Musings on the Avant Garde, Part 1

Much of what has been termed the avant garde can be better understood as the expansion of the aesthetic governing a given medium to fill a new space created by technological innovation. So, for example, when Impressionist painters began working more quickly and in the open air, they sought to create sketches that captured a given moment rather than working from a quick sketch to create a highly refined finished product. Likewise, swing music -- and the swinging syncopations of jazz in general -- would never have been popularized before sound recording. While musical notation allows for a composer to stipulate a swung beat, precisely how much the beat should be swung could never be practically specified until real time recording occurred. It is maybe not an accident that "groove" specifies both the idiosyncratic rhythm of a piece of music and a specific feature of the material conduit (i.e. the groove on a vinyl record) for that medium.