Is Prog Underrated?

Lewian wrote: Prog started in the second half of the 20th century and as such it was from its beginning surrounded by postmodern ideas on aesthetic, particularly the idea that the modern ideal of originality and progress may have run its course already, basically everything has already been invented and we can now only recombine and comment rather than create something truly new. With this of course came the fundamental uncertainly about values and the relativist tendencies to which I (at least partly) adhere. This is quite manifest in Prog, the first innovations of which were about "re-combination" of ideas, rock and classical composition, rock and free improvisation, and then (still more connected to modern ideals) technological innovation combined with futuristic/SF aesthetic ideas. Then the willingness of many of the main protagonists by the end of the 1970s to leave their earlier achievements behind and try some new re-combination, together with the ever growing influence of markets and commercialisation; w8ith an emergence, in parallel, of some artists who rather tried to conserve and develop approaches that at the age of just 10-15 years were too young, in their view, to be already left behind. In all this one can see, in my view, a fundamental insecurity about aesthetic value, which is actually quite typical for the time, which comes with its own aesthetic quality or interest. Personally I rate those artists highest who could steer through these developments in a confident and unmistakably personal and unique way. Firstly Can (including the solo work that followed the end of the band, I didn't choose my avatar for nothing). Czukay and Schmidt in particular as students of Stockhausen even had an academic music background (and Liebezeit was an established jazz drummer when Can started) and used this, and an insatiable curiosity for all kinds of music and sounds from all over the world, to produce their very own rich mix of influences, with a strong element of spontaneity, wilful primitivity and allusion to deep hypnotic and ritualistic roots of music, without ever standing still. In similar ways, although with very different results, Robert Fripp and King Crimson also created their very own sound and updated it continuously with new influences, particularly wide open to seamless integration of whatever new band members would bring in. Further examples are Magma and Art Zoyd; these and a handfull of other artists managed to put down so strong roots that they never lost their orientation when integrating new influences and "going with the time", but on the other hand their hearts, brains and particularly ears were always open enough to the big world of sound (and everything else) that they never stood still and managed to produce something fresh over four decades and more.  Of course I don't want to dispute the role of other prog heroes such as Yes, Pink Floyd or ELP at particular times, and chances are that in 100 years these will still be better known than more obscure artists such as Art Zoyd. Who survives in public perception is not a matter of quality alone and achieving 5-10 years of greatness combined with popularity will give an artists better chances to be remembered than four decades of flying confidently under the radar, but still, I'd expect that whoever rediscovers the work of Can, King Crimson, Magma or Art Zoyd in whatever time on whatever strange paths of music interest will be thoroughly amazed. Which of course is just my subjective opinion.

Prog started in the second half of the 20th century and as such it was from its beginning surrounded by postmodern ideas on aesthetic, particularly the idea that the modern ideal of originality and progress may have run its course already, basically everything has already been invented and we can now only recombine and comment rather than create something truly new. With this of course came the fundamental uncertainly about values and the relativist tendencies to which I (at least partly) adhere.

This is quite manifest in Prog, the first innovations of which were about "re-combination" of ideas, rock and classical composition, rock and free improvisation, and then (still more connected to modern ideals) technological innovation combined with futuristic/SF aesthetic ideas. Then the willingness of many of the main protagonists by the end of the 1970s to leave their earlier achievements behind and try some new re-combination, together with the ever growing influence of markets and commercialisation; w8ith an emergence, in parallel, of some artists who rather tried to conserve and develop approaches that at the age of just 10-15 years were too young, in their view, to be already left behind. In all this one can see, in my view, a fundamental insecurity about aesthetic value, which is actually quite typical for the time, which comes with its own aesthetic quality or interest.

Personally I rate those artists highest who could steer through these developments in a confident and unmistakably personal and unique way. Firstly Can (including the solo work that followed the end of the band, I didn't choose my avatar for nothing). Czukay and Schmidt in particular as students of Stockhausen even had an academic music background (and Liebezeit was an established jazz drummer when Can started) and used this, and an insatiable curiosity for all kinds of music and sounds from all over the world, to produce their very own rich mix of influences, with a strong element of spontaneity, wilful primitivity and allusion to deep hypnotic and ritualistic roots of music, without ever standing still. In similar ways, although with very different results, Robert Fripp and King Crimson also created their very own sound and updated it continuously with new influences, particularly wide open to seamless integration of whatever new band members would bring in. Further examples are Magma and Art Zoyd; these and a handfull of other artists managed to put down so strong roots that they never lost their orientation when integrating new influences and "going with the time", but on the other hand their hearts, brains and particularly ears were always open enough to the big world of sound (and everything else) that they never stood still and managed to produce something fresh over four decades and more.

Of course I don't want to dispute the role of other prog heroes such as Yes, Pink Floyd or ELP at particular times, and chances are that in 100 years these will still be better known than more obscure artists such as Art Zoyd. Who survives in public perception is not a matter of quality alone and achieving 5-10 years of greatness combined with popularity will give an artists better chances to be remembered than four decades of flying confidently under the radar, but still, I'd expect that whoever rediscovers the work of Can, King Crimson, Magma or Art Zoyd in whatever time on whatever strange paths of music interest will be thoroughly amazed. Which of course is just my subjective opinion.


Edited by Lewian - April 06 2018 at 19:27

Lewian wrote: ExittheLemming: I think you're getting me quite a bit wrong here. I was bringing in the music scientist or musicologist or whatever as someone who may have a better overview of stuff and may be well informed what in academic circles (which were originally not brought up by me in this discussion) is highly appreciated, certainly not as somebody who has a licence to prescribe right or wrong responses. That's not my line of argument here; ascribing relevance to what can or cannot stand up to academic scrutiny was where you were coming from if I remember it right.

If by 'music scientist' you mean someone who is qualified to teach or lecture about music at tertiary level, I can't help you there as I'm neither trained or qualified in music save the entry level standard issue 'two ears and a brain' I mentioned earlier. I guess that type of insight would need to come from a professor of a faculty of Music. There might even be one traipsing around on Prog Archives as we speak
I know that neither of us is conflating highly regarded with popular and as an aside, George Bernard Shaw was right: Those who can do, those who can't: teach.

Or alternatively, write completely humorless treatises on what qualitative criteria they believe all music should be measured (neither us believe that approach is legit)
Spoiler alert - these tomes are drier than a legionnaires socks but probably contain what most people denote by 'formal academic scrutiny'

Lawrence Kramer 'Why Classical Music Still Matters' - this critical musicologist (and composer) pitches into your camp with a hermeneutic model encompassing cultural practices, performance and media formats which he posits is inclusive of all conceivable genres. How surprised would you be to learn that I thought the whole thing 'post-modern w**kspeak?'

Julian Johnson 'Who Needs Classical Music?'  - (Prof. of Music, Royal Holloway University of London) takes a scalpel to the fondant mood music of Reich, Glass, Nyman et al and deems similar minimalist contemporary developments as 'inimical to thought' and a 'commodification of deliberate depthlessness'. He maintains that conventional academic scrutiny is an antidote to the 'value-free relativism of the marketplace'. Not a happy camper throughout but very well written

Roger Scruton 'The Aesthetics of Music'  - is actually quite enjoyable as this English professor of aesthetics gets incredibly angry in places and the end part is him pulverizing popular music (quite indiscriminately) to a bloody pulp. An archly conservative view on the metaphysics of sound and the primordial demarcation between tone and sound (like the cavemen I alluded to earlier). Scruton holds particular disdain for what he feels is the reckless abandonment of tonality initiated by the 2nd Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) and holds firm to the view that traditional analytical criteria are not rendered obsolete by contemporary developments in composition

It might be a self fulfilling prophecy of course, but I couldn't find any examples of anyone from 'musical academia' arguing completely the opposite i.e. that conventional 'formal academic scrutiny' could be proven to be completely spurious and had no longer any vestigial value for the analysis and comprehension of composition. (Although Lawrence Kramer, somewhat the outlier, comes pretty close in places)

Not sure how much further we can take this discussion but you now have three accredited sources of 'formal academic scrutiny' to choose from. The rest is up to you.


Edited by ExittheLemming - April 06 2018 at 14:50

Lewian wrote: what has been observed over millennia to be what the vast swathes of humankind readily avow they find satisfying in art? Well this is actually an empirical statement, isn't it? I'm not sure to what extent this holds and I'd be very surprised if you were. To me it looks like a statement of your subjective belief, nothing more. Which is fine of course except that you wanted to make the case for objectivity here if I'm not mistaken. The statement 'Any level of quality is achievable by any level of compliance or non-compliance'  is something that plankton might choose to have us believe they choose their dinner partners And yet it may be true, and verifiably true, in the sense that you can specify a reasonable set of rules and I (or a music scientist who's more knowledgeable than me) can show you a piece that disregards any number of them and is still held in highest esteem. (John Cage's 4'33'' may do the trick for many of these games but even without that I'm pretty sure it can be done.)

There is no such thing as a 'music scientist' (as if someone is qualified to prescribe your emotional responses to music are 'wrong') You and I have ears and a brain, so both us are more than qualified to evaluate music. The Cage piece was an exercise in conceptual art i.e  a demonstration of the impossibility of the idea of 'silence' As to what that has to do with an evaluation of musical composition is probably best known and kept to yourself.

ExittheLemming wrote: I can't help but think that's like saying without picture frames there would be no painting as people would just confuse the exhibits with the art gallery wall paper. Education, economics, media and societal elements all play an important role in what we get to see and hear as consumers but do not shape what I believe are our innate aesthetic criteria for what we find pleasing or satisfying in a work of art.

I disagree but ultimately this is a matter of scientific thought and empirical observation; without these we may just believe the different things we want to believe without any possibility to get to agreement.
You may have a look at this, by Pierre Bourdieu:
 http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?url=http://www.academia.edu/download/36960054/Distinction_A_Social_Critque_Of_The_Judgement_Of_Taste_By_Pierre_Bourdieu.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm0l1BqqZHDCkPf8kw-liW3oigF9cA&nossl=1&oi=scholarr&ved=0ahUKEwjpxqXznaPaAhViGsAKHRb7BawQgAMIMCgAMAA

ExittheLemming wrote: As I stated earlier, what is referred to broadly as sonata form is not set in stone and you are correct in stating that innovation very often goes against convention and breaks the rules (like Rock'n'Roll did in the 50's and Stravinsky did in 1913 with The Rite of Spring) That said, even those iconoclastic works that purport to destroy orthodoxy still contain the indelible vestiges of those incredibly resilient structural elements. Maybe we can alter the DNA of music until is becomes quite unrecognizable but without DNA itself we would surely perish?

We can discuss about how important such structure is to music perception and appreciation in general, and how widespread its use, but that's entirely different from using it for the "evaluation" of specific works. Even using a certain "academic" tradition of evaluation (with which I wouldn't necessarily agree), any level of quality is achievable by any level of compliance or noncompliance with such structural principles. This is simply not what counts (or let's say it counts a tiny little bit at most). But then I'm perfectly fine using it in analytic ways, for understanding rather than for assigning value.
 

miamiscot wrote: Underrated by most. Overrated by most on here.

Lewian wrote: I use the term "cultural practices" in a much more general way, so for example the western way of setting up a university system and academic culture is a cultural practice as well, as are conditions of musical performance, its role in education and the social setup of society etc. Globalisation may make us think that much of this is universal but in fact a lot can be traced to specific cultural origins and has become widespread not so much because of its universal qualities but rather because of economical and power relations and the like. I can't help but think that's like saying without picture frames there would be no painting as people would just confuse the exhibits with the art gallery wall paper. Education, economics, media and societal elements all play an important role in what we get to see and hear as consumers but do not shape what I believe are our innate aesthetic criteria for what we find pleasing or satisfying in a work of art. As humans we seem compelled to look for patterns in any external stimulus and quickly become bored and 'switch off' if none are found or if those that we can discern become too predictable. (Listening to new music is always and exactly like this) Speaking of "indigeneous" or "ritualistic" practices, I also think that it is important for understanding music how it originated from such practices in many places (this seems to me more universal than the structural elements you are referring to although for the moment I'm talking about my intuition rather than a solid knowledge of the literature and research). I think this is still reflected in much contemporary "use" of music (surely it plays an important role for rock music), and I think if you want to rule such elements out for "an aesthetic evaluation of composition", this evaluation loses some key aspects of music. It's interesting to observe that the initial phase of any sound source is referred to as it's 'attack' portion and this is no accident as in prehistoric times, any audio was evaluated on whether it might be a potential threat e.g. a predator, a stranger from outside the tribe or your terrified lunch. I think that sometimes we confuse the organization of sound (music) with sound itself. Being eaten alive and having to sit through Schonberg's Pierrot Lunaire might feel similar but we can safely leave the bearskins at home for the latter. Discussing structure like "introduction - theme/exposition - development - recapitulation - coda" is certainly an important part of "academic scrutiny" of music but the role this plays in trying to make up an "objective" concept of quality is less straightforward. Groundbreaking music (including music that is academically acknowledged as such) sometimes proceeds just by destroying or changing such structures; and surely music that satisfies such a blueprint all too easily is easily dismissed as derivative (unless it has other qualitiues that makes it stand out). As I stated earlier, what is referred to broadly as sonata form is not set in stone and you are correct in stating that innovation very often goes against convention and breaks the rules (like Rock'n'Roll did in the 50's and Stravinsky did in 1913 with The Rite of Spring) That said, even those iconoclastic works that purport to destroy orthodoxy still contain the indelible vestiges of those incredibly resilient structural elements. Maybe we can alter the DNA of music until is becomes quite unrecognizable but without DNA itself we would surely perish?