In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the work of art, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus how the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Cecil Percival Taylor was an American pianist and poet.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Edgar Melvin Sampson, nicknamed "The Lamb", was an American jazz composer, arranger, saxophonist, and violinist. Born in New York City, he began playing violin aged six and picked up the saxophone in high school. He worked as an arranger and composer for many jazz bands in the 1930s and 1940s. He composed two well-known jazz standards: "Stompin' at the Savoy", and "Don't Be That Way".
Franciscus ("Frans") Jozef Brüggen was a Dutch conductor, recorder player and baroque flautist.
Alex Ross is an American music critic and author who specializes in classical music. Ross has been a staff member of The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His extensive writings include performance and record reviews, industry updates, cultural commentary, and historical narratives in the realm of classical music. He has written three well-received books: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Listen to This (2011), and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020).
Robert Choate Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France.
Leon Kirchner was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 3.
Robert Sanford Brustein is an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator. He founded both the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remains a creative consultant, and was the theatre critic for The New Republic. He comments on politics for the HuffPost.
Arthur Friedheim was a Russian-born concert pianist and composer who was one of Franz Liszt's foremost pupils. One of Friedheim's students was Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn, the mother of 20th-century piano virtuoso Van Cliburn.
Deborah Solomon is an American art critic, journalist and biographer. She sometimes writes for the New York Times, where she was previously a columnist. Her weekly column, "Questions For" ran in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011. Later, she was the art critic for WNYC Public Radio, the New York City affiliate of NPR. She is sometimes confused with another reporter, Deborah B. Solomon, who is a financial journalist now working at The New York Times after a long career at The Wall Street Journal.
Joseph Wilfred Kerman was an American musicologist and music critic. Among the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field". He was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Anne Midgette is an American music critic who was the first woman to write classical music criticism regularly for The New York Times. She was the chief classical music critic of The Washington Post from 2008 to 2019, prior to which she wrote for The New York Times from 2001 to 2007. A specialist in opera and composers of contemporary classical music, Midgette advocates the importance of online criticism and has previously maintained a classical music blog. As a freelance writer she published in a wide variety of publications, sometimes covering other fields such as dance, theater, film and the visual arts. She is the co-author of two books, one with Herbert Breslin on his management of Luciano Pavarotti, and another with the pianist Leon Fleisher on his career.
Jonathan Yardley was the book critic at The Washington Post from 1981 to December 2014, and held the same post from 1978 to 1981 at the Washington Star. In 1981, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Neil Burton Rolnick is an American composer and educator living in New York City.
Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include indeterminacy, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements.
Arnold Saint-Subber, usually known as Saint Subber, was an American theatrical producer.
Tom Logan is an American director, writer, producer, acting instructor, and former actor. Based in Los Angeles, he has directed a multitude of feature films and television shows, and directed hundreds national and international commercials.
Isabelle Guérin is a French ballet dancer. She was a member of the Paris Opera Ballet from 1978. In 1985, she received the title of Danseuse Étoile from Rudolf Nureyev. John Rockwell has described Guérin and Laurent Hilaire as "two of the Opera Ballet's greatest stars". She danced classical and modern repertoires until her retirement in 2001.
Robert Paul Commanday was an American music critic who specialized in classical music. Among the leading critics of the West Coast, Commanday was a major presence in the Bay Area music scene over a five-decade career. From 1964 to 1994 he was the chief classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, following which he became the founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice in 1998.
