How to define and classify "Progressive Rock"?

But I would surely like to know what is it all about. 

I consider prog a musical movement that fermented in the years 1967-68 (thanks to psychedelia and rock-blues jam) and established itself in 1969 with In the Court of The Crimson King. It dominated the European rock scene, spreading from the UK to the continent (in Germany it had a parallel development with a very particular psychedelic music), in the years 1971-76, proposing itself as an intellectual alternative to classic rock (and folk, and blues), and to songwriter of some authors-performers. Its decline, which began around 1975-76 was rapid, and in fact died around 1977-78 with the advent of punk and new wave. Disco-music also arrived in the eighties, along with synth-pop. It was an essentially European phenomenon, even if reflections have been seen in the US.

Prog was characterized by providing rock music that was not just entertainment: the songs became long and elaborate thanks to the best technique of the musicians, often virtuosos, until they became suites, the musical score was refined, included tempo changes and contaminations with classical music and jazz, and another characteristic of prog is the care for arrangements, for ethnic and electronic instruments.

In the eighties prog disappeared but some groups tried to exhume it. With globalization, music became more and more contaminated at the level of musical genres and arrangements, and then starting from the nineties it seems that prog has been reborn, and today, if we consider prog every form of contamination, prog is rampant, but in reality is no longer true prog. It is the music that changes, that keeps up with the time. Avant-garde music, post-rock, electronic music, jazz-rock-fusion are not true prog, they are developments parallel to it and only to the extent that they are inserted in rock plots and in the song form, however dilated and distorted, I consider them true prog.

Overall, therefore, I tend to consider only (or almost) the albums of the seventies to be masterpieces of true prog. The more prog groups that today fascinate prog lovers, I fear they are very epigonic (such as Anglagard, Wobbler, All Traps on Earth seem to me), they have added more and more complexity, virtuosity, sumptuousness of the arrangements and of the studio production to the prog: not so much in terms of musical contents.

After all, it is part of the history of artistic movements: realism was born in the nineteenth century, at a literary level it becomes naturalism ("naturalismo") in France and realism ("verismo") in Italy, but even now there are realist literary works: they have very little of the nineteenth-century classics. The works of 2000 are more experimental, also because before there were few artists, now there are many, and therefore you must devise everything to get noticed, it happens to all the arts, including prog music.

Only the best make that list! Congratulations, Kees! 🎉

 

New PA subgenre, perhaps? 

I only listen to fake prog, or is it false prog...