Final answer:
Avant-garde modernist composers shared a goal of pushing musical boundaries by creating new sounds, redefining traditional structures, and challenging audience expectations with innovations such as atonality and twelve-tone music.
Step-by-step explanation:
Despite their different approaches, avant-garde modernist composers shared a unified goal. This goal was to challenge and expand the boundaries of traditional music. At the core of the avant-garde music movement was the desire to innovate and explore new possibilities in sound, composition, and performance. Composers like Berlioz, Strauss, and Wagner made progressive strides, questioning the established norms and experimenting beyond the comfort zones of their audiences.
While each composer had a unique method and style, they shared the pursuit of creating a new musical language. Arnold Schoenberg's exploration of atonality and the twelve-tone scale, for instance, radically altered the musical expectations set since the Renaissance. This system of scales musicians had relied upon for centuries was reimagined, introducing dissonance and unconventional notes to elicit a fresh response from listeners. His work greatly influenced the avant-garde movement although it remains less mainstream in terms of listener popularity.
The modernist movement, inspired by the call to "Make it new," did not only impact music but extended to art, architecture, literature, and beyond. The innovations introduced by modernist composers, such as the deconstruction of tonality and the creation of new scales, were precursors to broader changes in the cultural paradigm. Composers of the Romantic era also challenged older conventions but continued to value classical forms and rules. This illustrates the complexity of the artistic evolution towards modernity.
In summary, the goal shared by avant-garde modernist composers was to redefine and reconstruct the musical experience, subverting the expectations that had been ingrained in Western audiences, and introducing radical, sometimes divisive, but nonetheless influential concepts and compositions.