The work of the avant-garde is typically only of interest to other artists, true, but those other artists are influenced by what they see, and it reflects in their work, which in turn rattles a yet larger circle of artists, and so on. This is the trickle-down theory...
That bit rather rocked me back on my heels. I don't know whether any of the composers here explicitly regard themselves as 'avant-garde' (though I, and I suspect many others, would so regard them) but I haven't picked up any suggestion before that they are writing/performing typically for other artists. That may be (partially) true
de facto but it isn't the aim, surely? And wouldn't any composer, avant-garde or not, regard themselves as having failed if they appealed only to fellow composers?
Well, very little music that might be described as 'avant-garde' in the loosest sense has anything other than a small minority audience, and which is certainly heavily slanted towards people themselves involved in the new music world. In concerts here of such things, almost always I know at least 95% of the audience, and a similar situation often applies in a lot of concerts of more radical music in Europe as well. A further argument could be made that a lot of people go to such concerts as much for networking purposes as anything else. And the rest of society is blissfully unaware of and uninterested in such work. That's not a situation I welcome, by any means, but would that mean they have 'failed' in the way you are describing?
And I'm not sure where this leaves us hapless non-artists in the 'trickle down' picture. Is it really the case that, typically, we wait for someone to convert the ideas in avant-garde works ('for artists' eyes only') into other simpler works that we can then cope with. It doesn't feel like that.
I find it hard to imagine - though I suppose some could argue that such a process occurs when, say, stylistic aspects of avant-garde music are appropriated into film music, and the like?
What seems to happen far more often is that (some of) the avant-garde works themselves eventually find a wider audience, rather than the watered down versions that they might have spawned. It's the latter that disappear: it's the former, if they are lucky, that become canonic. No?
I'd love to believe the above, but don't think it holds up. How many such avant-garde works, certainly from the post-1945 period, have really found a 'wider audience'? The nineteenth-century mythology of the artist unrecognised and disdained in their lifetime, but vindicated by posterity, really doesn't seem to be applicable that much in the 20th, however often it is regurgitated. It remains the case that an awful lot of even early 20th-century music, certainly that of an atonal variety, has not remotely won any sort of wider audience that can compare with that for music of earlier centuries (or that for Rachmaninoff, Puccini, or other late romantics). In terms of works becoming 'canonic', that is essentially an artificial procedure enacted through cultural and educational institutions, which still reflects elite tastes. I'm not saying that phenomenon is in all senses a bad thing either, but we shouldn't pretend that it is anything else.
