A Personal Definition of Prog

Altairius wrote: ... If you include too many disparate things under one header, it tends to muddle the meaning of it.

And that's the new challenge for the future when it comes to determining a definition for various music's and styles. In the past, it was accepted that only one thing existed, and no one argues with the various periods of "classical music" at all.

Today, the media, has shown us that there is music everywhere, and it was likely to also exist 500 years ago, but there is/was no record of any of it. We do know that China and Japan have a rich musical history, but even for them, it is so strict and specific to one thing, that it is weird/hard to believe that a 1,000 years only has something like this in them!

Somewhere along the way, a lot of this will get dwindled down to something that makes sense. In general, for me, it was about stretching the "known" music's that are taught in schools and such. The compositional elements of those pieces are MASSIVE ... but our simplified, and individualized concepts of "solo" that both rock and jazz (and blues!) have defined, are the part that music was really missing before, as it seems to have been taken as a composed entity only.

Not many writers discuss the history of music and say something about the violin solo's, even in things like Violin Concerto's and the like, separated from the piece itself, and rock music has basically taken something that is more "individual" and not necessarily "composed" many times to give you something special that most of us love. One of the most famous duets in the history of rock music, was accidental, and not composed! And we love it, because it is magnificent.

In many ways, I always did not like some of the descriptions in the notes of so many classical music albums, this is a symphony about this and that and the passages are about this and that. Rock music, has replaced that with lyrics, which I tend to not enjoy as much since a whole lot of these lyrics are completely way off the music anyway! And some of them try to create a Hollywood "make-belief" kinda of thing with the words, which I, personally, do not enjoy at all. I will admit that cardboard pink and colored backgrounds are not my idea of fantasies and ideologies at all!

The known fact is that you and I won't be around to know what the result will be. For my part I consider a lot of the music/arts in the 1960's and 1970's the highest point of my generation, and as such I believe it is important, valid and quite on par with any artistic scene in the past 500/600 years.

I do know that some folks disagree, and they think it is just pop music. I think it is much more than that, and the fact that some things have survived almost 90 years already, thanks to film and other arts, is something to consider. Rock music, or jazz music is not likely to be forgotten, and will be considered more and more in music history. But, from a manuscript/score study, both of these pieces are likely to get dismissed as just pop music (as Dean suggests -- and I agree!), but I doubt that what it brought with it, which was the feeling and the emotion that was missing before, which we believed to be imaginary, is now right here ... in front of you ... and very valid.