WOEBOT

Picked up this great magazine the other day in the bookshop outside Tate Modern. It literally leapt out of the window at me. What it represents is a particularly fecund moment in the lifetime of the British Avant-Garde, a moment so fraught with promise, that it still haunts music today.

While American music is covered splendidly, there's stuff on Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman, it's viewed here through a British prism. Michael Nyman, who performed the key conceptual round-up of the Minimalists with his seminal book on Glass/Reich/Riley/Young, speaks to Steve Reich and Gavin Bryars interviews Morton Feldman.

The Brits could be grouped on an incline ranging from their proximity to the Avant-Garde and their notional "austerity" to their degree of involvement in Pop Culture thus: Cornelius Cardew > Portsmouth Sinfonia > Gavin Bryars > Michael Nyman > Paul Burwell and David Toop > Tom Phillips > Brian Eno.

And maybe it's this interface with Pop which went on to ensure the continuing resonance of the era? For this we have to thank Toop who took these ideas into Post-Punk and framed his writing about Hip-Hop within Cardew's conceptual framework (non-musicians, transgressive social re-organisation and open systems) and most especially Eno because of Obscure Records. Though of course part of the reason the music expanded beyond the boundaries of the hermetic world Avant-Garde music is usually happy to occupy was, not only that it was pungent with ideas and possibilities, but also that ideas of musical democracy were key to its fabric/rubric.

I've gone and scanned in the Eno article and uploaded it here, it's not the most interesting piece in the volume (a quite dry look at the actual limits of probability imposed by Cardew's score of "The Great Learning") but it's interesting from the perspective of its progeny, from the pen of self-professed "Rock Star".