It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs.

What's your take on avant-garde jazz? How about punk rock or sound art?

A lot of modern music skirts the line between beauty and ugliness.

It challenges us to listen differently.

In fact, it's hard to think of any pioneering music that didn't inspire outrage

at first. For example, in the early 20th century, as visual artists started experimenting with abstraction

and surrealism, musicians were experimenting too. David Stubbs is the author of Fear of Music,

why people get Rothko but don't Get Stokhausen.

Jim Fleming asked him why it seems like avant-garde music doesn't get the same respect that

avant-garde visual art does, even though they both got started at the same time, the creative days

of the 1920s. Yeah, and I think they both came from the sort of, same sort of well-spring of of cultural energy and at a certain time, the dawn of the 20th century.

Now, there was a sort of synergy at the time, and people like Schoenberg, you know, Arnold Schoenberg, I'm going to Kandinsky, the painter, they almost like recognize each other's kind of spirit.

Kandinsky looked at Schoenberg and think, well, yeah, that's what I'm doing in painting. And Schenberg looked at Kanzinski and said, yes, and vice versa.

Didn't Schoenberg and Kandinsky even promised to work with each other at one point?

They did. They were going to have some sort of synergized event.

Actually, I'm beginning to wonder whether we simply haven't listened enough to avant-garde music. Yeah, it is marginal. I think abstract art is easier to consume. That's one thing.

I mean, say, a sort of difficult canvas by something, a Rothko. You go to, say, the tape modern and see

something like that, or music modern art, New York or whatever, and it's within your field of

vision. You can spend as much or as little time in front of it as you please. It isn't kind of

all enveloping. Music, of course, it's not like that. Music, say, a piece by Stockhaus,

and you might be there for 90 minutes. You're in for the long hall. Right. Well, I was thinking

about it and realizing that when I see a piece of art that I don't understand. I can look at it, close my eyes, think about it, look at

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