The avantgarde's relation to popular music

It's been my experience that prog rock fans will distort the genre into being Avant Garde in order to place it in a more sophisticated light. This never changes.

Dean wrote: Symphonic Progressive Rock (and Prog in general) was not an 'avant-garde' reaction to the established norms of Rock Music, nor is it a fusion of Rock and Classical music but a development out of the extant Rock Music. As many have said, it is Rock Music with classical-like embellishment and that is a musicologically accurate assessment. I have seen people comment that such-and-such piece of Progressive Rock is symphonic because it has movements and therefore a symphony-like structure and this is a grossly inaccurate reading (and understanding) of both the piece of music in question and of Art Music Symphonies.

Fair.  Progressive rock was not a reaction against anything.  It was an attempt to develop rock as it was in the late 60s further.  They did not say, "rock as it is now is bullsh*t", they said "rock as it is now can do more than just 3'20" singles".  Some - not all - prog bands did that by appropriating means of bourgeois art music, such as the sonata form.  In the beginning, however, classical music did not play much of a role.  Rock musicians just wanted to try something new, and this resulted in the sort of rock avant-garde movements we now, somewhat inappropriately, call "psychedelic rock" (inappropriate because not all "psychedelic" music was in affirmative reference to "psychedelic" drugs).  The outcomes of this experimentation were different in different places - you just can't say that the Grateful Dead "sound like" the Velvet Underground, and Kraftwerk is another game again - but had a lot in common: they expanded the rock song form by means of collective improvisation and repetitive patterns.  Many bands never got beyond that, and were criticized - somewhat unjustly - of "noodling on a single chord for half an hour".

Progressive rock was the next step: some musicians, especially in the UK but also elsewhere, were not content with those amorphous collective improvisations, and sought for ways to bring structure into their long pieces.  An obvious place to look was, of course, "classical" music, which had had structured long forms for centuries.  But that was just one possibility, and questions such as "Is Close to the Edge really in sonata form?" are somewhat besides the point.  The main long form of progressive rock is what is often called the "multimovement suite" which, however, is not a Baroque suite in any way, though it gets close to what is called a "suite" in 19th-century "program music", and perhaps better called, in classical terms, rhapsody.

Of course, the academic avant-garde had moved way beyond that by then, and from their standpoint, progressive rock was just picking up what "real" art music had thrown out as obsolete decades ago.  But then, the academic avant-garde has been aloof of the general musical audience from the start, with Schoenberg founding his "Society for Private Musical Performances" as early as 1918.

By the way, it should be noted that the avantgarde always easier could be born from "ugly" than from "nice"; more avant "effects" are coming from "chaos" than from an "order" (structure). However, there is not any strictly rule from where avantgarde comes. So many people wrongly equate the avantgarde with ("ugly") abstractions. In fact, prog artists are like nomads, moving in different directions. Some in this wandering remain in the abstract, while others again and again reintroducing emotion in their (Art) music.

Edited by Svetonio - April 11 2015 at 11:41

Svetonio wrote: By the way, it should be noted that the avantgarde always easier could be born from "ugly" than from "nice"; more avant "effects" are coming from "chaos" than from an "order" (structure). However, there is not any strictly rule from where avantgarde comes. So many people wrongly equate the avantgarde with ("ugly") abstractions. In fact, prog artists are like nomads, moving in different directions. Some in this wandering remain in the abstract, while others again and again reintroducing emotion in their (Art) music.

I think Svetonio means that Avant-Garde is usually associated with art that is not ordered or ad hoc. Chaos is intrinsically disliked by people.

SteveG wrote: Svetonio wrote: By the way, it should be noted that the avantgarde always easier could be born from "ugly" than from "nice"; more avant "effects" are coming from "chaos" than from an "order" (structure). However, there is not any strictly rule from where avantgarde comes. So many people wrongly equate the avantgarde with ("ugly") abstractions. In fact, prog artists are like nomads, moving in different directions. Some in this wandering remain in the abstract, while others again and again reintroducing emotion in their (Art) music. I think Svetonio means that Avant-Garde is usually associated with art that is not ordered or ad hoc. Chaos is intrinsically disliked by people.

Edited by Dean - April 11 2015 at 13:16

Toaster Mantis wrote: I think industrial then was reacting against electronic music being assimilated by pop but I'm not 100% certain as I remember Throbbing Gristle being openly inspired by Giorgio Moroder's production tenure in the disco scene, and neofolk in turn reacting against what industrial started turning into. Can any of the rivetheads here fill in?

I'm actually somewhat confused whether things like jazz and experimental electronic music (noise, drone etc.) qualifies as "art music" or "popular music". In jazz' case, it seems to have started out as basically a kind of popular music based on call-and-response dancing but developed into something way more highbrow in the 1950s and 1960s. I wager it's a case-by-case situation there.

For the record I am kind of embarassed to take this long to learn that "art music/popular music" and avantgarde/mainstream are two different axes.

Svetonio wrote: jayem wrote:  (...) "Art music" only distinguishes from "music" if it means "pure art music", or "pure music", that is: music that's here only for the musical experience and doesn't (at least partly) aim at providing a necessary income, or music that doesn't (at least partly) serve another purpose like meeting other people. In that regard, some music called "prog" fits to being called "art music". (...)   I agree. Art music is basically an inner-directed music. And prog fits that.