Concept instrumental albums

 

A lot of Mike Oldfield also fits!

 

But we have to be careful, because we're expecting the instrumentation to "tell us a story" and sometimes we don't get it, and have no idea what it is.

 

So next time you ask that question, ponder the same question for one of Beethoven's 9 Symphonies! All of a sudden your question comes off a bit strange and weird. And then there is Mahler ... his wife walked out on him, and on that day he had just finished a Symphony ... for HER!

 

The concept is an idea. And not everything out there is based on "ideas".

I was just listening to Duke by Genesis and the album starts out in exact the same way.  Duke came

about five years later. 

Would you say then that the musical concepts that work are those where we already know the backstory, ie those that are based upon well-known existing work, such as Watership Down, Lord Of The Rings or The Snow Goose... or those themed albums that are intended to provide instrumental vignettes to characters such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII or inspired on objects such as the cards in a Tarot deck? [no clues... this is a pop quiz - name that album]

Concepts are ideas but not all ideas are not concepts, therefore not all instrumentals are concepts, whether they are based upon an idea or not. Several of Beethoven's symphonies are certainly themed, but they ain't concepts and while Mahler produced two symphonies kinda-inspired by his love for Alma Schindler, neither are concepts and as far as I recall she stayed with him until his death and didn't walk out on him - maybe you're confusing Mahler's biography with Ken Russell's poetically fictionalised film script... (dunno, it's been around 40 years since I saw the film, my memory's good but not that good)

Holst's Planet Suite is most definitely a concept, but Handel's Music For The Royal Fireworks and Tichycoughski's 1812 Overture are commemorative pieces based upon ideas but are not conceptual.

The use of vocalisation and vocable is using the voice as an instrument rather than singing a song so I would consider Claire Hamill's Voices to be an instrumental album and the 'Diana, Luna, Lucina' section of Incantations part one is a rhythmic chant, albeit sung like a synth-pad, so again I would view that as instrumental rather than lyrical. Of course song lyrics do not have to be coherent or make sense to be thought of as songs and many of them form an integral part of the musical content of the tune but I think there is a clear distinction between vocalisation and lyricism that we can recognise even if sometimes vocable seems to be a "place-holder" for a real lyric that failed to materialise (thinking Jon Anderson and Peter Gabriel here where use of vocable is more than just providing a sha-la-la-la type backing vocal - other members of Genesis weren't always impressed by Gabriel's scat vocalisations over instrumental sections on SEbtP).

From my own inept experience of creating instrumental music there is no easy way of telling whether each CD of music was constructed to a theme or whether the titles preceded the musical composition unless I explicitly state the case one way or another. Even when I've composed an album with a lyrical narrative, the music alone without the sung vocal doesn't tell a story as such.