Did Classical Music influence Prog?

 nice thought, but alas no - Beethoven, Mozart and all the decomposing composers would be considered classical composers if they were around today - just like John Adams, Philip Glass, John Tavener are now.

 

As much as we would like the idea of them becoming Prog musicians, they would have entered into the world of Classical music just as they did in the 18th century.

 

I used to thnk like this when a kid, always tried to convince my friends that Wakeman wiould be coinsidered a 20 Century Classical musician, but I was wromng.

 

There's still a strong Classical movement that has no relation with Rock music, and Rick Wakeman will always be considered a Rock musician.

 

As a prove of this, musicians like Steve Hackett and Tony Banks, despite their works, never had an album accepted as Classical, until they released Midsummer Night Dream and Seven, in which they abandoned every reference to Rock in order to be accepted by the elitist Classsical universe.

 

Maybe musicians as Mussorgsky or Cui, who broke with the European Orchestral universe, would be¨Prog musicians today, but that's not for sure.

 

Iván

 

I think what You are asking, did classical music influence Prog. more than it influenced mainstream.

And my answer would be yes i think so, im sure Genesis, Yes And KC, would listen to Classical music,

before they started the Prog. thing, even though they may not admit to it.

 

On the other hand that dosent nessesarily mean you will find "classical music" on any prog albums.

 

Regarding someone saying Krim's is not influenced by Classic's, i remember Fripp playing Bach on this one.  http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=9617

 

Here is a little piece from

 

 

"Some of Fripp's most perplexing comments on other music concern the Western art music tradition. On the one hand, the music of some of that tradition's masters has figured prominently in Fripp's own musical self-education. He has often acknowledged his debt to Bartok, particularly the Bartok of the String Quartets, many of whose movements sound positively Frippian, with their intense linear counterpoint, percussive rhythms, odd metrical schemes, extended tonality, exotic scales, and piquant dissonances. Stravinsky's name comes up from time to time, as when Fripp mentioned the Russian in a discussion of tuning, temperament, and enharmonic pitch notation; on another occasion he called early Stravinsky "really hot stuff." Fripp expressed admiration for Handel, Bach, Mozart, and Verdi in a 1980 essay, but he was not focussing on their music so much as he was making the point that these composers had had to teach themselves how to thrive creatively while working in "very difficult political and economic conditions ... Surely the most surprising point is how much inspired work had prosaic origins."

 

 

If this is not pure fiction, seems evident, that Fripp is well into the music of the past.

 

 

 

Much of what we call "classical" music was music that pushed back the boundaries in its time... Beethoven, for example did things which hadn't been done before - and which caused a lot of controversy - in that spirit, classical music definitely influences prog.

 

Insofar as a musician uses everything available to them to express their inspiration, and if they can't find the way to do it with what's available, invent something new or add in something which you wouldn't normally expect  (for example Beethoven was the first to use choral voices on a symphony) - then classical composers were the prog-rockers of their day.

 

I once reviewed a Genesis gig for a local paper (back in 1976 when they were still a 5 piece but with Phil Collins on vocal) and said that Genesis would be "tomorrow's classical music".  I'm not sure if I was right about that.

 

In hindsight, it would have been more accurate to say that about Mike Oldfield or Jean-Michel Jarre perhaps.