Hi everybody.
Busy semester, as per usual. Last of 'em too. I've got a really BS class about "The World's Music" with is sort of a watered-down ethnomusicology class that I've been required to take, even though for what it applies to helping little kids become musicians, I could've just spent a couple evenings in the local public library.
Any case, there's an essay requirement about examining, from sort of an ethnomusicology perspective, a music that we are already familiar with, because apparently... a good essay should
not be ..a.. research paper? (And I thought I was getting an education.)
So I'm posting the prompt for the essay, followed by what I wrote, which is 3 times as long as the meager 1000 words he was asking for and not expecting to get from anyone. I'm asking that you correct where I may be off base, saying things about prog that sound right but aren't, or where I over simplified, entirely missed the point, or whatnot. Even though the professor expects
shit for an essay I'm going to give him a damned good one in any case, because
that's how I roll.PS. Oh damn, I forgot a few content areas, but I can correct that later. So now it will be 4 times as long...
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Music 171: Introduction to the World's Music
Donald A. Henriques, Ph.D.
Questions
Writing Assignment #1 (1000 words)
Write an essay of 1000 words on a type of music that you are familiar with. This music may be for instruments, vocals or both. The purpose of this assignment is to create your own narrative that addresses the following categories. You may address these in the order of your choosing. However remember that this is a WRITING assignment is NOT a research paper and that your essay needs to be well constructed and clearly written. Use Thinking Musically to support your responses, however refrain from direct quotations. Specific guidelines will be forthcoming.
The following are questions that should be addressed in some way within your narrative.
In what way(s) does this music have meaning for you? How is that meaning constructed? Provide the context in which you experience the music and why that context has special meaning(s).
Describe the musical instruments used in the making of the music. How does these specific instruments contribute to the overall sound? Do these the instruments themselves have special significance? (gender-specific, ritual, spiritual associations, cultural status, etc.)
Time: How is musical time reflected in this music? Does the beat tend to be "regular and constant?" In general, describe the rhythm of the music. What is the "feel" of the rhythm? Does the rhythm have regular or irregular patterns? Does the rhythm itself have any special significance?
Pitch: Does this music have an easily recognizable melody? Describe the overall shape of the melody in terms of pitch. Does it cover a wide or narrow range of pitches? Are there expressive reasons for this? Describe the harmony. Would you characterize it as generally consonant or dissonant? Why?
Musical Structure: Describe the overall structure of the music. Are there improvised sections? Are there dramatic changes in tempo, rhythm or melody that indicate sectional changes in the music?
How is this music typically transmitted among the musicians? Does it have a written tradition?
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Sean Lowrie
16 February 2010
Progressive rock, boiled down, and made significantly less interesting than it actually can be, at certain times, that is.
The music referred to as "progressive rock" is a music near and dear to me, one that I grew up with and became intimately familiar with, never mind the fact the records of the music were recorded anywhere from twenty to ten years before I was born. Since I've taken up music and as I've become a musician in my own right I've gained more and more insight into what is progressive rock, what it meant, and what its legacy is.
First off, the term itself is fuzzy as fuzzy can be. What I will be specifically examining is the "prog" of the 60s and 70s, which was mainly an English phenomenon, but it did not bar Canadians and Americans, though to my knowledge the phenomenon was at the time limited to those three nations. Progressive rock was a sub-culture of the very dominant rock culture at the time, and during the early 70s achieved something of hegemony in the rock world, if only for a brief moment. I will not be talking about other experimental rock music styles that were contemporary, not the folk-rock, not the avant garde rock acts, nor jazz-rock fusions where they evolved from a jazz idiom first. Of course, the edge of what is and isn't prog will always remain very fuzzy, for reasons soon to be revealed.
Again, note that prog evolved from the psychedelic music of 1966-1969. Being that the rock culture was highly individualistic there was no consensus and no one way to push the psychedelic fad beyond the norm and into something else, there was only consensus that something else was very desirable. This individualist culture is one of the social givens that shaped the progressive genre for the musicians, the audiences, the consumers at the record stores, and the perceptions of the genre by the general public, they who were probably wondering Oh God, what drugs've these lads taken this time?
This individualism enabled a very wide range of music influences to coexist and inform the performances of differing bands, and the same goes with life views and all the other baggage of the progressive rock era. There was Yes and their many imitators with their extremely intricate metrical madness, their love of choral harmonies, and their penchant for strange Indian-flavored metaphysics. There was Rush with their much heavier near-metal sound and their penchant for Libertarian politics and Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy. (And outright lifting of her novels into rock-album format.) There were entirely symphonic outfits such as Renaissance who created all original romantic-era compositions for orchestra and rock band. There were even such organizations as my personal favorite, the ever schizophrenic and unstable King Crimson whom ranged from electrified Gustav Holst, to jazz-rock compositions (with a strange medieval fairy-tale quality to it), to African music and the occult, and finally to proto-metal before disappearing off the face of the Earth for seven years, before re-emerging as a rock-gamelan, and disappearing off the face of the Earth this time for over a decade, before re-emerging as something almost, but not quite, alternative-metal, and then sticking around all the way to the present day, all the while their modus operandi being something very similar to Wagnerian totalgesamtkuntswerk. Clearly, there was room for every odd and freaky way of doing music under the Sun, excepting the avant-garde who were just not commercially viable.
This is the reason why prog has such fuzzy edges. How would one exactly say that King Crimson is in (well, I guess they did start the whole shindig) while Frank Zappa and the Mothers along with Captain Beefheart are out? Is Pink Floyd progressive, or space-rock, or just plain old psychedelia? These doubts mean, at least to suspend disbelief of the entire premise, we've got to examine what united the disparate acts of progressive rock.
They all can be said to share similar instrumentation. At first this seems like one big "duh." If they all descended from mainstream rock of the 60s then they should all have rock instrumentation, and lo! there it is, they all have an electric guitar or two, an electric bassist, and a drummer! Well, it should be also noted that almost all prog bands relied on keyboards to a degree never before heard of in rock music and certainly not shared by contemporary rock music. Rick Wakeman of Yes and Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer made their keyboard skills the heart of the "sound" of their respective bands. Hammond Organs, pianos, and Mellotrons popped out of every possible musical corner, and I must confess, the bands with lesser discretion usually included these instruments even in the places where they harmed the musical content of the moment. The Mellotron especially, and especially the bloody "three-violins" sound on it (my all time favorite sound in the world) became the sound of progressive rock, that is, when mixed with inordinate gobs of reverb. In its the day the instrument was despised for its unreliability (which resulted from these dudes not wanting to do any maintenance at all on the contraption) and has since outlived the progressive rock era and achieved cult status amongst some. (Yours truly gives supplications and gentle praise at the Temple of the `Tron every Saturday evening, and has joined a Yahoo! group full of people who were young when the `Tron was young, are now old, haven't gotten rid of their `Trons, and still act as if they are somehow relevant in the year 2010. Some members actually are still building them in the original factory in England, and from all these people who were there in that progressive moment I've gotten much insider's illumination into what was progressive rock.)
Prog attempted to leave behind traditional rhythm and meter to as great as extent as they could get away with, and still sell records. Asymmetric meter was definitely in, and incidental polyrhythm was not uncommon in certain passages. Deliberate polyrhythm was a bit more rare, at least until King Crimson returns in 1981 with Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew playing the part of a gamelan ensemble on their guitars, but that's after the death of prog in any case. There usually is no good musical reason why differing metrical patterns were used by these acts, only that anything that was difficult to perform right and not normally heard in rock circles was a great thing, whereby a band could show off just how "liberated" they are from the restraints of conventional thought. As base as this sounds this summation accurately describes the metrical reason to be for a good two-thirds of the prog music one can run across on record. There is that other third that may have actually gone weird for musical or philosophical sake, and they should not be discounted, but they are equally the exception to the rule. Also remember that prog rock is still rock, and as such you just can't escape the "tyranny" (as one guitar idol of mine put it) of four-on-the-floor. It is a fundamental of the rock language, and try as the prog people did, there was no escaping it.
Progressive rock is also unified by almost all the musicians being of the highest skill. Virtuoso ability on your, one, two, or six, different instruments is not really an option in progressive rock, it is a demand. Virtuoso ability became the common vehicle for very exciting musical moments, which was more or less the point of progressive rock in the first place. There was often absolutely no distinction between what would otherwise be considered "normal" and "extended" techniques. If you could make your guitar sound like an enraged elephant, and then could find a way to musically use it, then you could assure your next album and tour would be a smash hit. Don't get me wrong, the virtuoso aspect was also commonly abused as the interesting thing in and of itself, but "fret-wanking" has always been present in rock music, and in that regard it doesn't serve as a distinction between what is and isn't progressive rock. It should be noted though, that I mentioned instruments and not voices. The vocalist (or vocalists) for any mythically average progressive outfit would be of no greater skill than any non-prog rock outfit, and the deviation from wretched to sublime was comparable to that of regular rock music. Why there was never much premium placed on singing I have never rightfully known, but safe to say, in prog, one will encounter 10-12 instrumental tracks for every a cappella piece.
The structure of most of the tunes is alien to the rock world but should be very familiar to any fan of romantic compositions. An awful lot of progressive rock came in movements as opposed to three-minute ditties one would expect out of a rock band. The vinyl record itself became something of a storybook, and concepts, storylines, and motivic material would appear, reappear, and recombine throughout the length of an LP in very much a romantic idiom. This was rightfully viewed by most outsiders, and a lot of fans on the inside, as quite a bit pretentious, but it fit in so very well with the entire world of prog rock. For the mother of all examples, one has to listen to Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" album, erm I meant song, erm I meant… The one song on the album fills both sides of the LP! Granted, band leader Ian Anderson meant for the entire thing to be a bit ridiculous as he was taking the piss on the music critics of the time, but it still is mighty fine music with excellent classically-minded development and recombination of the various motives and feels of the epic tune. This is the nature of progressive rock.
This fascination for the Wagnerian concept album, and most everything else these people did resulted from a philosophy of what they were doing. Almost all of the bands and people involved in prog-rock doggedly ensured that everything they did would have a unified approach about it. Their music, their stage demeanor, their creative process, their cover art, and their interviews all had to spring from a single source. Quite often this source would be some half-baked philosophy that everyone but the band members themselves thought was quite kooky, but that's okay, everyone had their own brand of kooky. In this regard progressive rock is not an insular thing but a direct product of the societies in which these people were living. As the common narrative goes, the 60s were a time of great doubt in all Western/democratic social institutions, and young people especially (that's the rock crowd) were trying to find alternatives, any alternative to a Western tradition that had totally failed them. As exoticism has long been a trait of the West, many looked towards India and towards the teachings of the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. Many, of course looked elsewhere, or flat out invented their own, but everyone was fairly adamant that they were going to take stance against the insanity of the West by behaving very self-consistently once they'd found their wellspring. (In this regard I have to look admiringly towards the members of Rush, those crazy Canucks, who said The West has failed you? Hell, you don't even know what Western civilization would taste like, so completely has modern society left behind the classical liberalism of our grandfathers.) Progressive rock just had to be a unified whole for any band or it just wasn't good enough.
This leads to the ultimate synthesis point for prog-rock, one that wouldn't seem all that spectacular at all had I mentioned it right off the bat. Prog-rock was meant to be exceptional art for art's sake. This is not to say that rock is not an artform, but rock had an entirely different aesthetic, did not hold itself to ridiculously high expectations, and to speak basely, still had a lot of room left for plain old fun. Not so with prog-rock, which is not to say that prog-rock was meant to be dull and dreary and entirely cereberal. Instead prog-rock is intellectually fun, it is fun in the same manner as many people get a kick out of going to the Lourve to look at the paintings. Prog-rock must be recognized as an elitist phenomenon, and yes that brought out all the typical pompousness in some participants that any elitist phenomenon does, but there were many in the prog world as performers or listeners that weren't going to take their own selves that seriously, even if it seemed like everyone else was. Prog-rock was meant to be challenging, stimulating, emotional, and self-consistent, in a way that rock music never had been before. It was, to date at least, the ultimate marriage of romantic sensibilities and rock-n-roll aggression. As has been stated on a page dedicated to telling the history of prog in as crude and humorous of a way as possible, "Progressive rock is all about seeing how many musical orgasms can be achieved in a thirty-minute period." Vulgar? YES! Still, it is quite possibly the best truism about prog-rock I've ever run across.
By circuiticious route all this examination and mincing of words leads back to me. Prog was dead and rotting by the time I was born in 1987, certainly nothing remained of it by the time I was capable of remembering anything, that being around 1995. (Excepting of course King Crimson, the band curiously infamous for never holding together and never going away either. Oh that, and they're the hacks responsible for launching the prog era with their 1969 debut In the Court of the Crimson King.) My father has very eclectic musical tastes, ranging from hard-bop to blues to Wagner to spirituals to the Beatles to contemporary-jazz. Progressive rock was at its zenith during his jr. high school years, those being the mid 70s. It was the music for him growing up much as Miley Cyrus and Lady Ga-Ga are the music for teens now. So I heard plenty of King Crimson, Rush, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant, and the likes, when I was growing up. Honestly I paid not nearly as much attention to it as compared to how I am now; it was to be taken for granted. I did really dig the sounds of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, who I've recently gotten back into as I realize that first time I heard many great classical works was on ELP CDs. (I nearly pooped myself when I first heard the real Allegro Barbaro by Belá Bartók, as that IS The Barbarian, opening track of the debut ELP album.)
Rather it was The Moody Blues that eased me into a true love affair with prog-rock. The Moodies have always been on the very edge of what might be prog, but they're more of a proto-prog outfit. In `68 and `69 they were making such lush and symphonic noises with their very mellow British R&B sensibility and the spacious and dark sounds of Mike Pinder's self-modified MkII Mellotron. (He was a quality control person in the Mellotron factory before he joined The Moody Blues in 1965.) That's what got me hooked on "the sound" in my jr. high years, and as I went through all the emotionality of my teen years the strong emotionality of The Moodies seemed ever the perfect fit, and so my early romances, my growing sense of pride as I could do more and more things, and my transformation into a man is all wrapped up in the wistful beauty of The Moodies. (It should also be noted that the same beauty of the Moodies seems to have spoke to the members of the commercial-flop outfit Giles, Giles & Fripp in 1969, as they replaced a bassist, got a multi-instrumentalist with MkII Mellotron, got a very bizarre lyricist, and changed music forever under the band name King Crimson.) Showing that the universe is a very ironical place, in my 2nd year of high school, while I was hunting for more Moodies CDs I temporarily exhausted the supply of Moodies in Tower Records Fresno, and had money enough to purchase one more CD. Well, there was King Crimson's 2nd album In the Wake of Poseidon which had a cover painting very much like those of Moody Blues albums, and I (correctly) figured if the artwork is similar then the music is similar. (I was already learning the unwritten rules of progressive rock.) I've been on a downward spiral into the depths of prog-rock ever since, and I couldn't be happier about it.
Inside of what I means to be, me, prog is special as it feeds so many of my interests. I'm a musician by trade, and have spent twelve years learning to play in the Western classical tradition. Prog rock speaks to this very well, while at the same time being undeniably rock music, whereby I never am too far from my personal roots. It is also very situated in my life, as I go through the momentous years of my teens and my now my 20s, as I have seen incredible history, as I have studied to come to know our forgotten classical liberal heritage, as I fear the current Marxist-lite worldview, and in general have come of age, prog-rock is the bulk of the music I've been listening to in my free time. Granted, there is not much ideological similarity between the prog-rockers and me, (with the exception of Rush) but I can still accept their music and their kooky ideas for what they are and enjoy, as Ian Anderson would say, the gift of song.
I'm also becoming friends with some of the people who were there during that time through that Yahoo! list I mentioned earlier, the one with the aging Mellotron-fogeys. I can listen to their stories and their banter and get an inside feel for what to me looked like a very pretentious, yet cool, era in music. I've learned that these people don't bite, they're not so kooky as they once seemed, and that many got into those pretensions by the same means that anyone gets into anything. Pretense wasn't so much a deficiency of character but a historical phenomenon, as the youth of 1970 didn't have a lot of quality information floating about by which to inform their worldview. (I am not saying that somehow I am superior to them for my worldviews, but exactly the opposite, that my worldviews are a result of happy historical accident in exactly the same manner as the pretenses of 1970 were historical accident.) All of this learning and bonding only further cements the central role of prog-rock in my life, and that in a nutshell is the same individualist story that informed the creation of prog-rock. Every prog-rocker of necessity will have their own unique take on what it meant. The story of progressive rock is the story of the individual, no stronger statement can be made about the context of prog. All we've left to do then, is throw the first Matching Mole album on the turntable and wonder, what were they snorting?
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Thanks everyone! FYI, the 1st draft is due next Tuesday. Next Wednesday is my clearance hearing for my flute senior recital, which, I am going to smoke. Doing the 2nd half of Bartok's Suite Paysanne Hongroise, Bach's Sonata in Eb (BWV 1031), Chaminade's Concertino, and finishing out with Robert Dick's Lookout! which I just performed for him last Saturday as part of a masterclass, complete with Ian Anderson antics as it is afterall, electric guitar music for the regular flute.