Edward L. Macan - Rocking the classics : English progressive rock and the counterculture

Rocking the CLASSICS

English progressive Rock and the Counterculture

Edward Macan

Oxford University Press

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Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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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 019-509887-0
ISBN 019-509888-9 (pbk.)
1. Progressive rock musicEnglandHistory and criticism.
I. Title.
ML3534.M28 1996 781.66dc20 95-49637

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

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

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 musics commercial heyday of the mid-to late 1970salthough I never was involved to the point of joining any bands fan cluband 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 19901991, when I read two books that permanently altered my philosophy of music: Henry Pleasantss Serious Music: And All That Jazzterms 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 musics 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 realizationsif not revelationsthat 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.

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 Webers