Originally Posted by Terrapin_Station
Alright, first, here's a long, explanatory definition that's kind of like an article. After that, I'll give more of a nutshell definition (I'll put it after a number of lines to make the division obvious), for folks who don't want to read that much:
The basic idea of progressive rock is that it is taking a rock framework and experimenting with it by pushing and pulling that framework in all kinds of different ways--sometimes to almost a breaking point (where it essentially becomes another kind of music instead).
To understand it, we have to explain that in more detail, or more specifically. Part of the rock framework is instrumental--there tends to be an instrumental core to progressive rock comprised of electric guitars and bass guitars, keyboards, drums, and sometimes another instrument or two like sax, violin, etc.--just like there was often an instrument or two like that in rock--just think of all the saxophone in the early rock 'n' roll records, for example.
The next part of the framework is structural, and here, the traditional rock framework is the traditional pop song framework, going back long before the rock era even began. Here, we're talking about songs with verse-chorus-bridge structures (and the common elaborations of that found in rock, such as intros, pre-choruses, etc.). Also part of the structural framework is particular kinds of key signatures, chord progressions, riffs, rhythms/time signatures, and so on.
So in the context of that framework, progressive rock is about experimenting with it. For example experimenting with time signatures so that we don't just always stay in simple binary or tertiary repetitive meters, or at least not the same meters for the whole tune (such as a whole song just in 2, or 3, or 4 (which you can think of as two 2's strung together), or 6 (two 3's strung together), etc.). A lot of progressive rock used time signatures like 5's, 7's, 11's, etc. Or, experimenting with key signatures by maybe just completely abandoning that approach altogether (so you're instead approaching harmony maybe in a way like Bela Bartok or Igor Stravinsky did, for example), or layering a modal approach or something like that. Or experimenting with structure so that we have a bunch of repeating A sections in a row, then abruptly change to very different repeating B sections, and never go back to the A section--rather than alternating them as would usually occur in rock or traditional pop. It can be anything, but the name of the game is experimenting with the normal rock framework in various ways--that's the main defining characteristic.
For many bands, a large part of the experimentation, or at least the inspiration for the experimentation, arose from combining other kinds of music with rock, or by experimenting with something other than mainstream rock frameworks. Any kind of outside music was fair game, as long as the core framework for experimentation remained a rock one. So, for their experimental bases, some bands combined folk elements with rock (like Jethro Tull or Renaissance), or combined jazz elements (like Ash Ra Tempel and King Crimson), or combined classical elements (like ELP or Yes), or combined country and rock (like the Dixie Dregs), or combined things like pop, rock and classical (like early ELO and The Moody Blues), or combined electronic or avant garde classical with rock (like Gong and The Art Bears). Many combined more than two or three kinds of music (this actually applies to most of the bands I've listed above, and Frank Zappa is a great example of someone who combined almost everything with a rock framework at one point or another, or the Grateful Dead, who combined country, folk, blues, jazz, jugband music, and all sorts of things with rock), and on and on. And before long, a lot of bands took stylistic elements from other progressive rock bands and incorporated them into their own thing.
At the same time, progressive rock still has a discernible connection to those traditional rock and pop song structures, harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, etc. materials. It's not a complete abandonment of all traditional structures in other words, at least not all the time (there might be sections of things that are complete abandonments, but to remain progressive rock, there will be a return to things like chord progressions, steady meters, repeating A/B sections, and so on).
Like many developments in rock music after the mid 1960s, the gist of progressive rock can be seen as heavily influenced by The Beatles--later in their career, they experimented with rock frameworks in the same way, and quite a bit of their later stuff could qualify as "proto-progressive rock" if we don't outright consider it progressive rock.
Another common characteristic in progressive rock, but not a necessary one, is instrumental prowess on a technical level. This tends to be the case because of the kind of experimentation that goes on--it's both a cause of some of the experimentation and a symptom of some of it. Progressive rock attracts musicians who find interesting ideas like, "What if you played this section with five even beats repeated over my three even beats for the same duration of real time?", or, "What if you transpose the second verse to Ab, and I shift the melody up to a B locrian scale, and the bass parallels the melody in down a 6th, but adjusts whatever pitches necessary so they're in Ab?" In other words, the experimentation tends to be theoretical experimentation, and that tends to be interesting to people with a theoretical bent who are proficient on their instruments, or alternatively, it tends to make you more proficient at your instrument as you struggle to play what you can dream up theoretically.
The above actually tends to be the main impetus behind creating progressive rock in the first place--at least initially. Progressive rock musicians were (and still often are) musicians who had become bored with the same old same old when playing pop/rock tunes. The genre is not rooted in wanting to literally "progress" music. It's rooted in there being musicians who find playing tune after tune in 4/4, with simple ABABCAB-type song structures, with simple I-IV-V-type harmonic content, etc. incredibly BORING, so they want to do something else--BUT, they still like a lot of the features of pop-rock music, so they don't want to completely do away with things like grooves, chord progressions and the like.
Rush, then, is progressive rock, but their focus in the 70s was on more of a hard rock/metal framework (metal for that era)--but they did the same kind of experimentation with rhythms/meters, harmonies, song structures and so on with that hard rock/metal framework. There were other bands that did this, too--a lot of mid-70s (and later, including recent) King Crimson was hard rock/metal-oriented, as were bands like early Styx (although more just the hard rock side there).
It's a bit more complicated once the 80s arrive, because many of the progressive rock bands stuck around, but many of them went in a less experimental pop direction--then reigned in their playing with the rock framework a lot, and went back to more conventional rhythms, song structures, harmonies, song lengths, etc. BUT, many of them still retained a degree of experimentation that continued to set them apart--it was just a more subtle kind of experimentation. A great example of a band taking that approach, and coming along right while that approach was in full swing, is Asia. On one level, they're just a pop-rock band, but if you listen closely, they're doing a lot of experimenting with structures, but often very subtly--not surprising given that the band is comprised of prog rock veterans trying to produce commercial hits.
But, during the 1980s, there were still some bands that were just as adventurous as bands were during the progressive rock heyday in the 1970s, and by the late 80s, many started dropping the more pop approach (like King Crimson, who became at least as experimental as ever, if not more, in the 1990s), plus there have been a number of progressive rock resurgences with new bands heavily influenced by the classic 1970s progressive rock bands.
By the way, "fusion" is very similar to progressive rock in its aims and scope--we could say that progressive rock and fusion are two sides to the same coin, but the difference is rather than building on a rock framework, fusion builds on a jazz framework. Sometimes the distinction between fusion and progressive rock is a very gray one, as both tend to have a lot of rock and a lot of jazz in them (it's just that the jazz framework has some important differences that are sometimes easily identifiable). One of the important distinctions, though, is that progressive rock musicians tend to have rock backgrounds--most of them grew up listening to rock, they focused on playing rock when they started learning an instrument, and so on, while fusion musicians tend to have jazz backgrounds--most of them grew up listening to jazz, they focused on playing jazz soon after they started learning an instrument, and so on.
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Nutshell definition:
(1) The music is attempting to break out of the stereotypical pop/rock music-theoretical structures--to do something different than the typical rhythms (which are usually in 4/4 in the stereotypical pop/rock structures), typical harmonic material (I-IV-V, ii-IV-V etc. progressions), typical melodic material (often pentatonics), larger-scale song structures (so not just intro/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus, etc.), and so on. At the same time, there are still recognizable relationships to those sorts of structures.
(2) Most progressive rock artists approached (1) by partially merging rock music with heavy influences from other genres, including classical (from various eras), jazz (again from various eras), world music, etc.--even things like country for some artists. Most artists focused primarily on one other genre to merge with rock, but that's just happenstance. It wouldn't have to be just one merged genre, or even any, really. For example, with Yes it was classical (and pretty much oriented towards earlier 20th Century classical), with Jethro Tull it was primarily British folk music, with King Crimson, there was a heavy jazz influence, etc.
(3) The musicians doing the music either came from predominantly rock backgrounds (so that earlier in their musical experience, they'd played with more straightforward rock bands, they grew up listening to rock and learned a lot about how to play from rock records, etc.) or they were at least trying to play in a rock vein overall--so that the basic "feel" of the music still had a rock orientation.
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08-31-2016, 02:05 PM
Linear Mode
