Emulating Classic Prog Is Not Prog

infandous wrote: As to the rest, I wonder then why we don't have every possible musical innovation on this site?  There is "progression" to be found in every genre of music, yet they are not all represented here.  The thing I find odd however, is that not everything here can really be called "rock" music.  Not all of the music on this site is innovative or original because Progressive Rock is a genre with certain characteristics which are fairly well defined in the link above (though it can be argued that anything that is not outright plagerism is "orginal", since it does not copy something else).

That is only because the term prog is an abbreviation of progressive rock and it is therefore seen fit to associate it with a) music that is at least somewhat rock based and b) rock based music that originated in the late 60s at the earliest.  But the musical construct could be found in any kind of sophisticated/art music, often at greater levels of sophistication than the usual symph prog fare.  Dave Brubeck Quartet and Stockhausen are two examples that come to mind as progressive music. That prog is used to denote only something rock based does not mean in any way that it is the only progressive music in the world.

I have personally also argued, unsuccessfully, for the inclusion of artists that are not strongly tied to rock because I don't see rock as such an overwhelmingly important part of the puzzle even in classic prog.  Sure, some bands like Rush lean heavily towards rock but some others like Gentle Giant draw into a melting pot of influences. Of course, as the definition of progressive rock supplied by this website demonstrates, it is more a historical thing and a connotation associated with the "movement" to "progress" rock and make it more sophisticated. Sort of like the term NWOBHM. It means nothing, it's just heavy metal.  Queensryche sound very NWOBHM-ish in their early work but they are not usually called that because they are American.  Regardless, the musical essence remains the same.  So too,  the concept of prog per se is very broad.

And I must disagree on that note that those characteristics are fairly well defined in this definition. I can take specific cases and show how bands commonly referred to as prog, especially from 90s onwards, don't share some of those characteristics, but I think it's fairly obvious anyway.  We cannot enumerate musical characteristics to describe all the music that constitutes prog, we can only indicate what it might be. 

You have mentioned in some other thread that it was easier to understand what prog was in the 70s but it's much more confusing when applied to the contemporary stuff. It's because prog was a concentrated movement in the 70s and there possibly was more 'cross-fertilization'.  That movement more or less ground to a halt by the end of the 70s. A technical metal wave led by Rush initially and then by bands like Watchtower, Pestilence, Death and, finally, Dream Theater forms one axis of the new prog and the RIO movement started in the mid 70s continues underground and leads another.  I am not so much abreast of what neo prog bands from the 80s are up to and I don't know to what extent there are strong ties between that and modern neo prog bands. There's a lot of other stuff that doesn't get slotted so easily and often not identified as prog by the mainstream, like Radiohead. 

So, the idea of prog, as in prog rock, essentially derives from the original movement. It is no longer relevant and is broadly applied to sophisticated rock music.  For the sake of convenience in taxonomy, bands bearing resemblances to 70s prog get accepted in databases more easily than those that don't sound a whole lot like any 'known' prog. That doesn't mean that the former is more prog than the other, of course. 

So essentially I find the notion that "progressive" means "moving forward" and the idea of "prog" as a "genre" to both be wrong. Instead I'd say "prog" = "progressive" and it means "music with an integration of popular and art music values/elements" (this can even cover "krautrock" or "post rock" if needed because those styles can be said to carry a heavy minimalist classical influence... and since minimalism and Baroque obviously aren't the same genre, neither are symphonic and krautrock).