I was just wondering, what makes a piece of music experimental? If a band is classified as, say, experimental rock, what criteria do they have to fit to be named so? What makes experimental music different from "regular" music?
the song structure and instrumentation. Pop and a lot of rock follows a familair verse verse chorus verse chorus bridge type organization.
basically, if it's trying to see how something sounds, or just trying to break out of the norm, it's experimental. Of course, the term can get really confusing, because some bands copy 'experimental' bands sounds and get the label for themselves...
There's a lot of scope, really. Someone like Conlon Nancarrow really was experimental: he used a player piano to compose and perform pieces which would be humanly impossible long before the invention of sequencers, because he got sick of working with musicians. This is why, when people go on and on about how innovative Jimi Hendrix was for titting around with feedback a bit, I punch them in the tits. Experimental music isn't usually a musical experiment in the scientific sense, it's more an exploration beyond one's own norms. It's a very personal and subjective thing though; a American who writes music for oud might seem experimental in his own country, but would probably be pretty straightforward in the Middle East.
