The avantgarde's relation to popular music

Svetonio wrote: jayem wrote: (...)  That's why I welcome Svetonio backing my first comment, though I can't really agree that each and every prog piece would fit to being (non phrase-noun meant) "pure art music" or "inner-directed" (doesn't read pretentious bollocked if it means that it's just music we enjoy  fancying alone rather than dancing to it in the midst of a crowd). (...) Of course that not every prog song is Art music, but the percentage of great prog songs & epics is quite sufficient, so we no need to speculate. Same is with Jazz which is mainly Art music too.

jayem wrote: But only because I failed to honour your first answer into thanking or nodding.

Dean wrote: jayem wrote: 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. Good to know !!  ...And what they call "fusion" ...DuhHhhhh... Well done Jean-Marie, I think you have successfully managed to shoot yourself in the foot

Toaster Mantis wrote: 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.

Edited by Dean - April 12 2015 at 12:04

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.

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". (...)

Ah, no. Art Music is a noun phrase - it means something specific. 

I remember reading an interview with Wm. Bennett, where he claims that he was trying to do not what TG did but expand on what they didn't do in their music.

Thanks for finally getting around to crystallizing your thoughts on the subject, Dean and Svetonio. For the record there are several competing definitions of "avantgarde" in art history, but I think the first person to define the term accurately was Walter Benjamin. If I remember correctly, he defined it in opposition to commercialized art or "kitsch", another term I also think either him or Theodor W. Adorno popularized.

I'll write down my replies more in detail later this weekend. I think it's relevant that the article I linked to is from a webzine specializing in metal and industrial/neofolk, two genres whose history fit Dean's definition of avant-garde more. A lot of specific "movements" in metal history seem to start as reactions against other scenes, I think the earliest groups also grew out of psychedelic rock, but from the perspective that specific scene had exhausted its possibilities... then there was the NWoBHM reacting against punk turning into new wave and the earlier metal groups turning into stadium rock, the earliest thrash/black/death metal groups reacting against glam/"hair metal" et cetera.

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?

WeepingElf wrote: 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.