Progressive music

For other uses, see Progressive music (disambiguation).

Progressive music is a type of music that experiments with alternative routes and expands stylistic boundaries outward. The word "progressive" is based on the root concept of "progress", which refers to development and growth by accumulation. In the 1940s, "progressive jazz" described a complex, modernist-inspired variation of big band. By the 1960s, the post-hippie music that was labelled "progressive" (i.e. "progressive pop") would later come to be known as progressive rock. It directly followed the development of rock and roll, pushing the genre into greater complexity while retracing the roots of romantic and classical music.

Jazz

"Progressive jazz" redirects here. For other uses, see Progressive jazz (disambiguation).

See also: Bebop, Cool jazz, and Third stream

Bandleader Stan Kenton coined the term "progressive jazz" for his approach to big band jazz music that conveyed an association with art music.

Progressive jazz is a form of big band that is more complex or experimental. It originated in the 1940s with arrangers who drew from modernist composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. its "progressive" features were replete with dissonance, atonality, and brash effects. Progressive jazz was most popularized by the bandleader Stan Kenton during the 1940s. Critics were initially wary of the idiom. Dizzy Gillespie wrote in his autobiography: "They tried to make Stan Kenton a 'white hope,' called modern jazz and my music 'progressive,' then tried to tell me I played 'progressive' music. I said, 'You're full of shit!' 'Stan Kenton? There ain't nothing in my music that's cold, cold like his."

AllMusic states that, along with Kenton, musicians like Gil Evans, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Cal Massey, Frank Foster, Carla Bley, George Gruntz, David Amram, Sun Ra, and Duke Ellington were major proponents of "progressive big band", a style of big band or swing music that was made for listening, with denser, more modernistic arrangements and more room to improvise.

Pop and rock

Main articles: Progressive pop and Progressive rock

See also: Art rock, Avant-rock, Psychedelic rock, Acid rock, and Post-progressive

When progressive rock first emerged, it was called progressive pop, with the term "progressive" referring to the wide range of attempts to break with standard pop music formulas through extended instrumentation, personalized lyrics, and individual improvisation. "Progressive rock" evolved from psychedelic (or "acid") rock music, and the term is almost synonymous with "art rock". Proto-prog is the advanced music that slightly predates the progressive rock era of the late 1960s.

Up until the mid 1960s, individual idiolects always operated within particular styles. What was so revolutionary about this post-hippie music that came to be called 'progressive' ... was that musicians acquired the facility to move between styles—the umbilical link between idiolect and style had been broken.

—Allan Moore

Sociologist Paul Willis believes: "We must never be in doubt that 'progressive' music followed rock 'n' roll, and that it could not have been any other way. We can see rock 'n' roll as a deconstruction and 'progressive' music as a reconstruction." The music developed immediately after a brief period during the 1960s when creative authenticity among musical artists and consumer marketing coincided with each other. In 1966, the degree of social and artistic dialogue among rock musicians dramatically accelerated for bands like the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Byrds. By 1970, a journalist at Melody Maker highlighted progressive pop as the "most fascinating and recent development" in popular music, writing that the music is "meant for a wide audience but which is intended to have more permanent value than the six weeks in the charts and the 'forget it' music of older pop forms." Author Will Romano states that "rock itself can be interpreted as a progressive idea ... Ironically, and quite paradoxically, 'progressive rock', the classic era of the late 1960s through the mid- and late 1970s, introduces not only the explosive and exploratory sounds of technology ... but traditional music forms (classical and European folk) and (often) a pastiche compositional style and artificial constructs (concept albums) which suggests postmodernism."

Cleveland's Troy Smith believes that the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds "established the group as forefathers of progressive pop". Both Pet Sounds and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), with their lyrical unity, extended structure, complexity, eclecticism, experimentalism, and influences derived from classical music forms, are largely viewed as beginnings in the progressive rock genre. Critics assumed King Crimson's album In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) to be the logical extension and development of late 1960s proto-progressive rock exemplified by the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Pink Floyd, and the Beatles. According to Edward Macan, the album may be the most influential to progressive rock for crystallizing the music of earlier "proto-progressive bands ... into a distinctive, immediately recognizable style". He distinguishes 1970s "classic" prog from late 1960s proto-prog by the conscious rejection of psychedelic rock elements, which proto-progressive bands continued to embrace.

In the opinion of King Crimson's Robert Fripp, "progressive" music was an attitude, not a style. He believed that genuinely "progressive" music pushes stylistic and conceptual boundaries outwards through the appropriation of procedures from classical music or jazz, and that once "progressive rock" ceased to cover new ground – becoming a set of conventions to be repeated and imitated – the genre's premise had ceased to be "progressive". "Post-progressive" is a term invented to distinguish a type of rock music from the persistent "progressive rock" style associated with the 1970s.

Electronic

See also: Italo disco, Progressive house, and Progressive trance

AllMusic defines "progressive electronic" as a subgenre of new age music which "thrives in more unfamiliar territory. The styles that emerge are often dictated by the technology itself. Rather than sampling or synthesizing acoustic sounds to electronically replicate them, these composers tend to mutate the original timbres, sometimes to an unrecognizable state. True artists in the genre also create their own sounds." Writer Simon Reynolds posits that "the truly progressive edge in electronic music involves doing things that can't be physically achieved by human beings manipulating instruments in real-time."

Giorgio Moroder performing in 2015

In disco music, and later house music, a desire to separate more exploratory styles from standard approaches saw DJs and producers adopting the word "progressive" to make a distinction. According to the DJ and producer Carl Craig, the term "progressive" was used in Detroit in the early 1980s in reference to Italo disco. The music was dubbed "progressive" because it drew upon the influence of Giorgio Moroder's Euro disco rather than the disco inspired by the symphonic sound of Philadelphia soul.

By 1993, progressive house and trance music had emerged in dance clubs. "Progressive house" was an English style of house distinguished by long tracks, big riffs, mild dub inflections, and multitiered percussion. According to Reynolds, the "'progressive' seemed to signify not just its anti-cheese, nongirly credentials, but its severing of house's roots from gay black disco." Reynolds also identifies links between progressive rock and other electronic music genres, and that "many post-rave genres bear an uncanny resemblance to progressive rock: conceptualism, auteur-geniuses, producers making music to impress other producers, [and] showboating virtuosity reborn as the 'science' of programming finesse."

Bibliography

• Ake, David Andrew; Garrett, Charles Hiroshi; Goldmark, Daniel (2012). Jazz/not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-27103-6. 
• Butler, David (2002). Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-275-97301-8. 
• Gillespie, Dizzy (2009). To Be, Or Not-- to Bop. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-6547-1. 
• Greene, Doyle (2016). Rock, Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, 1966-1970: How the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground Defined an Era. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-2403-7. 
• Haworth, John Trevor; Smith, Michael A. (1975). Work and Leisure: An Interdisciplinary Study in Theory, Education and Planning. Lepus Books. 
• Hegarty, Paul; Halliwell, Martin (2011), Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s, New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-8264-2332-0 
• Holm-Hudson, Kevin, ed. (2013). Progressive Rock Reconsidered. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-71022-4. 
• Jacobshagen, Arnold; Leniger, Markus; Henn, Benedikt (2007). Rebellische Musik: gesellschaftlicher Protest und kultureller Wandel um 1968. Verlag Dohr. ISBN 978-3-936655-48-3. 
• Macan, Edward (1997). Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509887-7. 
• Macan, Edward (2005). Endless Enigma: A Musical Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9596-0. 
• Moore, Allan (2004). Jethro Tull's Aqualung. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4411-1315-3. 
• Reynolds, Simon (2013). Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-78316-6. 
• Romano, Will (2010). Mountains Come Out of the Sky: The Illustrated History of Prog Rock. Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books. p. 17. ISBN 978-0879309916. 
• Willis, Paul E. (2014). Profane Culture. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-6514-7. 

Further reading

• Gendron, Bernard (2002). Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-28735-5. 
• Official Charts Company (September 4, 2015). "Progressive music you didn't know you loved". Official Charts Company. 
• Romano, Will (2014). Prog Rock FAQ: All That's Left to Know About Rock's Most Progressive Music. Backbeat Books. ISBN 978-1-61713-620-7. 
• Smith, Bradley (1997). The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music. Billboard Books. ISBN 978-0-8230-7665-9.