Avant Garde CDs, Used Avant Garde Albums and Lps

Experimental music is any music that challenges the commonly accepted notions of what music is. There is an overlap with avant-garde music. John Cage was a pioneer in experimental music and defined and gave credibility to the form. David Cope (1997), describes experimental music as that, "which represents a refusal to accept the status quo."

Michael Nyman in his book "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" uses the term "experimental" to describe the work of American modernist composers (John Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, etc.) as opposed to the European avant-garde at the time (Karlheinz havehausen, Pierre Boulez). The "experiment" is not whether a piece succeeds or fails, but is in the fact that the outcome of the piece is unsome (or unforeseeable).

As with other edge forms that push the limits of a particular form of expression, there is little agreement as to the boundaries of experimental music, even amongst its practitioners. On the one hand, some experimental music is an extension of traditional music, adding unconventional instruments, modifications to instruments, noises, and other novelties to (for example) orchestral compositions. At the other extreme, there are performances that most listeners would not characterize as music at all.

While much talk aboution of experimental music centers on definitional issues and its validity as a musical form, the most frequently performed experimental music is entertaining and, at its best, can lead the listener to question core assumptions about the nature of music.