The Emergence Of Art Rock
Chewbop
---------------------------------------------
There is a mythology, an inherent developmental cycle, to
artistic movements. They begin with a rude and innocent vigor,
pass into a healthy adulthood and finally decline into an
overwrought, feeble old age. Something of this process can be
observed in the passage of rock & roll from the three-chord
primitivism of the Fifties through the burgeoning vitality and
experimentation of the Sixties to the hollow emptiness of much
of the so-called progressive, or "art", rock of the Seventies.
The whole notion of art rock triggers hostility from those who
define rock in terms of the early-middle stages of its
development. Rock was born as a street rebellion against
pretensious and hypocrisy - of Fifties society. Fifties Tin Pan
Alley pop and high art in general ("Roll Over Beethoven"). Thus
the very idea of art rock strikes some as a cancer to be battled
without quarter, and the punk reversion to primitivism was in
part a rejection of the fancier forms of progressive rock. The
trouble is, once consciousness has intruded itself into the
process, it's impossible to obliterate it (except maybe with
drugs, and then only temporarily). And so even primitivism,
self-consciously assumed, became one of the principal vehicles
of art rock. The Beatles' "Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
(1967) is often cited as the progenitor of self-conscious
experimentation in rock. It was the album that dramatized rock's
claim to artistic seriousness to an adult world that had
previously dismissed the whole genre as blathering teen
entertainment. The Beatles aspired to something really daring
and new - an unbashedly eclectic, musically clever melange that
could only have been created in a modern recording studio. One
inevitable implication of the whole notion of art rock,
anticipated by Sgt. Pepper, is that it parallels, imitates or is
inspired by other forms of "higher", more "serious" music. On
the whole, imitative art rock has tended to emulate classical
music, primarily the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
orchestral sorts. The pioneers in this enterprise were the Moody
Blues, whose album "Days of Future Past" paired the group with
the London Festival Orchestra. Although Moody Blues devotees
seemed to think they were getting something higher toned than
mere rock, they were kidding themselves. Moody Blues records
were mood music, pure and regrettably not so simple. There's
nothing wrong with that, of course, except for the
miscategorization into something more professional. The vast
majority of the bands that pillage traditional classical music
come from Britain. Why British bands feel compelled to quote the
classics, however tounge-in-cheek, leads into the murky waters
of class and nation analysis. In comparison with the British,
Americans tend to be happy cavepeople. Most American rockers
wouldn't know a Beethoven symphony if they were run down by one
in the middle of a freeway. One result of such ignorance is that
American art (music, painting, poetry, films etc.) can develop
untroubled by lame affectations of a cultured sensibility. In
Britain the lower classes enjoy no such isolation. The class
divisions and the crushing weight of high culture flourish
essentially untrammeled. Rockers seem far more eager to
"dignify" their work, to make it acceptable for upper-class
approbation, by frightening it with trappings of classical
music. Or, conversely, they are far more intent upon making
classical music accessible to their audiences by bastardizing it
in the rock context. Or, maybe, they feel the need to parody it
to the point of ludicrousness. In all cases, they relate to it
with a persistence and intensity that Americans rarely match. The
principal examples here from the Seventies are acts like The
Nice, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Deep Purple, Procul Harum,
Renaissance, Yes and Rick Wakeman. Much of what these artists
did was just souped-up, oversynthesized, vaguely "progressive"
rock of no particular interest or pretensions. But at one time
or another all of them dealt in some form of classical pastiche.
Wakeman, classically trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy,
is as good an example as any. After serving time as a session
pianist for the likes of David Bowie and Cat Stevens, he joined
Yes, helping to lead the group into a convoluted pop mysticism.
He eventually left Yes in 1974 to pursue a solo career devoted
to such elaborate, portentously titled orchestral narratives as
"Journey to the Centre of the Earth", "The Six Wives of Henry
VIII" and "The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights
of the Round Table". These ice-skating epics had their elements
of elephantine humor. But his classical excursions were
dispatched with such a brutal cynicism as to be genuinely
appalling. Even when such groups weren't busily ripping off
Grieg their music was operatically arty in the bad sense,
through their ponderous appeal to a middle-class sensibility and
their lame reliance on electronically updated nineteenth-century
vaudeville stage tricks. Too often these pastiches were further
burdened by the seemingly irresistible weakness certain sorts of
loud, arty British bands had for science-fiction art and
"poetry". Yes' album covers make the point as well as anything,
but such puerile mythologizing - Tolkien for the teenyboppers -
pervaded much of British pop poetry and lapsed over with
insufferable affectation into much of the British electric
folk-rock camp, too; think only of Jethro Tull and Cat Stevens.
Classical borrowings don't have to be limited simply to
quotations, however, nor do they have to be bad by definition.
The whole Craze for "rock operas" of the Kinks-Who variety
produced some fascinating work. Similarly, some of the fairly
straightforward heavy-metal groups have colored their music with
the judicious application of nonrock styles, to telling effect
(the use of Eastern modes and intrumental accents in Led
Zeppelin's "Kashmir", for example). Such use of classical and
other nonrock styles and formal ideas blends imperceptibly into
all-purpose stylistic eclecticism - the free and often febrile
switching among different styles within the same piece.
Eclecticism, by now a talisman of the entire post-Modernist
movement in all the arts, was more prominent in the Seventies
pop world in London than anywhere else, and, at its best, it
stops being lamely imitiative and enters the realm of
creativity. Numerous British bands of the Seventies fell into
the eclectic art-rock camp: Genesis, King Crimson, Gentle Giant,
Electric Light Orchestra, Queen, Supertramp, Sparks, 10CC and
Be-Bop Deluxe. There were continental band like Focus, and even
American groups like Kansas, Styx and Boston that fit here also.
Certainly there were differences between these groups, large
differences, and there were many more groups that could be
listed. But they all shared a commitment to unprepared, abrupt
transitions from one mood to another. Sometimes the shifts were
between tempos, sometimes between levels of volume, sometimes
between whole styles of music. The effect in any case was
violent, disruptive and nervously tense, and as such no doubt
answered the needs of the age as well as anything. At their best
(or at their most commercially successful) these groups never
lost sight of older rock basics, as with Queen's best work. In a
sense, Roxy Music might be considered the leader of this
particular pack, especially between 1971 and 1973, when Brian
Eno was a member of the band. But even from the first, and
despite the strong contributions of Phil Mananzera and Andy
McKay, this was always Bryan Ferry's band, as proven by his
continuity in his subsequent solo albums. Ferry's artsiness
expressed itself so much as style over substance that style
itself became substantive. As the ultimate self-professed lounge
lizard, he managed to take pop-rock's hoariest conventions (the
love song, even actual oldies on his solo albums) and coat them
with very intimations of unspeakable decadence. But the real art
rocker in Roxy Music was Eno. Aside from the quality of his
music, which is considerable and which he sustained into the
Nineties, he is interesting from two points of view: his command
of the synthesizer and his relation to others on the London and
New York experimental scenes. The synthesizer is a much-abused,
much-misunderstood instrument. When played like a souped-up
electric organ by people like Keith Emerson, Jon Lord (of Deep
Purple) or Rick Wakeman, it can sound simply flashy and cheap.
The obligatory synthesizer solo, preferably with smoke bomb and
laser obligato, was the curse of the Seventies. If synthesizers
weren't regarded as newfangled organs, they were taken
literally, as something that "synthesizers", and we were
subjected to Wendy Carlos' and Isao Tomita's synthesized
versions of the classics. The synthesizer is an instrument with
its own characteristics, and those characteristics are just
beginning to be explored by rock musicians. When played with the
subtetly and discretion of a Stevie Wonder or a Garth Hudson, it
can reinforce conventional textures superbly. And when somebody
like Brian Eno or Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream gets hold of
it, the synthesizer can create a whole world of its own. Eno's
"Discreet Music" (1975), with its title-track first side full of
soothing, hypnotic woodwindish sounds, or "No
Pussyfooting"(1975) and "Evening Star" (1976), two
collaborations with Robert Fripp, ex-King Crimson guitarist,
or "Music for Airports" (1978), were masterly examples of
genuine rock avant-gardism. Of course, they weren't really
"rock" in any but the loosest sense: There was no reference
back to a blues base, even in attenuated form. But they still
counted as music produced by rock sensibility aimed at a rock
audience. Eno's position within the London avantgarde, and the
nature of that avantgarde, are both of interest, too. London,
like New York, has a thriving avantgarde musical community that
doesn't place much of a premium on formally acquired technique,
thus remaining open to fresh infusions from ostensible
"amateurs". In London the experiment relatively free from Top
Forty pressures. This robbed the London scene of some potential
big-name experimenters like George Harrison and John Lennon
(whose "Two Virgins" with Yoko Ono was another particularly
appealing early art rock entry in 1969). Still, what was left in
the forefront of experimentation was interesting enough. The
mere fact that Eno had to leave Roxy Music (quite apart from the
question of clashing egos with Ferry) indicates the difficulty
of pursuing experimentation and commercial success at the same
time. The London avantgarde scene, insofar as any outsider can
tell, is marked still by a fascinating if rather private and
sporadic interchange between the classical and pop worlds. In
the Seventies the pop stars (Eno, guitarist Phil Manzanera of
Roxy, Fripp) did rather more interesting work than those who
came over from a classical background (David Bedford, Stomu
Yamashta). Mike Oldfield fits here to a certain extent, although
his work - particularly after his best-selling "Tubular Bells"
(1972), which did admittedly have a bland appeal as a reduction
of California composer Terry Riley's ideas - was lame beyond
recall. Much of this work, from Oldfield to Eno and even Riley,
is head music, and relates to a rather interesting form of
avantgarde trance music, which brings us to the subject of
drugs. The avantgardism is rock of the Sixties and Seventies,
for all its ultimate debts to surrealism and other vanguard
movements from earlier in the century, owed its primary fealty
to the proliferation of drugs in the Sixties. It would be
misleading to overstress this, but just as false to repress it.
Marijuana, LSD and other psychedelics, and metherdrine, or
speed, all had a profound effect on how music in general, and
art rock in particular, was made and perceived. This is not to
say that you had to be stoned to play or enjoy this music. But
it does mean that the climate and stylistic preoccupations of
many varieties of present-day art are built in part on
perceptions analogous to the drug experience. Sometimes it takes
only one trip, as with acid, to give you a whole other fix on
the world. The kind of quiescent, dappled textural shiftings
that mark much of American composer La Monte Young's music
(Eno was strongly influenced by Young; and John Cale, formerly
of the Velvet Underground, worked closely with him) owe
something to grass, at least originally: Maybe Young has never
smoked in his life, but his art could have germinated only in a
subculture primed for it by marijuana. And the same is true for
the whole acid-rock phenomenon. The pure acid-rockers of the
Sixties - from The Byrds to Jefferson Airplane - don't really
concern us here. But Pink Floyd, originally Britain's premier
acid-rockers, do. After cutting a couple of British hit singles
in 1967, the group concentrated on extended compositions, often
with spacey lyrical motifs. "The Dark Side of the Moon" (1973)
became one of the most successful albums of the decade, a
bestseller in Europe and America as well as England. Pink Floyd
turned out some of the most consistently interesting "head
music" of the late Sixties and Seventies, and managed, in its
various shards after its breakup, at least to re-create some of
that work arrestingly thereafter. The group had a sense for line
and continuity and ritualistic repetition that was quite
special, and to dismiss it simply as technically limited is
philistine. In Los Angeles the drug scene helped spawn the
Mothers of Invention, one of the first rock groups to emphasize
mixed-media presentations, dubbed "freak-outs" by leader Frank
Zappa, a selfprofessed teetotaler, was forced after the first
few L.A. freakouts in 1967 to disavow the use of drugs at these
affairs - naturally to no avail. The Mothers combined social
satire, parody of rock & roll oldies, classical references -
Zappa regularly paid homage to Edgar Varese - and a growing
taste for vaguely avantgarde jazz improvisation. It has been an
influential collage of styles, affecting the work of such
diverse musicians as Jean-Luc Ponty, the jazz violinist, and
Paul McCartney, who once cited the Mothers' first album, "Freak
Out", as a key inspiration for "Sgt.Pepper". The psychedelic
enthusiasms of the late Sixties, kindled by (among others) Pink
Floyd and the Mothers of Invention and centered in San Francisco
and in London, found their most sustained resonance in the
Seventies in West Germany. Kraftwerk had the biggest commercial
impact in the United States, thanks to the surprising success in
1975 of "Autobahn". Rather more interesting was Tangerine Dream
and its leader, Edgar Froese. The group's records and Froese's
solo albums were impressionistic extravaganzas, full of gentle
washes of electronic color. There was a parallel to Eno's work
here. But Eno is a more diverse artist than Froese, and more
overtly rock oriented, and in such purely experimental pieces as
"Discreet Music" he shows an indebtedness to the structuralist
principles of classical composers like Young, Riley (himself an
offshoot of the psychedelic/meditative climate of the Bay Area
in the Sixties), Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Froese, on the
other hand, owes his classical inspirations to such orchestral
colorists as Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti and the electronic
music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Froese's work
seems less interesting than that of his models, but at least his
choice of inspirations betrayed a certain sophistication. More
directly related to Eno was the band Cluster, with which Eno
twice collaborated. And the artier implications of Giorgio
Moroder's disco "factory" cannot be ignored here. His "I Feel
Love" for Donna Summer is one of the best trance records of the
Seventies, among the other things - as a version performed in
New York by Blondie and Fripp reaffirmed so well. And before he
hit upon his disco formula, Moroder had made an overt art-rock
synthesizer collage disc, influenced by the German psychedelic
groups but better than his models. At the time nobody could be
interested in releasing it, and since then Moroder has been too
busy to bother. The evolution of the New York art-rock scene in
the late Seventies, and its subsequent spread to Los Angeles
and other byways of the United States, was such an eruption of
energies that it merits separate treatment. But the pattern
suggested in London was brought to triumphant fruition in this
country: a rejection of overcomplexity, the development of a new
artistic primitivism and finally a direct merger with other
forms of avantgardism, both classical and jazz - with Eno and
Fripp, both of whom moved to New York, as catalysts. This
disquisition began with talk about morphologies and
self-consciousness, and in some ways the aesthetic behind the
New York art-rock scene of the past decade brings us full
circle. Looking at rock from a populist standpoint, one can
seriously question both its aspirations to high art and the very
hegemony of high art itself. Maybe the self-conscious primitives
are right: Maybe art rock doesn't have to be clever complexity
at all. Maybe real art is what which most clearly and directly
answers the needs of its audiences. Which, in turn, means that
we can prize pure rock and pure pop, from Chuck Berry on, as
"art" in no way of inferior to that which may entail a more
highly formalized technique for its execution. Rock may be part
of a far larger process in which art broadens its gestures to
encompass an audience made more numerous by the permeation of
social equality down into strata heretofore ignored. There is
another, more philosophical side to it. What Warhol and pop
artists were trying to tell us - and what composer John Cage has
been telling us all along - is that art isn't necessarily a
product crafted painstakingly by some mysterious, removed
artistdeity, but is whatever you, the perceiver, choose to
perceive artistically. A Brillo box isn't suddenly art because
Warhol put a stacked bunch of them into a museum. But by putting
them there he encouraged you to make your every trip into the
supermarket an artistic adventure, and in so doing he exalted
your life. Everybody's an artist who wants to be, which is
really a more radically populist notion than encouraging
scholarly studies of the blues. Roll over Beethoven, indeed, and
make room for us.
Chewbop.
--
Questo messaggio e' stato inoltrato automaticamente
da un paio di anonymous remailer. Il mittente originale
e' sconosciuto e non identificabile. Datevi pace.
Tom Hartman
them ) there he( Warhol) encouraged you to make your every trip into the
supermarket an artistic adventure, and in so doing he exalted
your life."
Wait, I thought the thrust of the article was that YES and ELP were pretentious...;)
paramucho
Ah, these spin-off bands... YESterday and hELP.
abe slaney
> The Emergence Of Art Rock: A study by Chewbop
Hey, I enjoyed the read.
What is not explained is why the music these class-conscious brits were
creating was so widely popular in countries without the same traditional
class divisions. For example, as noted, most Americans don't know much
about Beethoven beyond however much of the 5th was used in Bugs Bunny.
So why should they affect pretensions to a class that doesn't exist for
them?
Chocolo Malto!
"abe slaney" <abesl...@itagain.com> wrote in message
news:VRv9c.508$AY4...@twister.nyroc.rr.com...
> Chewbop wrote:
> > The Emergence Of Art Rock: A study by Chewbop
>
> Hey, I enjoyed the read.
> What is not explained is why the music these class-conscious brits were
> creating was so widely popular in countries without the same traditional
> class divisions. For example, as noted, most Americans don't know much
> about Beethoven beyond however much of the 5th was used in Bugs Bunny.
ROFLOL!
abe, you slaney me!
paramucho
wrote:
You hear the British Class System in the Beatles' music?
mcnews
Chocolo Malto!
"mcnews" <mcou...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:1cddce67.04032...@posting.google.com...
> i heard yes at the super market yesterday.
your move?
abe slaney
Not me, although I'm sure I would if class struggle was the prism
through which I saw the world. It sounded to me like Chewy was positing
pretensions to a cultural elite as the motive behind certain kinds of
neo/pseudo-classical art rock, which is fine as a thesis but doesn't
explain the popularity of those bands among a generation of basically
culturally clueless stoner suburbanites. I think the popularity in that
case had more to do with a kind of escapism...the storybook quality of
the themes and instrumentation, etc., than it did with class maneuvering.
richard blaine
>For example, as noted, most Americans don't know much about Beethoven
beyond however much of the 5th was used in Bugs Bunny.
Though "Rhapsody Rabbit" was Liszt. One of the high points in Western
art.
Bugs, that is.
Lizz Holmans
blaine) wrote:
The Divine Bugs's ventures into opera are much better known--'What's
Opera, Doc?' is the single best thing Chuck Jones ever did, and 'The
Rabbit of Seville' is nearly as good.
Lizz 'Yes, I know it, I can't help it' Holmans
--
i feel as visible as a hyphen but not half as self assured--archy
BlackMonk
As opposed to Australia and Britain, where every schoolchild can whistle
Beethoven's entire oeuvre by age 7?
Anyway, the idea that only certain classes can enjoy a specific type of
music sounds suspect.
abe slaney
Well I agree. Maybe I wasn't clear...when I said 'it is not explained' I
didn't mean that the argument was incomplete, I meant that it was flawed.
BlackMonk
My mistake. Sorry about that.
>
paramucho
wrote:
The problem with the kind of explanation you say Chewy posits is that
they tend to be based on arbitrary postulates and the argument can't
really proceed beyond the postulates. Is my "square" more "round" or
more "blue"? What is "art music"? I think it's an arbitrary label.
Chewy eventually comes to that conclusion, so to speak, but on a
social rather than musical basis.
It seemed to me that a large part of his article is concerned with a
social class system [in music]. I don't think most people look at
music through that prism -- it tends to be only an issue for those who
do, as you say in the general case.
Me, I like paragraphs.
abe slaney
>
> Me, I like paragraphs.
:)
They do help.
mcnews
Chocolo Malto!
"mcnews" <mcou...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:1cddce67.04032...@posting.google.com...
> "Chocolo Malto!" <cho...@jesus.com> wrote in message
news:<c46ej1$l6f$0...@pita.alt.net>...
> > "mcnews" <mcou...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
> > news:1cddce67.04032...@posting.google.com...
> > > i heard yes at the super market yesterday.
> >
> > your move?
>
> yep.
natch!..:)
Christopher Jepson
seems to be missing, though, is the artists of the Canterbury scene
(Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine, Caravan, etc.), whose music was
characterized by a sizable element of jazz -- often pretty avant-garde
jazz, which marked them as more truly innovative than certain other,
more famous, art-rockers.
Chris Jepson
MacBeatle
> >
> My mistake. Sorry about that.
> >
Well well well.
Mr. Perfect finally acknowledges one tiny little error.
Amazing!
Mister Charlie
"MacBeatle" <waro...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:23e30c12.04032...@posting.google.com...
Now now...a little more humilty in this place would benefit us all.
Chocolo Malto!
"Christopher Jepson" <cje...@mail.med.upenn.edu> wrote in message
news:40684FB3...@mail.med.upenn.edu...
a local weekend supplement had a great and rather long article on daevid
allen recently.
he's still at it, living somewhere on the east coast of oz, still playing
and recording.
>
Chocolo Malto!
"Mister Charlie" <smokerdu...@myway.com> wrote in message
news:c49n4t$2frgp4$1...@ID-63206.news.uni-berlin.de...
it's had to be humble when you're as great as i am...:)
BlackMonk
I thought you didn't like Gong? I have no use for anything they did without
Allen, but some of his stuff, with and without Gong is fantastic. Then
there are times when he does absolutely nothing for me.
Chocolo Malto!
>
> "Chocolo Malto!" <cho...@jesus.com> wrote in message
> news:c4a6e2$pg2$0...@pita.alt.net...
> >
> > "Christopher Jepson" <cje...@mail.med.upenn.edu> wrote in message
> > news:40684FB3...@mail.med.upenn.edu...
> > > As a fan of art rock I found this an interesting read. One thing that
> > > seems to be missing, though, is the artists of the Canterbury scene
> > > (Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine, Caravan, etc.), whose music was
> > > characterized by a sizable element of jazz -- often pretty avant-garde
> > > jazz, which marked them as more truly innovative than certain other,
> > > more famous, art-rockers.
> > >
> > > Chris Jepson
> >
> > a local weekend supplement had a great and rather long article on daevid
> > allen recently.
> >
> > he's still at it, living somewhere on the east coast of oz, still
playing
> > and recording.
>
> I thought you didn't like Gong?
well, i must admit i am absolutely infatuated with steve hillage's version
of hurdy gurdy man ...:)
> I have no use for anything they did without
> Allen, but some of his stuff, with and without Gong is fantastic. Then
> there are times when he does absolutely nothing for me.
me too, like about for the last twenty years....:)
BlackMonk
I'd still like to hear a live album from Brainville, the show I saw was
amazing, but their album was a letdown.
Bjoern Are
> The Emergence Of Art Rock: A study by Chewbop
>
> There is a mythology, an inherent developmental cycle, to
> artistic movements. They begin with a rude and innocent vigor,
> pass into a healthy adulthood and finally decline into an
> overwrought, feeble old age. Something of this process can be
> observed in the passage of rock & roll from the three-chord
> primitivism of the Fifties through the burgeoning vitality and
> experimentation of the Sixties to the hollow emptiness of much
> of the so-called progressive, or "art", rock of the Seventies.
This rock & roll "process" is a mythology, created by the post punk
press and media, not the least when taking about the alleged
"hollowness" of progressive rock. It is in fact far easier to argue
for the hollowness of all other rock forms.
However, I guess saying that progressive rock of the 60 and 70's was
the period in rock history being the least hollow, is to risk being
interpreted as to say that todays political correct musical "analysts"
are hollow. Which I don't mind being interpreted as saying.
> The whole notion of art rock triggers hostility from those who
> define rock in terms of the early-middle stages of its
> development.
Excactly.
> The Beatles' "Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
> (1967) is often cited as the progenitor of self-conscious
> experimentation in rock. It was the album that dramatized rock's
> claim to artistic seriousness to an adult world that had
> previously dismissed the whole genre as blathering teen
> entertainment. The Beatles aspired to something really daring
> and new - an unbashedly eclectic, musically clever melange that
> could only have been created in a modern recording studio.
Pricesely, one of the earliest example of rock not being "hollow"
(interesting term, BTW, wonder what John would have said about it,
typical academic undefineable).
> One inevitable implication of the whole notion of art rock,
> anticipated by Sgt. Pepper, is that it parallels, imitates or is
> inspired by other forms of "higher", more "serious" music. On
> the whole, imitative art rock has tended to emulate classical
> music, primarily the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
> orchestral sorts.
Havn't heard much "art rock", have you, Chewbop?
> The pioneers in this enterprise were the Moody
> Blues, whose album "Days of Future Past" paired the group with
> the London Festival Orchestra. Although Moody Blues devotees
> seemed to think they were getting something higher toned than
> mere rock, they were kidding themselves. Moody Blues records
> were mood music, pure and regrettably not so simple. There's
> nothing wrong with that, of course, except for the
> miscategorization into something more professional.
Moody Blues did exactly the same thing as Eno ten years later,
creating mood music based on available instruments and classical
forms. Both went more for a minimalist form, based mostly on
soundscapes. Between these you have the whole aggressive
"maximalistic" scene, often focusing on 20th century forms from
Stravinsky to Bartok and Ginastera, not to mention Stockhausen.
> The vast
> majority of the bands that pillage traditional classical music
> come from Britain. Why British bands feel compelled to quote the
> classics, however tounge-in-cheek, leads into the murky waters
> of class and nation analysis.
Nonsense. Almost no band "pillaged traditional classical music". And
the one doing it the most - Ekseption - was very much an ekseption.
And it was Dutch. And this has nothing at all to do with class
analysis, this is a marxist misinterpretation based on it sounding
plausible in academic circles.
> In comparison with the British,
> Americans tend to be happy cavepeople.
That may be true;-)
> Most American rockers
> wouldn't know a Beethoven symphony if they were run down by one
> in the middle of a freeway.
They would know it was classical, though.
> Rockers seem far more eager to
> "dignify" their work, to make it acceptable for upper-class
> approbation, by frightening it with trappings of classical
> music.
Nonsense, rockers almost never do this, and when they do it is not out
of any class consciousness.
>Or, conversely, they are far more intent upon making
> classical music accessible to their audiences by bastardizing it
> in the rock context. Or, maybe, they feel the need to parody it
> to the point of ludicrousness. In all cases, they relate to it
> with a persistence and intensity that Americans rarely match. The
> principal examples here from the Seventies are acts like The
> Nice, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Deep Purple, Procul Harum,
> Renaissance, Yes and Rick Wakeman.
The Nice was a 60's band and it was mainly in the 60's that "Procul
Harum" (sic) used some classical forms. And Purple rarely did. And all
did it for fun, or for political comment (The Nice played Bernstein's
"America" while burning a painting of Stars & Stripes) or for the beat
of it, like The Nice mixing Dylan' Country Pie with Bach's
Brandenburger. Yes and ELP mainly used 20th century forms, and that
aggressivily. Rather that "souping up" they filled it with so much
pepper that it got hard to stomach. And still obviously is, as Chewbop
does not seem to have bothered to hear much of it.
> Much of what these artists
> did was just souped-up, oversynthesized, vaguely "progressive"
> rock of no particular interest or pretensions. But at one time
> or another all of them dealt in some form of classical pastiche.
> Wakeman, classically trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy,
> is as good an example as any.
About the only example one might say. And Keith Emerson's Piano
Concerto is not so much pastiche (of 20th century forms) as a valid
concerto, especially the furious third movement, made just after his
house burned down, if memory serves me right.
> He eventually left Yes in 1974 to pursue a solo career devoted
> to such elaborate, portentously titled orchestral narratives as
> "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", "The Six Wives of Henry
> VIII" and "The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights
> of the Round Table".
The first one was made BEFORE he joined Yes, the second when he still
was in Yes, and the third before he joined Yes again. Before
"analysing" again, Chewbop need to get his facts right. On the other
hand, they don't seem to matter much, as he has made his mind up.
> These ice-skating epics had their elements of elephantine humor.
Arthur was the only one performed on ice, and that only twice, and the
whole thing was due to Wakemans pub sense of humour and spectacle. He
even chose to have his pub friends along as singers.
> But his classical excursions were dispatched with such a
> brutal cynicism as to be genuinely appalling.
This is a malicious comment with no base in fact. Where on earth does
this "analyst" get all his errors and misrepresentations from? Wakeman
is a genuinely uncynical guy, he plain simply enjoys a good variety
show. This is a popular or populistic attitude academic analysts
always seem to miss - or dismiss - as their analyst excursions are
dispatched with such a brutal cynicism as to be genuinely appalling.
> Sometimes the shifts were
> between tempos, sometimes between levels of volume, sometimes
> between whole styles of music. The effect in any case was
> violent, disruptive and nervously tense, and as such no doubt
> answered the needs of the age as well as anything.
Yes, indeed, the old "answered the needs of the age". Just like this
"analysis" may have "answered the needs" of an age into class
interpretations. Or his own needs of feeling important.
> But the real art rocker in Roxy Music was Eno.
Not the least as he was not much qualified to play any instrument.
> Aside from the quality of his
> music, which is considerable and which he sustained into the
> Nineties, he is interesting from two points of view: his command
> of the synthesizer and his relation to others on the London and
> New York experimental scenes. The synthesizer is a much-abused,
> much-misunderstood instrument. When played like a souped-up
> electric organ by people like Keith Emerson, Jon Lord (of Deep
> Purple) or Rick Wakeman, it can sound simply flashy and cheap.
Except from Wakeman, none of these played is as a "souped up" organ,
and Lord almost never used it. Never having heard "Toccata" performed
by ELP, has he, Chewbop?
> The obligatory synthesizer solo, preferably with smoke bomb and
> laser obligato, was the curse of the Seventies.
Why, where, who? I went to dozens of concerts in the 70's and
witnessed a synth solo only two times - both by Wakeman - and they
didn't last for more than a minute. Now, guitar and drum solos, on the
other hand....
> If synthesizers
> weren't regarded as newfangled organs, they were taken
> literally, as something that "synthesizers", and we were
> subjected to Wendy Carlos' and Isao Tomita's synthesized
> versions of the classics.
An ocean of difference between Carlos and Tomita.
> The synthesizer is an instrument with
> its own characteristics, and those characteristics are just
> beginning to be explored by rock musicians. When played with the
> subtetly and discretion of a Stevie Wonder or a Garth Hudson, it
> can reinforce conventional textures superbly. And when somebody
> like Brian Eno or Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream gets hold of
> it, the synthesizer can create a whole world of its own. Eno's
> "Discreet Music" (1975), with its title-track first side full of
> soothing, hypnotic woodwindish sounds, or "No
> Pussyfooting"(1975) and "Evening Star" (1976), two
> collaborations with Robert Fripp, ex-King Crimson guitarist,
> or "Music for Airports" (1978), were masterly examples of
> genuine rock avant-gardism.
And most of Froese and Eno's msuci are as mentioned just mood music
utilising different classical forms - minimalistic - than other
artists. No more, no less valid, though to some a whole lot more
boring than e.g. Keith Emerson at his most inspired.
> Of course, they weren't really
> "rock" in any but the loosest sense: There was no reference
> back to a blues base, even in attenuated form. But they still
> counted as music produced by rock sensibility aimed at a rock
> audience. Eno's position within the London avantgarde, and the
> nature of that avantgarde, are both of interest, too.
Yes, the high brow connectio is what this is about, Bowie and Eno got
on well with the "artists", spoke their language etc, while the other
bands - much maligned - were too busy enjoying themselves at the local
pub.
> London,like New York, has a thriving avantgarde musical community that
> doesn't place much of a premium on formally acquired technique,
> thus remaining open to fresh infusions from ostensible
> "amateurs".
Exactly, Eno's great "force" was not being able to play any
traditional keyboard. Hence he had to approach it completely
different. To some interesting effects, though no more valid than
other ways. And often rather boring.
> "The Dark Side of the Moon" (1973)
> became one of the most successful albums of the decade, a
> bestseller in Europe and America as well as England. Pink Floyd
> turned out some of the most consistently interesting "head
> music" of the late Sixties and Seventies, and managed, in its
> various shards after its breakup, at least to re-create some of
> that work arrestingly thereafter. The group had a sense for line
> and continuity and ritualistic repetition that was quite
> special, and to dismiss it simply as technically limited is
> philistine.
I think "ritualistic repetition" about sums it up. This "analysis" is
not about looking at music objectively (well, no one does, anyway), it
is about arguing the case for minimalistic music where little really
happen. To praise a musical piece for its "ritualistic repetition" may
also indicate an inability to enjoy a musical piece where one has to
concentrate a bit. And it goes against what the Beatles were about,
doing creative changes and letting something new happen all the way
through a piece. Which I find less boring than minimalism, though that
kind of music also has its place when I'm in the mood.
> Everybody's an artist who wants to be, which is
> really a more radically populist notion than encouraging
> scholarly studies of the blues. Roll over Beethoven, indeed, and
> make room for us.
This is a grand misunderstanding of "populistic". People don't want so
much to make music themselves, as to be entertained by genuine
entertainers. Like the Beatles, Nice, Wakeman, ELP and Queen did/does.
And in stark oppostion to most of Eno's work. No matter what an class
oriented analyst may insist in a series of revealing errors.
IMHO.
Regards
Bjorn Are
Christopher Jepson
> a local weekend supplement had a great and rather long article on daevid
> allen recently.
>
> he's still at it, living somewhere on the east coast of oz, still playing
> and recording.
That's good to hear. He must be like 70 now, right?... I saw Gong about 10
years ago, in a club in Philadelphia. It was approximately the "classic"
Gong lineup -- Daevid Allen, Gilli Smyth, Didier Malherbe and some of the
others -- and they played mostly the Radio Gnome Invisible stuff. It was one
of my favorite concerts of all time.
Chris Jepson
Bjoern Are
> > to such elaborate, portentously titled orchestral narratives as
> > "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", "The Six Wives of Henry
> > VIII" and "The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights
> > of the Round Table".
>
> The first one was made BEFORE he joined Yes, the second when he still
> was in Yes, and the third before he joined Yes again. Before
> "analysing" again, Chewbop need to get his facts right. On the other
> hand, they don't seem to matter much, as he has made his mind up.
To clarify if anyone is confused by this: Parts of "Journey" was
composed prior to him entering Yes, the album was recorded while he
was with Yes.
Bjorn Are
Martin ~ Malaysia
>
> Arthur was the only one performed on ice, and that only twice, and the
> whole thing was due to Wakemans pub sense of humour and spectacle. He
> even chose to have his pub friends along as singers.
It was performed trice. All three sold out. I saw the second one. One
of the best shows I have been to.
Bjoern Are
I stand corrected, thank you!
Regards