Composition And Experimentation In British Rock 1967-1976
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So,
formally, the simplest possible patterns are employed. All can be traced to earlier
popular models: the ternary in the early rock jam (Cream’s Crossroads,
or King Crimson’s 21st-century schizoid
man), the altered binary rare, but appearing in tracks like A
hard day’s night, and the Animals’ It’s
my life, and the iterative-stanzaic in, say, the blues. Note, though,
that in my descriptions I have had to refer to “broadly” or “essentially” this
or that formal pattern. This is the key here, I think – regularity, of length
and proportion of repeat, of metre, of texture, is avoided within the formal bounds
identified. These are examples of sectional composition, no matter how complex
the surface is made to sound, but the surface is of course what most listeners
actually hear. Let me concentrate on that surface for a moment. The
Boys in the Band opens with what is almost a progressive/jazz head
tune, along the lines of Ian Carr’s Nucleus, the Mahavishnu Orchestra or early
King Crimson. A different complexity appears in the hocketed interweaving, and
the pointillistic texture which completes the first part of the verse of Knots, where the prominent keyed percussion
momentarily hints at the world of Pierre Boulez’ uncontrolled hammering. Yet another
complexity appears in the almost unmetred opening of Advent of Panurge where successive phrases
have 14, 10 and 20 beats, before we do actually lose the will to count. Elsewhere
we can find time-signatures of 5/4, added and lost half-beats and the like, but
these are standard fare for progressive rock.
If we dive slightly below the surface, for a while, we can identify some common melodic strategies (see Example 1). The Advent of Panurge is fundamentally scalic, with a pattern which changes its context: a line which falls from fifth, to first, and rises back to fifth degree climaxes, transposed, moving from tonic down to fourth and back. I’ll call this a “trough” contour. Such a trough, fifth to first to fifth, organises Raconteur, troubadour too. A dog’s life inverts this pattern, moving from lower fifth to upper fifth and back (a “peak” contour), disjunct upwards movement and conjunct down. Think of me with kindness has almost exactly the same contour. A cry for everyone relies on a single falling motion, from upper to lower tonic. The Boys in the Band makes use of a similar fall, but one with kinks in. Knots is very different, with a disjunct melody making great play with a sharpened fourth degree. Only The River has a markedly more complex line, although the subsequent melody twice rises from lower to upper tonic, in two different keys (f#-A). So, a limited palette of melodic shapes, although strongly disguised by texture and metre.
How are these melodic ideas developed, or at least continued? As Example 2 shows, the “peak” contour of A dog’s life develops its latter half, falling from upper seventh degree to lower seventh, then returning to the upper fifth degree to lower fifth motion, in effect “composing out” the falling tetrachord A-G-F#-E. The central idea retains the same shape as the initial idea, but with a mixture of conjunct and disjunct movement and with kinks in the outline. The “peak” contour in Think of me with kindness has an intermediate continuation which emphasises the first half, the upward leaps, while the refrain concentrates, at a slower pace, on negotiating its way back down. A central section then rises in fourths, as had that of A dog’s Life. So, two different but related sets of continuations here, but each can be described as developing, in a nineteenth-century “classical” sense, the material initially presented.
The Advent of Panurge adopts yet another strategy, repeating the scalic movement but extending the range in both directions. There is a short central vocalise which has little to do with this straight-forward contour, but the remainder of the melody operates smoothly. Raconteur troubadour, whose contour is similarly shaped, develops in a quasi-motivic manner, as show in Example 3. The opening melody reappears subsequently as a quasi-nobilmente theme (the second version of example 3), while the motif of a partly-filled sixth, either falling or rising, culminates in a trumpet phrase, the last “new” idea we hear, and which interlocks two such motifs (the third version). The opening tritonal motif of Knots is followed by its immediate infilling. The later cadential idea, again disjunct, is also immediately followed by its partial infilling. And, as in all good pop music, these memorable tunes are matched by equally resonant bass lines although, in the case of Octopus, they are mostly likely to function in a quasi-contrapuntal manner. On A cry for everyone, the bass has its own very strong sense of identity, as it moves into and out of syncopation, mostly in contrary motion with, but just occasionally doubling, the vocal line (see Example 4). The occasional independence of the bass is perhaps most marked at the beginning of The River, although note that it sinks into relative obscurity on the entrance of the voice. In these examples, perhaps, we can see devices which are familiar from European concert music, even if they are technical rather than stylistic features. So, below the surface, perhaps an equation of progressive with classical here makes some sense, although only on a note-to-note level. We can also observe a parade of compositional virtuosity, in that while there is a limited range of initial material chosen, the means of continuation are more varied, local to each song. One of the starkest examples of this occurs in the long instrumental section of A cry for everyone, where the process results from an exchange of material, what I have elsewhere termed “intercutting”, which is reminiscent of passages in Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play.
What might we say about harmonic language? This is hard to summarise, but we can say that the dorian mode dominates, while the two more contemplative tracks (A dog’s life and Think of me with kindness) pull strongly towards the mixolydian. Within this, the actual harmonic language is highly flexible. Thus The Advent of Panurge has an incessant harmonic motion from IV-I, as the emotional tone is forever pulled downwards, while Raconteur, troubadour pulls the dorian tonic towards III and IV before settling on bV for the instrumental, and finally cadencing in VI. Modes are not observed strictly – we are properly operating within a chromatic modal domain. There is little sense of large-scale harmonic design anywhere here, and perhaps this exemplifies well the technique of concatenating sections I have already talked about. Indeed, this seems to me a key feature of the Gentle Giant idiolect, as their live practice demonstrates. In live performance, (14) Octopus tended to reduce to a medley consisting of Knots - The Boys in the band - The advent of Panurge. The integrity of songs was, by and large, maintained, sometimes acquiring additional material developed after studio versions had been set down. For example, Panurge was usually interrupted by a recorder quartet (replete with quasi-medievalisms), and Boys was often played as an acoustic guitar duet, including an improvisatory section which often, virtuosically, touched on bluegrass and blues styles. (15) On Artistically cryme, (16) Boys precedes Knots and includes a blues interpolation. In live performance, Knots was usually shortened, and some of the vocal quartet material was played unaccompanied (necessarily, perhaps, if one bears in mind the song’s textural complexity). Often the move into Panurge was made via an organ solo reminiscent of Bachian toccata-like playing, but Live Rome 1974 adopts a different route. (17) In live performance, then, we can see that the practice of concatenating sections to produce songs is extended to concatenating songs to produce larger wholes - using much the same strategy that so many progressive “concept” albums use. (18) What is remarkable is that such complex music still enables alternative subtleties of realisation.
So, how to summarise this view of Octopus? What remains its most interesting feature for me is the limited number of compositional strategies chosen, in different domains, but combined in such a way that each track retains it own individuality, an individuality which remains over and above the details of the actual material and its textural clothing from which each track is constructed. For example, A Dog’s Life and Think of me with kindness are melodically similar, but one is ternary, the other binary. The same goes for Raconteur troubadour and The Advent of Panurge, but one is iterative and the other binary. It is this sort of combination I find interesting. But, to return to my starting-point, can we perhaps label the style of which it forms a part? Terms like “symphonic progressive”, “medieval progressive” and even “folk progressive” are bandied about on fan pages, but none of these conclusively identifies the style. It is here I feel moved to call on adjectival phrases like “inky blackness” to cover my speedy retreat, for I don’t know what to do in the face of such a question as this. I can append no useful style label, but I hope I have successfully outlined some of the key stylistic features of the album. What then do I mean by “stylistic” features here? I mean some of the identifiably characteristic uses of particular musical domains. Strangely, for Gentle Giant, many of these uses show an awareness of the possibilities of motivic thinking common to composers in the European tradition, although I would also maintain that the progressive rock movement as a whole is not marked by such awareness. Some of these uses transfer across to other Gentle Giant albums. In a Glass House is a good example here, although if I were to make comparisons with early Giant – the album Gentle Giant, say, or late material – Civilian, most notably – we will find many of these characteristics either inchoate or dissipated. This album, then forms part of a changing Gentle Giant idiolect, an idiolect which I suspect retains few constant features across its lifespan. (19) But this idiolect appears to me to be part of no style – even such undifferentiated blubber terms as “rock” or “fusion” do this music no justice. Perhaps this explains why, to return to Lucy Green’s definition with which I began, some of my most musically astute friends can barely distinguish this music from “non-musically meaningful sound”. What “musically-meaningful sound” might actually be will have to await another time.
To conclude, then, observation of the formal characteristics of Octopus reinforces my initial assumption that progressive rock is not a style, but is best understood stylistically as marked by the establishment of the independence of the idiolect. As a movement, it is individualistic and, in skill terms, elitist. But in its definitional emphasis on the importance of individual difference, within some loose stylistic bounds, it has had a profound effect on subsequent popular music, wherein a similarly-coded “difference” is the key discursive marker of aesthetic success, outweighing the indivisible communality promoted by the media surrounding its most prominent “other”, punk. Recall, if you will, Andy Gill’s, Mark E. Smith's and John Lydon’s praise for King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, and our view of the historical importance of progressive rock begins to require redressing.
If we dive slightly below the surface, for a while, we can identify some common melodic strategies (see Example 1). The Advent of Panurge is fundamentally scalic, with a pattern which changes its context: a line which falls from fifth, to first, and rises back to fifth degree climaxes, transposed, moving from tonic down to fourth and back. I’ll call this a “trough” contour. Such a trough, fifth to first to fifth, organises Raconteur, troubadour too. A dog’s life inverts this pattern, moving from lower fifth to upper fifth and back (a “peak” contour), disjunct upwards movement and conjunct down. Think of me with kindness has almost exactly the same contour. A cry for everyone relies on a single falling motion, from upper to lower tonic. The Boys in the Band makes use of a similar fall, but one with kinks in. Knots is very different, with a disjunct melody making great play with a sharpened fourth degree. Only The River has a markedly more complex line, although the subsequent melody twice rises from lower to upper tonic, in two different keys (f#-A). So, a limited palette of melodic shapes, although strongly disguised by texture and metre.
How are these melodic ideas developed, or at least continued? As Example 2 shows, the “peak” contour of A dog’s life develops its latter half, falling from upper seventh degree to lower seventh, then returning to the upper fifth degree to lower fifth motion, in effect “composing out” the falling tetrachord A-G-F#-E. The central idea retains the same shape as the initial idea, but with a mixture of conjunct and disjunct movement and with kinks in the outline. The “peak” contour in Think of me with kindness has an intermediate continuation which emphasises the first half, the upward leaps, while the refrain concentrates, at a slower pace, on negotiating its way back down. A central section then rises in fourths, as had that of A dog’s Life. So, two different but related sets of continuations here, but each can be described as developing, in a nineteenth-century “classical” sense, the material initially presented.
The Advent of Panurge adopts yet another strategy, repeating the scalic movement but extending the range in both directions. There is a short central vocalise which has little to do with this straight-forward contour, but the remainder of the melody operates smoothly. Raconteur troubadour, whose contour is similarly shaped, develops in a quasi-motivic manner, as show in Example 3. The opening melody reappears subsequently as a quasi-nobilmente theme (the second version of example 3), while the motif of a partly-filled sixth, either falling or rising, culminates in a trumpet phrase, the last “new” idea we hear, and which interlocks two such motifs (the third version). The opening tritonal motif of Knots is followed by its immediate infilling. The later cadential idea, again disjunct, is also immediately followed by its partial infilling. And, as in all good pop music, these memorable tunes are matched by equally resonant bass lines although, in the case of Octopus, they are mostly likely to function in a quasi-contrapuntal manner. On A cry for everyone, the bass has its own very strong sense of identity, as it moves into and out of syncopation, mostly in contrary motion with, but just occasionally doubling, the vocal line (see Example 4). The occasional independence of the bass is perhaps most marked at the beginning of The River, although note that it sinks into relative obscurity on the entrance of the voice. In these examples, perhaps, we can see devices which are familiar from European concert music, even if they are technical rather than stylistic features. So, below the surface, perhaps an equation of progressive with classical here makes some sense, although only on a note-to-note level. We can also observe a parade of compositional virtuosity, in that while there is a limited range of initial material chosen, the means of continuation are more varied, local to each song. One of the starkest examples of this occurs in the long instrumental section of A cry for everyone, where the process results from an exchange of material, what I have elsewhere termed “intercutting”, which is reminiscent of passages in Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play.
What might we say about harmonic language? This is hard to summarise, but we can say that the dorian mode dominates, while the two more contemplative tracks (A dog’s life and Think of me with kindness) pull strongly towards the mixolydian. Within this, the actual harmonic language is highly flexible. Thus The Advent of Panurge has an incessant harmonic motion from IV-I, as the emotional tone is forever pulled downwards, while Raconteur, troubadour pulls the dorian tonic towards III and IV before settling on bV for the instrumental, and finally cadencing in VI. Modes are not observed strictly – we are properly operating within a chromatic modal domain. There is little sense of large-scale harmonic design anywhere here, and perhaps this exemplifies well the technique of concatenating sections I have already talked about. Indeed, this seems to me a key feature of the Gentle Giant idiolect, as their live practice demonstrates. In live performance, (14) Octopus tended to reduce to a medley consisting of Knots - The Boys in the band - The advent of Panurge. The integrity of songs was, by and large, maintained, sometimes acquiring additional material developed after studio versions had been set down. For example, Panurge was usually interrupted by a recorder quartet (replete with quasi-medievalisms), and Boys was often played as an acoustic guitar duet, including an improvisatory section which often, virtuosically, touched on bluegrass and blues styles. (15) On Artistically cryme, (16) Boys precedes Knots and includes a blues interpolation. In live performance, Knots was usually shortened, and some of the vocal quartet material was played unaccompanied (necessarily, perhaps, if one bears in mind the song’s textural complexity). Often the move into Panurge was made via an organ solo reminiscent of Bachian toccata-like playing, but Live Rome 1974 adopts a different route. (17) In live performance, then, we can see that the practice of concatenating sections to produce songs is extended to concatenating songs to produce larger wholes - using much the same strategy that so many progressive “concept” albums use. (18) What is remarkable is that such complex music still enables alternative subtleties of realisation.
So, how to summarise this view of Octopus? What remains its most interesting feature for me is the limited number of compositional strategies chosen, in different domains, but combined in such a way that each track retains it own individuality, an individuality which remains over and above the details of the actual material and its textural clothing from which each track is constructed. For example, A Dog’s Life and Think of me with kindness are melodically similar, but one is ternary, the other binary. The same goes for Raconteur troubadour and The Advent of Panurge, but one is iterative and the other binary. It is this sort of combination I find interesting. But, to return to my starting-point, can we perhaps label the style of which it forms a part? Terms like “symphonic progressive”, “medieval progressive” and even “folk progressive” are bandied about on fan pages, but none of these conclusively identifies the style. It is here I feel moved to call on adjectival phrases like “inky blackness” to cover my speedy retreat, for I don’t know what to do in the face of such a question as this. I can append no useful style label, but I hope I have successfully outlined some of the key stylistic features of the album. What then do I mean by “stylistic” features here? I mean some of the identifiably characteristic uses of particular musical domains. Strangely, for Gentle Giant, many of these uses show an awareness of the possibilities of motivic thinking common to composers in the European tradition, although I would also maintain that the progressive rock movement as a whole is not marked by such awareness. Some of these uses transfer across to other Gentle Giant albums. In a Glass House is a good example here, although if I were to make comparisons with early Giant – the album Gentle Giant, say, or late material – Civilian, most notably – we will find many of these characteristics either inchoate or dissipated. This album, then forms part of a changing Gentle Giant idiolect, an idiolect which I suspect retains few constant features across its lifespan. (19) But this idiolect appears to me to be part of no style – even such undifferentiated blubber terms as “rock” or “fusion” do this music no justice. Perhaps this explains why, to return to Lucy Green’s definition with which I began, some of my most musically astute friends can barely distinguish this music from “non-musically meaningful sound”. What “musically-meaningful sound” might actually be will have to await another time.
To conclude, then, observation of the formal characteristics of Octopus reinforces my initial assumption that progressive rock is not a style, but is best understood stylistically as marked by the establishment of the independence of the idiolect. As a movement, it is individualistic and, in skill terms, elitist. But in its definitional emphasis on the importance of individual difference, within some loose stylistic bounds, it has had a profound effect on subsequent popular music, wherein a similarly-coded “difference” is the key discursive marker of aesthetic success, outweighing the indivisible communality promoted by the media surrounding its most prominent “other”, punk. Recall, if you will, Andy Gill’s, Mark E. Smith's and John Lydon’s praise for King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, and our view of the historical importance of progressive rock begins to require redressing.
