This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC wreath lectures.

This lecture in the series The Survival of the Symphony, given by Alexander Goer, was originally broadcast in 1987.

To be avant-garde means being ahead of one's time and going out in front to show the way.

An avant-garde composer is a kind of prophet, telling a truth that isn't yet revealed to all.

But avant-garde music doesn't necessarily have to result from a conscious plan.

A great composer sometimes cuts through prevailing conventions without apparent forethought.

Art is individualism, wrote the Viennese poet Peter Altenberg

in 1912, and individualism is a destructive and transforming force. What art seeks to destroy and transform

is the monotony of type, the slavery of habit, the tyranny of convention, and the degradation of people to the level of machines.

Altenberg pours scorn upon the very notion of common values.

The individual's perceptions are to be placed above everything and in art determine what's good and bad.

He stands in a hostile relationship to the world around him.

Only faith in the self and the absolute commitment to the dictates of the imagination,

which never ceases to stray in the space that has no human paths,

can save the artist and help him to preserve his integrity.

In the years before the First World War,

dressed in the stiff collars and ties of the period,

artists worked in a hostile environment.

Little was available for them except cheap accommodation and cafe life. Composers who didn't happen to be performers had few opportunities to get their

works played or even make a living as teachers if their views happened to conflict with those of the

establishment.

They were sustained only by their sense of mission.

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