boundaries. By exploring the avant-garde as a thoughtful inquiry into experimentation, creativity, and originality, we bring to the fore the "invisible republics" of culture, the ephemeral, the suppressed, and the unconformity of artistic and political undercurrents. Avant-garde and experimental art are international in scope, and their trajectory, as we see it, has been to expand themselves towards a new enlightenment, a critical project, and a rhizomatic entity, albeit with tacit harmony and cohesion. From Bucharest to Paris, London to New York, Paris to Brazil, Cuba, or Chile, to name a few, the same urge for the unknown and anti-art poetics emerged almost simultaneously in every field. We ask how these separate geographical territories (and practices) speak to each other and how this might reshape scholars' historical understanding of European and American modernity. This is an open access book.