Rocking the classics : English progressive rock and the counterculture

392 Pages·1997·2.9 MB·English

by  Edward L. Macan

Rocking the CLASSICS
Rocking the CLASSICS
English progressive Rock and the Counterculture
Edward Macan
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Page vi is an extension of the copyright page.
Macan, Edward L., 1961–
Rocking the classics: English progressive rock
and the counterculture/Edward Macan.
p. cm. Discography: p.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–19-509887-0
ISBN 0–19509888-9 (pbk.)
1. Progressive rock music—England—History and criticism.
I. Title.
ML3534.M28 1996 781.66—dc20 95-49637
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Lyrics Credits
Prelude
Introduction
1. The Birth of Progressive Rock
2. The Progressive Rock Style: The Music
3. The Progressive Rock Style: The Visuals
4. The Progressive Rock Style: The Lyrics
5. Four Different Progressive Rock Pieces
6. Related Styles
7. A Sociology of Progressive Rock
8. The Critical Reception of Progressive Rock
9. Progressive Rock After 1976
Postlude
Appendix (Discography/Personnel Listings)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Lyrics Credits
“Lemmings (including Cog)” written and composed by Peter Hamill
used by kind permission of Stratsong Limited/Carlin Music Corp.,
London, England “Stones of Years” composed by Keith Emerson and Greg Lake
used by kind permission of Leadchoice Limited “Battlefield” composed by Greg
Lake
used by kind permission of Leadchoice Ltd.
“Sheep” written and composed by Roger Waters
copyright © 1977
used by kind permission of Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd.
“Shine on You Crazy Diamond” written and composed by Roger Waters,
Richard Wright, and David Gilmour
copyright © 1974
used by kind permission of Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd.
“Welcome to the Machine” written and composed by Roger Waters,
copyright © 1975
used by kind permission of Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd.
“Lost in a Lost World” composed by Mike Pinder
used by kind permission of Mike Pinder/One Step Records
Prelude
Despite having authored what is to my knowledge the first comprehensive study
of progressive rock, I must admit that my involvement in the progressive rock
scene has heretofore been as an objective observer, not as a participant. To be
sure, I was a fan during the music’s commercial heyday of the mid-to late 1970s
—although I never was involved to the point of joining any band’s fan club—
and I have attempted to remain abreast of developments in the progressive rock
scene. On the other hand, in recent years my efforts as a musician have been
centered in other areas. I have made my living as a music educator, teaching
music history, music theory, and piano courses, as well as directing various jazz-
based instrumental ensembles. I have devoted significant energy to the classical
tradition as a recitalist on piano and the mallet instruments, especially as a
performer of my own compositions. I have participated in gospel music and
hymnody as an amateur. My training as a musicologist, I might add, geared me
exclusively towards engaging the art music tradition. So why write a book about
progressive rock?
The answer, I suppose, is that while this book is about progressive rock, it is
also about a number of other issues that are of considerable importance to me in
my work as a music educator and musicologist. In many ways, the origins of this
book can be traced back to 1990–1991, when I read two books that permanently
altered my philosophy of music: Henry Pleasants’s Serious Music: And All That
Jazz1 and Christopher Small’s Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and
Celebration in Afro-American Music.2 These books challenged virtually every
assumption that my academic training had imbued in me: that Western art music
was inherently “better” than popular music, that this superiority was the result of
Western art music somehow existing beyond the realm of social considerations
and therefore being “timeless,” and that this superiority is demonstrable through
reference to the notated score. Granted, I do not agree with everything in these
books; I believe Small in particular sometimes advances arguments that reach
the realm of ideological hysteria (for instance, his unfortunate suggestion that
classical music is a tool by which imperialistic capitalists oppress the
downtrodden masses). Nonetheless, I am grateful for the way in which these
books forced me to come to terms with the unstated assumptions that permeate
the whole positivistic model of post-secondary music education as it traditionally
has been practiced in the United States.
There were three convictions that the Pleasants and Small books brought
home to me especially strongly; since they permeate this book as well, it is
probably best to enumerate them here. First, no music exists outside of society:
Bach and Beethoven were just as much creatures of a specific time and place as
were Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charlie Parker. Second, if no music can really be
asocial, no music can be “timeless,” either. No matter how powerfully a musical
style may affect contemporaneous audiences or even listeners several
generations down the road, societies change, and a time comes when every
musical style loses its grasp on mass culture and enters the realm of historical
artifact, to be cultivated by a smaller, more specialized audience of initiates.
Finally, the European approach to musical analysis not only neglects the
relationship between music and audience (surely the ultimate measure of a
music’s power) by concentrating exclusively on the sounds themselves, but it
also limits itself to those elements (harmony, melody, meter, and structural
organization) which the European notational system can accurately convey.
Using these criteria, a Beethoven symphony is obviously “superior” to jazz or
the blues; however, when one considers the timbral and rhythmic subtleties
which notation is unable to capture, this “superiority” becomes harder to
maintain unambiguously.
There were other realizations—if not revelations—that occurred to me as a
result of reading these books. First, I was forced to acknowledge explicitly what
I had long recognized implicitly: popular music has an affective power on
contemporary audiences that classical music no longer has, and it would be
difficult to state the criteria by which this could be construed as a favorable
reflection on the current classical music scene. Over the years I have had
occasion to observe the powerful responses that rock, jazz, and gospel musics
frequently evoke from their respective audiences. I have not seen anything
approaching this kind of rich audience/performer interaction in the largely
uncommunicative ambience of the concert hall, where any genuinely
spontaneous audience reaction to a performance is castigated as “inappropriate”
by the custodians of high culture. I find it difficult to believe that Mozart or Liszt
would have rejoiced over the current state of affairs, since it clearly does not
resemble audience/performer interaction in their eras. Indeed, it was not always
like this, since the taming of the classical music audience that took place in the
early twentieth century is by now well documented.3
Second, I came to the realization that traditional musicology, and the whole
system of music education of which it is an outgrowth, is becoming antiquated
on a number of fronts. Some of the limitations of traditional musicology are by
now well known: its questionable but pervasive assumptions that “serious”
music is categorically “better” than “popular” music, that the music of an artistic
elite is inherently “richer” than the music of the uncouth masses, and, most
pervasively, that Western art music occupies a different realm qualitatively than
any other body of music.
However, other weaknesses of musicology as it traditionally has been
practiced are less universally recognized, and therefore, potentially more
pernicious. For instance, since one of the elemental assumptions of traditional
musicology has been that classical music is timeless and exists beyond society,
no methodology was developed for examining the relationship between a
musical style and its social context. For years musicologists showed remarkably
little curiosity about either the ethnographic identity and the social motivations
of the audiences of pre-twentieth-century art music, or about how these factors
might have played a role in shaping musical style. William Weber’s Music and
the Middle Class4 was the first work to expose a particular art music audience
(in this case the audiences of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt) to the type of
ethnographic analysis taken for granted in popular music studies; Weber’s book
appeared only in the mid-1970s, and even then remained unique for some time.
Needless to say, as long as the myth of European classical music existing beyond
time and place endured, discussions of the roles played by social class, gender,
race or ethnicity, and other social variables in the formation of musical style
were difficult at best, and frequently did not take place. Paradoxically, though, it
was only by ignoring these factors that the myth of an “asocial” music could be
maintained.
Another potential pitfall of traditional musicology is that while its existing
models of musical analysis are quite successful in demonstrating how specific
examples of Western art music work on a purely musical basis, they are usually
inadequate for a comprehensive analysis of non-Western music or Western
popular music. The reason is that these analytical methods tend to focus on those
features of the music that the European system of notation can capture with
fidelity: harmony, melody, meter, and large-scale structure. The timbral and