Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-
language literature, to a compositional tradi-
tion which arose in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, particularly
in North America, and
whose most famous and influential exponent
was John Cage (Grant 2003, 174). More
loosely, the term is used to describe music
within specific genres that pushes against
their boundaries or definitions, or else whose
approach is a hybrid of disparate styles, or
incorporates unorthodox, new, distinctly
unique ingredients (Anon. [n.d.]a).
Origin and some defini-
tions of the term
The term was first introduced by composer
John Cage in 1955. According to Cage’s
definition, "an experimental action is one the
outcome of which is not foreseen" (Cage
1961, 39), and he was specifically interested
in completed works that performed an unpre-
dictable action (Mauceri 1997, 197). In Ger-
many, the publication of Cage’s article was
anticipated by several months in a lecture de-
livered by Wolfgang Edward Rebner at the
Darmstädter Ferienkurse on 13 August 1954,
titled “Amerikanische Experimentalmusik".
Rebner’s lecture extended the concept back
in time to include Charles Ives, Edgard
Varèse, and Henry Cowell, as well as Cage,
due to their focus on sound as such rather
than compositional method (Rebner 1997).
A year earlier, the Groupe de Recherches
de Musique Concrète (GRMC), under the
leadership of Pierre Schaeffer, organized the
First International Decade of Experimental
Music between 8 and 18 June 1953. This ap-
pears to have been an attempt by Schaeffer
to reverse the assimilation of musique con-
crète into the German elektronische Musik,
and instead tried to subsume musique con-
crète, elektronische Musik, tape music, and
world music under the rubric "musique ex-
perimentale" (Palombini 1993, 18). Unfortu-
nately, publication of Schaeffer’s manifesto
(Schaeffer 1957) was delayed by four years,
by which time Schaeffer was favoring the
term "recherce musicale", though he never
wholly abandoned "musique expérimentale"
(Palombini 1993a, 19