ABSTRACT
Experimental music patently lacks an articulate aesthetic. Precisely this lack enabled a reviewer not long ago to denigrate experimental music as ‘a rather amateurish branch of philosophy and comparative religion, as against a genuinely musical movement’. 1 Paradoxically, the detractors of experimental music include those who speak from a left-wing position. What makes this paradoxical is, as I hope to reveal, that experimental music happens to have implications that derive from, and support, such a position. One difficulty is that these implications are not often expressed at the level of the music’s ‘content’; and current evaluations of experimental music show no awareness of the complexities of the arguments put forward by such radical thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno (among others), who have dealt with the problems of commitment in art, of experiment, and of an avant-garde. A knowledge of their work makes clear that an aesthetic of experimental music could well begin by attempting to situate the theory and practice of experimental music within the framework of arguments advanced by these writers. This essay is such a beginning.
