most important element in music/prog

Difficult poll, eh?

Good post from David there.
A lot of the music in prog, well, let's face it, it's not as "out there" as some of the pure avant garde music and more extreme classical music forms.
Which means, a very large majority of prog rock is still written with a tonal center and along with that, we usually have melody.
Melody, contrary to the belief of many non musicians, is not just that kind of stuff you hear in symph prog or whatever but it can be as dissonant as hell to and melody does not have to conform to that popular belief that it has to be 'beautiful' sounding, but it's still a melody isn't it, since it's not atonal/atonality.
Yes, folks, that means all those seemingly 'noisy'  prog metal or avant bands you hear , have A LOT more melody than you realize, but it isn't always 'beautiful' and consonant, but melody is still present in many cases.

Of course, without melody, without the musical scales used to write melodies, we cannot really have harmony in the normal sense anyway, since the notes in chords that make up harmonies are derived from scales and modes in the first place, so from that, it was easy to pick melody over harmony by a long shot.
When someone writes melodies, often a rhythmic center can develop from that too.
And of course, to some extent, form and structure can rely on melodic components, but not always obviously.

Melody is the essence of music.

^ I don't consider noise to be music. You may call it "Noise Music" for the lack of a better word, but I think that without any melody it isn't really music anymore - more like an abstract form of "sound art".

I just think that noise is noise and music is music. I love a certain amount of noise in music, but if it's just noise without any discernable melody then I simply won't call it music anymore. 

Harmony,  meant as "harmonies",   the chords and the work-out of the melody.

Music  which has a lack  of "harmony",  noodling around on the strangest melodies all the time  isn't listened to by me - especially when I read about the "virtuosity"  of a band  I can guess  what the real problem of the band is :  they don't have any sense  for  harmony. 

Of course,  the music is great  when the band  is able to do both things,  but feeling is more important than virtuosity - as you can see at the music of Moody Blues  that  profits  of  great songwriting.  Of course  I love them more than King Crimson ... 

...  and this is the exception:   music that is so fresh and radical   like King Crimson or parts of VdGG's work  can be very good, too - but all in all the harmony  plays  the most important role. 


Edited by Einsetumadur - January 21 2009 at 11:02

Melody and harmony normally feed off each other, so I don't consider them independent. That duo, along with rhythm form the basis of most all forms of what we call music.

I've yet to hear a work by Merzbow that doesn't have a melody. To be honest I can't even imagine what it would sound like. 

Rhythm for me.

Actually it entirely depends on how melodic/rhythmic the song is.