Has the flame finally gone out?

TODDLER wrote: I'm a huge Mike Oldfield fan! I've noticed on Ommadawn that his structure of music is in the Prog vain, but it's often not including a drum pattern in ALL sections  and if it did, more people would directly hear the style of Progressive Rock that they could identify with. ...

Careful here, because Mike is capable of doing rock'n'roll, but then his tendencies are much more classical than they are rock music oriented.

is it progressive? This is where the term is badly defined and designed.

Mike is working with about 10 to 15 to 20 staffs of music, or tracks, and he knows that the same thing can't be done on all of them (how boring and soooooooo rock'n'roll!!!!) and his sense is to do something different. This is the mark of a true composer!

TODDLER wrote: ... For example, when he plays the bass parts on bass guitar, the sections if done differently with a full scale Prog band could easily fit the bill. However...he is an instrumentalist and sometimes in his music, he naturally creates a different sound within itself that SOMEHOW steers clear of a Progressive Rock formula. When he's recording all the instruments himself, it's most difficult to imagine his music being performed by a Prog band.. ...

Where do you think most of "rock music" and "progressive music" came from?

They all came from the previous history of music ... that existed before they even learned their very first note! it follows that the majority of stuff that (anyone) would know would be something familiar to them, and that has been documented before.

My take on Mike is that "Tubular Bells" was more instinctive, and the rest a bit more composed, but by then he had a better sense of what to do and not do!

making the comment about GG or YES playing it is bizarre. You do know that in the early days, the preshow music for all YES shows was classical music, right? Probably due to Rick Wakeman I imagine, but even that should tell you about a massive connection with classical music!

TODDLER wrote: ... Vangelis was like that in the early days. Mike Oldfield and David Bedford were both progressive with their compositions. ...

I think this is incorrect. David Bedford was very classically minded and probably helped Mike learn music and composition. David is also in the earliest albums that Mike did with Kevin Ayers, and it was there that the 17 and 18 year old learned a lot of his craft. With David around, it probably helped make Kevin a bit more defined musically than otherwise.

Progressive is being mis-represented here in my book. It was, in many ways, a lot more "individualistic" than it was "progressive", but the compositional elements made themselves clear, although "Tubular Bells" was not as clear in "composition" as it was in a series of chord and note progressions, which could be considered rock music oriented and not classically minded at all. But this is not visible in Incantations, for example.

TODDLER wrote: ... it would be very possible that their music would resemble the vision of pure Progressive Rock composition, but because he is an instrumentalist...that's not going to happen or even sometimes make that impression on anyone in particular.

I think this is stretching it. Jon anderson might tell you something else. He did not put lyrics there because of the silence or whatever. My guess is that Jon already had this whole thing in his head before the others got a whiff of it, and they helped make it monumental is more than likely. The same goes for Ian anderson. I doubt that the music comes first in most of his work ... I think he might even tell them to go like this and like that ... it's what the musicians do to the rest of it that helps define it even better, and this is where Gentle Giant is so massive, but even Gary has stated several times ... we never wrote anything down ... it was just fun playing all these different things! .... but we can not conceive of that possibility, and perhaps that is where we go wrong?