19401159%2E2015%2E1008344

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Is Progressive Rock Progressive? YESand Pink Floyd as Counterpoint toAdornoJérôme Melançon & Alexander CarpenterPublished online: 04 Feb 2015.

To cite this article: Jérôme Melançon & Alexander Carpenter (2015) Is Progressive RockProgressive? YES and Pink Floyd as Counterpoint to Adorno, Rock Music Studies, 2:2, 125-147, DOI:10.1080/19401159.2015.1008344

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Is Progressive Rock Progressive? YESand Pink Floyd as Counterpoint toAdornoJérôme Melançon and Alexander Carpenter

Theodor Adorno insisted that progress in music depends upon an on-going, radicalnewness that breaks with convention as it strives towards aesthetic and social auton-omy; it is not possible in popular music, which, as a mere cultural commodity, isnecessarily formulaic, repetitive and static. There is, however, a genre of rock musicthat aspires to the high seriousness of art music, that eschews the market demandsof the pop single, and that calls itself progressive. Progressive rock, exemplified byYES and Pink Floyd, both accords with and responds to Adorno’s critique of popularmusic as meaningless and regressive, but also goes beyond what Adorno thought waspossible for progressive music. As both musically and politically progressive, prog rockaspires to seriousness, meaning, and truth, challenges the aesthetic rigidity andcapitalism of the music industry from within, and makes possible for listeners anawareness of the otherwise masked alienation of everyday life.

Introduction

Theodor Adorno wrote most of his major essays on modern music and popularmusic in the 1930s and ‘40s. He identified the former as intentionally anti-com-mercial works of art for a specialized audience, requiring a particular kind of atten-tive/structural listening that would foster a revolutionary personality; the latter hecharacterized as a production of the culture industry, as recycled form and contentguaranteeing quiescence and social stability. Musically speaking, while modern,serious music is progressive and changes constantly, popular music is static by vir-tue of its commodification, and so cannot bring forth new musical elements tocompositions that thus merely repeat each other. However, Adorno failed to fore-see the industrialization of modern music, as well as the possibilities that wouldsoon be opened by jazz and popular musicians in their experimentations, and somissed the increasing commodification of both types of music—i.e., serious andpopular—as well as the manners in which both continued to promote progress.

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Rock Music Studies, 2015Vol. 2, No. 2, 125–147, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2015.1008344

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Although Adorno’s writings are mostly confined to a specific era of the musicindustry, his rejection of popular music continues to find echoes.1

Faced with the on-going resonance of this rejection, we consider whether andhow popular music might be able to overcome, rather than contribute to alienation(as Adorno asserts), which we define as being removed and turned away frommeaningful engagement in political, economic, social, and artistic life. We arguethat since progressive rock shares some of the same concerns we can find in Ad-orno’s writings on modern and popular music, it stands in counterpoint to Ad-orno’s rejection of popular music, and provides an example of how music can betied to political and musical progress. The specificity of progressive rock is that itaddresses these concerns by leaving out the hypothesis of an art that might beentirely autonomous from capitalism; instead, it focuses on possibilities for over-coming alienation, within that framework as it appeals to a larger audience—a lar-ger portion of the population than modern art music could hope to reach.We will develop this argument in two steps. The first step comprises a study of

what Adorno meant by “progressive,” in political as well as in musical terms. Wewill present what music must achieve in order to be considered progressive and soemancipatory, rather than merely entertaining and consequently alienating and inno way inoffensive—in other words, to present what might make “prog rock” pro-gressive. The second step will be to turn to two progressive rock groups, YES andPink Floyd, in order to study how they responded to the same problems withinpopular music. These two groups were chosen because they were among the mostsuccessful in the terms of the music industry, and so are the best known progres-sive rock groups outside the circle of aficionados of the genre. We will turn toYES’s music and Pink Floyd’s own explanations for their musical endeavors to iso-late the underlying intentionality at play in their compositions.At the outset it will appear that for Adorno, the problems with popular music

are essential—that is, there is no way for popular music to be anything but what itis—whereas for progressive rock musicians, as exemplified by YES and Pink Floyd,the problems with popular music are historical, and, while the commodification ofmusic cannot be avoided, the problems it brings can be overcome through a con-stant subversion of musical tropes and genres. This second thesis is especiallyimportant for those who desire progress, since it suggests different roots for thesame problem and does not require a revolutionary break with previous musical orpolitical forms. Instead, our position seeks spaces for freedom and better musicaland political conditions within a capitalist and popular framework, and appeals toa much broader public, yielding different results than the appeal to a narrow pub-lic, going beyond elitism as defined by Adorno.

The Continuing Relevance of Adorno’s Critique of Popular Music

Adorno’s critique of popular music provides us with three orders of problems wemust address if we are to speak of the progressive nature of any music or art form.

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First, this radical critique addresses the very essence of popular music: it is withoutsubstance; it prevents us from understanding the society in which we live and thedomination under which we live, all the while silencing us; it even creates alien-ation—a disconnection from our society—and prevents any kind of significantchange within it. And so, if we are to see whether progressive rock, a subgenre ofpopular music, is progressive, we must answer this critique and address these the-ses concerning what popular music is, as separate from serious music, which aloneis said to be progressive.The second order of problems Adorno formulated explicitly as a critique is the

very malaise that progressive rock musicians appear to have felt or formulatedimplicitly when they began creating music in the late 1960s. These musicians werealso uneasy about the standardization of popular music, the repetition of hits onthe radio and in society, and they sought to construct songs differently and toreach audiences differently than through repetition, giving a wide importance notonly to the LP over the singles format, but also to large scale concerts that tookthe focus at least partly away from the band’s recognition factor, toward the musicand larger theatrical elements. In this manner, progressive rock can be said toshare Adorno’s critique of popular music, but to respond to it through othermeans.The third order of problem formulated by Adorno revolves around the issue of

defining what progress is politically and musically,2 and of linking music, as asocial and material practice, to political phenomena, even where no obviously polit-ical activity takes place. And so we will address these definitions, descriptions, andpropositions first, before moving on to more specific aspects of progressive rock asanswers to the challenges he made explicit.

Adorno’s Criticism of the Music Industry: What is Politically Progressive?

In asking the question of what might make music progressive politically accordingto Adorno, we will be able to pinpoint the other side of his criticism of popularmusic. Popular music is problematic as “light music,” that is, as music for enter-tainment. As such, Adorno writes, music “seems to complement the reduction ofpeople to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communi-cate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people moldedby anxiety, work, and undemanding docility” (Essays 289). Adorno’s argument isthat light music distracts us from the alienation and the domination that frameour situation and that it makes us unable to articulate, express, discuss, and thusunderstand, the predicaments of modern life. In other words, it does not necessar-ily cause us to become dumb—in both meanings of the word—but it does at thevery least cause us to remain dumb.The most famous and most often studied statement of Adorno’s criticism of

modern capitalism can be found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which heco-authored with Max Horkheimer and in which he wrote the main essay on the

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culture industry. In the Marxist terms that are more common in that essay—whichafter all is aimed at other sociologists and philosophers, rather than at musicolo-gists—light music maintains us in a state of false consciousness. In other words, weare unaware of the reality in which we live because we focus on fetishes. Fetishesare things, objects, which are venerated in the place of the consciousness of therelationships for which they stand and serve as intermediaries. Money is the ulti-mate fetish: we desire money for itself, rather than for the relationships it bothmakes possible and in this process of becoming a fetish makes impossible. He alsolists the star, the singing voice, the instrument, the cultural good, and the presenta-tion of the music as fetishes specific to the music industry.Light music, music for entertainment, is of course part of the culture industry.

We should not be surprised, then, that it furthers the logic of capitalism that cre-ates it. Modernity—and so capitalism—ties everything together so as to makeeverything commensurable, knowable, graspable, usable. For everything to bereplaceable with anything else, it must prevent any kind of difference, and so itbrings everything down to sameness, it forces everything to conform to rules andlaws—not just human laws, but also what we call the laws of nature—and we can-not see that which does not conform. Because we focus on what can be done, wemiss part of reality. In the process we forget what is greater than the diminishedversion of a human being we have created for ourselves. What is outside our reach,our grasp, be it physical or conceptual, is a source of fear—and so nothing isallowed to remain outside our reach.Yet much remains outside our reach, and there is power exactly because con-

cepts and ideas do not quite correspond to the world, but instead impose violenceupon it, through the figure they create for social order. Those who have power overlegal and scientific language also have power over others, since they can assignplaces for them in the social whole. Only they have a vision of the whole; the oth-ers are limited to their actions as individuals, doing their own part in someoneelse’s plan for the whole. In this manner, the few can dominate society through theactions of the collective, which is merely an aggregation of individuals actingtoward goals imposed upon them from the outside (Adorno and Horkheimer 16).Fascism is looming behind every corner for Adorno; what matters most, even tohim, beyond the repetition of past fascisms, is that there exist social processes—mass production, standardized behavior, a statistical outlook on the individual, andthe repression of difference, all through a tangible “threatening collective” and“concealed powers” (Adorno and Horkheimer 22)—that necessarily lead to fascism.The chain of causation is clear: mass production (the base) creates a culture (the

superstructure) that demands standardized behavior not only in the workplace, butalso in all social roles and interactions, and that fosters faceless domination. Moraland intellectual codes make this behavior seem natural, unavoidable, and to beobeyed and liked as the only possible destiny. As individuals are seen as, and toldthey are, merely things that succeed or fail to meet the goals set for them, they seekto adapt best as they can to these goals, which are tied to their economic and social

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roles. Self-preservation becomes the main value, the reason for all actions and allthought. Individuals are the main agents of the standardization of their behavior:there is no one in particular to tell them when they cross a line, except for a gener-alized and collective other, which is experienced in reactions such as “what willthey think?” As subjectivity is eradicated and replaced with scientific processes ofinstrumental decision-making by individuals themselves, experience and thoughtbecome limited to self-preservation and to the administration of the world to thatend. Individuals are then both cut off from their society and their situation anddisappear within a mass full of identical human beings who can speak to eachother, but solely in order to manipulate the world. As a result, they cannot hear orsee anything new. In such a context, culture creates mass deception through theunanimity of the mass: “culture today is infecting everything with sameness”(Adorno and Horkheimer 94).Authoritarianism emerges at the junction of de-individualization and standardi-

zation. Millions are exposed to the same music, the same information, withoutthere being any mechanisms to support their response and reactions. Listeners arenot given the chance to be subjects and so are forced to conform their desires orbetter yet their demand to the standardized product; the public conforms so wellthat its members are willing to participate in all kinds of competitions to become apart of the industry as well, on the terms dictated to them. Marketing researchtreats the masses like authoritarian governments do: as mere forces to be dividedand organized, ready to be conquered or used for conquest.Sameness is extended to the point of encompassing even dissent and opposition.

Being labeled as divergent from the rules and the style of the culture industry leadsto being incorporated within it: the criticism is also a position within the culture; itis not countercultural; otherwise it would not be heard. Indeed, “[p]ublic authorityin the present society allows only those complaints to be heard in which the atten-tive ear can discern the prominent figure under whose protection the rebel is suingfor peace” (Adorno and Horkheimer 104). The cultural dissident can be heard butonly if he or she is well-organized and speaks to the standard in its own language—only if he or she appeals to the rules of the system and so follows them. Other-wise, there is only ostracism, estrangement, isolation, economic impotence, andintellectual powerlessness.For Adorno the way out is the logic itself, in what it leaves out. Indeed, thought

does separate, distance, and objectify, but that is not all it does. Rationality is notonly instrumental rationality but also dialectical rationality in that it allows us tosee how an experience is a part of something greater, part of broader experiences,part of a social whole. In this manner, it can confess that it is power and masteryand so can abandon its claim to mastery. Adorno seeks to establish activities thatstand outside the logic of what he calls enlightenment, and which we could alsocall modernity or capitalism. Such activities recognize that we cannot measureeverything, that we will always be more than the roles that are assigned to us, andopen the way for us to think of ourselves outside any standardization of our

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individuality, relationships, activities, and desires, by offering a contrast with oursociety that leads us to question it and to criticize it. He is thus attempting toestablish a sphere outside capitalism whence it can be criticized. Later in his life,Adorno would radicalize his position, and argue in favor of what he calls theautonomous work of art—a work of art that is entirely autonomous from politics.In other words, a work of art that attempts to be political and speak about politicsis bound to send us back to the very same conditions that produced it. Yet hisposition remains the same: only from outside capitalism, only from outside thecurrent social totality, is it possible to criticize and bring any kind of change tocapitalism and the social totality.

Adorno’s Criticism of Light Music: What is Musical Progress?

Adorno applies this thesis to a distinction between serious—or new/modern—music (see below) and light music, rather than to what we now tend to call classi-cal and popular music.3 He did not favor new music for only theoretical reasons.Having studied piano as a child and later taken music courses at Goethe Universityin Frankfurt, Adorno moved to Vienna in 1925 to study composition with AlbanBerg. Berg was a key member of the Second Viennese School, headed by one ofthe most influential composers of the early 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg—theputative father of modern music and progenitor of atonality. Adorno also tookpiano lessons with another of Schoenberg’s close friends and collaborators, the pia-nist Eduard Steurmann, served as associate editor of the pro-Schoenberg musicjournal Anbruch from 1928 to 1931, and wrote a number of substantial essays andarticles on Berg, Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, and the modern Viennese musicaltradition, which sought to create radically and completely new music.For Adorno, however, this period was short-lived: since then the history of

music “has been nothing more than the history of decline, of regression into thetraditional” (Philosophy 5). What is more, it is limited to very few composers, andAdorno criticizes the music industry generally for commercializing serious musicas classical music, for turning it into mere “household ornaments”; by making it“sacrosanct,” he writes, “…traditional music has come to resemble commercialmass production in the character of its performances and in its role in the life ofthe listener and its substance has not escaped its influence” (Philosophy 10). Thepotential for the expression of truth—social and aesthetic—lies only in the avant-garde. But the avant-garde is “cut off from official culture,” and a “philosophy ofmusic,” as an investigation into music’s truth and true nature, can therefore onlybe a “philosophy of modern music” and can have only progressive music as itsobject (Philosophy 10).Progressive or new music is largely inaccessible and incomprehensible to the

general public: people are alienated by its “outward characteristics,” since they aremerely “radio-trained” listeners who are “cut off from the production of newmusic” (Adorno, Philosophy 9). The difficulty in achieving a critical understanding

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of progressive music lies in the fact that the work’s meaning, for Adorno and theradical composers he values, lies in the “inherent form of every work,” in the“immutable questions and antagonisms of the individual compositional structure”(Philosophy 8).Adorno juxtaposes Schoenberg and Stravinsky in his book Philosophie der Neuen

Musik to demonstrate the fundamental difference between progressive and regres-sive music. Regression in music is essentially a strategy, employed by composersconforming to established and accepted sounds and practices. The intention of theneo-classical Stravinsky, asserts Adorno, is to “emphatically…reconstruct theauthenticity of music—to impose on it the character of outside confirmation. …The mind of a composer such as Stravinsky reacts vehemently against any impulsenot visibly determined by society—actually against the trace of anything which hasnot been socially comprehended” (Philosophy 136). Regressive music, in otherwords, is not born out of an authentic impulse. It makes use of traditional tech-niques, sounds, and modes of organization—which are not merely outdated but“false”—towards accessibility; this music is carefully crafted, favoring the “strictcontour of the phenomenon” over the “strict self-development of essence” (Philoso-phy 136). Progressive music, by contrast, arises from the “tasks” designed by thecomposer, tasks for which traditional or conventional material as such is necessar-ily exhausted, so that new means must be found. It is in this moment that authen-ticity is found, in terms of the work’s consistency, on its own terms. Progressivemusic—Schoenberg’s antebellum atonal, expressionist music, in this case—isexactly, necessarily, what it must be, arising out of artistic necessity, not techniqueor ability, and striving spontaneously towards truth, towards music as knowledge(Philosophy 41). As a result, progressive music does exactly what a progressive poli-tics does: it follows the movement of history, while avoiding the false directionsand the stagnations that tempt all political actors and all musicians.

Defining Progressive Rock

What sort of relationships exist among Adorno’s condemnation of popular/popu-larist music, his notion of musical progress, and the notion of progress attached toprogressive rock? Clearly, from Adorno’s point of view, the mere facts of increasedtechnical complexity—of harmony, of form, of rhythm, of meter—and of increasedvirtuosity in progressive rock music, especially as they reference classical music,would not be de facto indicators of progress. Indeed, one could certainly argue thatthe very elements in Stravinsky’s music that Adorno is railing against, namely theuse of pre-approved musical material—tonal or quasi-tonal harmonies, borrowingsfrom contemporary music, such as jazz, and parodies of baroque and classicalforms—that gives his music a phony imprimatur of quality and authenticity, arealso evident in progressive rock. This is certainly the case where bands are usingthe traditional instruments of baroque and classical music, such as the harpsichordand Spanish guitar, or are giving their works historical titles like “Toccata” or

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“Suite,” drawing from the lexicon of 17th- and 18th-century music—again, theimprimatur of quality, the weight of tradition, of substance. In this sense, forAdorno, progressive rock would be patently regressive.A different point of view is offered by progressive rock historian and aficionado

Jerry Lucky, who claims that we make a mistake when we look for newness ororiginality as such in the music of progressive rock bands. Rather, what is progres-sive about progressive rock is not necessarily its musical, technical, and technologi-cal aspects—although these are partly what differentiate progressive rockaesthetically from other, more traditional forms of rock and pop—but its “philo-sophical approach,” a philosophy that “embraces a nobler goal, the goal of any artform, to be able to express a greater range of emotions and ideas, with greatershades and nuances” (Lucky 120). Lucky suggests, too, that one way to define pro-gressive rock is with reference to its cerebralness, against the “more visceral” quali-ties of mainstream rock (120). While Adorno would certainly disagree, since heargues that “intellectualism”—the mind over the heart—is the charge commonlyapplied against progressive modern art music by ignorant listeners and critics(Philosophy 11), there is nonetheless some common ground to be found here. Inseeking to define or delineate musical progress, both Lucky (for prog) and Adorno(for modern music) highlight the importance of the progressive musician’s resis-tance to the demands and vicissitudes of the commercial music market and to tra-dition and convention. For Lucky, citing Jon Anderson of the band YES,progressive rock is about making music without having to worry about “time,”without the restrictions of conventional song formats and lengths (110). By exten-sion, progressive rock, by resisting these conventions, takes the risk of beingunpopular and commercially unsuccessful, albeit a limited and calculated one, asprog groups do seek a broad audience and are often successful by industry stan-dards: Jon Anderson claims, for example, that YES has sold 35 million albums(“Interview with Jon Anderson”). By creatively resisting the demands of the indus-try without entirely rejecting them—Anderson has stressed the importance of“making great music that lasts forever, creating music that has a heart and soul”while resisting what he describes as the “‘business-business-money-money-pop-pop’” model (“Interview with Jon Anderson”), the “corporate idea…[the] recordcompany idea to make an album because we needed a hit” (“I’ll Return to YES”)—they complicate the popular music soundscape and the notion of popularity, andin so doing create music that is, in the words of the members of the prog rockband Gentle Giant, “unique, adventurous, and fascinating” (qtd in Lucky 121).Adorno offers a similar argument, namely that progressive or radical music—

which is “unique” by its very nature—eschews the commercial market and meresensuality, following “the integral laws of musical structure” to their logical conse-quences, instead of striving for the more accessible middle road via “the propermixture of enticement and banality” (Philosophy 12). Modern music, which Adornopresents as an example of art that seeks complete autonomy from the demands ofcapitalist culture, could strive for such purity only by abandoning any measure of

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popularity. Ironically, the composers Adorno most valued—Schoenberg, Webern,and Berg—actively sought the publication and performance of their works andhoped for the eventual acceptance and understanding of their aesthetic (see Car-penter), and indeed, over time, much of this music has become canonical and, assuch, increasingly commercially viable.In contrast, Lucky denounces the idea that artists must progress and create new

music as one example of the centrality of the concept of progress in the 20thcentury. He contrasts this need for innovation with the “minimal qualitativeadjustments to composition, skill level, arrangements etc.” throughout Mozart’s life(111). This taste for novelty is also difficult to pinpoint and tends to turn us awayfrom the work of mainstream progressive rock musicians. At the end of a series ofdubious arguments (one of which relegates classical music to a “genre” alongsidesubgenres of pop), Lucky distinguishes music that is progressive musically—challenging music—from progressive rock music as “created within certain perime-ters [sic]” (113): longer, structured songs, with many movements and parts (relatedor not), featuring intricate musicianship, using contrasting elements like loudness,dynamics, and mood, incorporating long solos or improvisations, including othermusical styles and referring to orchestras either by incorporating them or by usingMellotrons and synthesizers. Although Lucky’s criteria seem generally sound, herewe will define progressive rock not as a genre—to which we will refer as “progrock”—but instead through the intention that underlies all these musical character-istics: to bring substance and meaning in popular music, so that it lives up to thevalue popular music has for those who listen to it and play it.

“Prog Rock” as a Genre of Popular Music

Yet, in spite of this possible “progressive” structure, progressive rock has the dis-tinction of being the most hated of all pop and rock genres. A recent review ofYES Is the Answer, a new book on progressive rock, describes prog rock and itspreeminent bands as “uncool,” “reviled,” and “much-despised” (Skratt). Prog rockas a genre has yet to be ironically reclaimed and reappraised by subsequent gen-erations of music fans, who have in recent years revived and appropriated bands—such as ABBA, the BeeGees, Hall and Oates, and Journey—that had been dis-missed as symbolic of the uncoolness of their time. Prog rock, by contrast withthe pop of this era, appears to be so irredeemably uncool that no one wants totouch it, no matter how much irony it is packaged in. The reasons for this hesi-tation are manifold. Prog rock has long been accused of a being, among otherthings, unfashionably white; lyrically self-indulgent and ridiculous; sartoriallyunfashionable; of displaying a slavish devotion to virtuosity that is fundamentallytasteless; and, perhaps worst of all, of being unbearably pretentious in loudlywearing its influences—especially classical and contemporary art music practicesand paradigms—on its sleeve.

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This article does not and cannot offer a complete history of progressive rock,nor does it provide a systematic overview of prog rock style and aesthetics. It suf-fices here to note that prog rock was a musical movement fuelled by serious rockmusicians in the late 1960s who sought to elevate the status of rock into an artform, in response both to the relative banality of contemporaneous pop music andto the experimental rock music of the time, typified by the highly influential latealbums of the Beatles. The terms “art rock,” “symphonic rock,” or “concert hallrock”—equally inexact terms—are often used synonymously with progressive rock(Covach 3). As a generic designation, these terms—especially the latter two—areused to categorize rock music with an expanded scope and scale. The groups thatcomprise the prog rock canon—including YES, ELP, Genesis, King Crimson, Rush,Klaatu, Jethro Tull—are all quite different in many respects: some tend towardsmore traditional rock, with expanded instrumentation; others comprise classicallytrained musicians determined to lend gravitas to rock by drawing on past tradi-tions to lend it greater melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and formal complexity; othersstill lean towards more experimental approaches that bring popular and art musiccloser together. What binds them together is a common shift away from blues-based rock towards ever increasing complexity. Listeners, both sympathetic andunsympathetic, recognized this shift, and, as Wilsmore asserts, “affirmed it as aprogressive movement” (105). Then, as now, it was not entirely clear how progrock was progressive: that is, where it was going and what its end point would beonly came to be known in retrospect, and what the notion of musical progressactually was and is requires “a culturally constructed agreement that progress hasbeen made” (Wilsmore 105).It can be said with some certainty that prog rock as such grew out of an age of

experimentation in British rock music in the late ‘60s, beginning around 1967 andending roughly a decade later, effectively immolated by punk and new wave by1977. The era of progressive rock begins, as Covach observes, when some rockmusicians begin to think of rock as “listening music” rather than dancing music, atrend that seems to have been influenced by the Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’sLonely Hearts Club Band (3), and that is certainly evident in the experimental sym-phonic and long-form music of other important groups of that same era, notablyPink Floyd and the Moody Blues. Moore has likewise linked the advent of progrock to “a general shift from a working-class, dancing market to a student, listeningmarket, and [to] an economic boom, which gave the major labels the space toinvest in artists and relax their hold over product and marketing.”Prog rock reached its apex in the mid-1970s, the era of prog “super groups” like

ELP, YES, and Genesis, spreading out from England to the United States andCanada. By 1977, however, prog rock was becoming increasingly unpopular, under-mined in large part by the emerging punk and new wave bands in the UK., whosemusical aesthetic was predicated on a return to the simplicity of traditional popforms and sounds, directness of personal expression, and a celebration of musicalamateurism (Covach 5). As of the early ‘80s, prog rock was effectively dead, its

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preeminent bands—including YES, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd —eithertotally defunct, shifting towards more commercially accessible pop music, or dis-solving and reforming into new pop bands (Covach 5). “Progressive rock” quicklybecame an invective in the lexicon of music critics and journalists, and, notwith-standing the pervasive influence of progressive rock that continues to be felt today,the genre came to be synonymous with pretention, artifice, and a bygone era ofover-inflated, over-produced rock.While progressive rock was born out of the experimental, underground music

scene of the late 1960s as a vehicle for rock musicians determined to elevate rockto the status of art, it should also be understood that progressive rock was alsosomething of a reactionary movement. The desire to give rock greater substanceand meaning was not sui generis; rather, the progressive impulse, the desire tochallenge and transcend traditional or conventional pop and rock, is also certainlyrelated to the pop music of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. A glance at the pop chartsaround the time of prog rock’s birth and ascendancy makes it clear that, for youngmusicians who came of age with Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and even the psychedelicmusic of the latter part of the ‘60s, rock music that might be termed “serious” wasin fierce competition with an array of manufactured and commodified pop musicacts, or “bubblegum” pop: Kim Cooper and David Smay identify 1967–1972 as the“classic bubblegum era,” defining bubblegum as “disposable pop music…contrivedand marketed to appeal to pre-teens [and] produced in an assembly line process—driven by producers and using faceless singers” (1). Some iconic chart-toppingartists in the late ‘60s, such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Mar-vin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin were able eventually to resist their own commodifi-cation in the wake of mass commercial success. In doing so, they opened a pathfor other forms of resistance to a music industry that was simultaneously produc-ing monumentally successful pop acts such as the Monkees, the Archies, and DavidCassidy. As of the early ‘70s, then, classic prog rock bands were reacting—at leastin part—to the kind of popular music that Adorno would have characterized asregressive, passive, and fundamentally meaningless: formulaic, mass-produced,throw-away songs that were essentially childish—cross-referencing “children’sgames, nursery rhythms, candy” (Cooper and Smay 1)—and directly tied in com-mercially to popular live television shows, cartoons, and comic books.

YES and “Roundabout”: Breaking Musical Conventions

If prog rock’s progressiveness is measured in part by its breaking with rock con-ventions, and if prog rock is, in effect, defined in the negative—that is, in terms ofhow it is not like traditional rock—then a brief overview of prog rock’s innovationsand characteristics, relative to traditional rock, is necessary.Progressive rock’s use of expanded instrumentation, which is a facet of rock in

the late ‘60s, is mentioned above; in prog, however, a song’s orchestration—howthe instruments are used—becomes an essential aspect of the music itself. In other

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words, it is not simply that more instruments are added for color or exoticism, orthat orchestral players are merely coupled to the rock band structure, but ratherthat these extra instruments are integrated in the texture and substance of the song.In terms of form, the standard rock/pop form of verse/chorus/verse is eschewed,with songs becoming much longer, often multi-sectional, even taking on thedimensions of small-scale classical movements. Jon Anderson has remarked onprog as expanding the pop forms of artist like the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and theBeach Boys, describing the approach of YES as “an extension of that experience,where you’re going to do rock music but adventurous, not basic, working from thestructure, like symphonic structure, and instrumentation, so we expanded on that,we expanded our musical thinking” (“Interview”). Prog rock songs often includesharply contrasting sections, varying in tempo, texture, instrumentation, mood, andmeter. The blues-based, relatively simply harmonic foundation of rock—whatWilsmore calls rock’s “fixity of chord progressions”(105)—is likewise eschewed infavor of more complex and less formulaic chord progressions, along with a chordvocabulary expanded by the addition of jazz chords, plus sonorities taken from orat least authorized by historical and contemporary art music practice. This wouldinclude a variety of altered chords, modal harmonies, harmonies arriving from lin-ear or contrapuntal processes, and atonal chords. Long, highly virtuosic and some-times improvised solos are a prominent feature of most progressive rock. Finally,and perhaps the most important rejection of standard rock practices, there is progrock’s use of a variety of meters: that is, rather than the “pedestrian regularity of 4/4 common time” (Wilsmore 105) organizing the governing pulse, prog rock songsshift in and out of common time, using a variety of irregular metrical structures.The song “Roundabout” by YES numbers among the modest number of songs in

the progressive rock canon that are generally familiar to listeners. It appears on theYES album Fragile, released in 1971. As of that year, the group’s membership com-prised what is now considered its “classic” line-up: Jon Anderson on vocals, ChrisSquire on bass, Bill Bruford on drums, Steve Howe on guitar, and Rick Wakemanon keyboards. “Roundabout” is 8:30 minutes long in its original incarnation; it wasedited down to 3:30 minutes so it could be released as a single, and was a majorhit for the band. It is an interesting song and relevant to our arguments preciselybecause it is patently “progressive” but also eminently listener friendly.The song is cast in a kind of cyclic form, common in many different eras and

genres of classical music. Cyclic form simply refers to unifying themes or ideas thatrecur and hold a piece together. There are several instances of cyclic form func-tioning in “Roundabout,” most notably that the song begins and ends with thesame music: the introductory acoustic guitar part returns in the middle, and thenat the end as the conclusion. More subtly, there is a short music motif or thematicidea—a transitional or linking idea—that appears in different parts of the song, cre-ating a strong sense of unity. The song’s fundamental structure is fairly traditional:verse/chorus, with a bridge and solos. What marks it as “progressive” is the expan-sion of this form through the addition of a substantial introduction and conclusion,

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thematically unified transitional passages, and a very long bridge that is effectivelya stand-alone section, rather than a brief digression.In terms of instrumentation, the classical influence (Rick Wakeman’s contribu-

tion, most likely: he was a classically trained pianist who studied briefly at theRoyal College of Music) is evident from the outset of “Roundabout”: the song isintroduced by classical guitar, which establishes the overall E minor tonality of thepiece, and concludes with a short, Baroque-inflected contrapuntal passage thatserves as an anacrusis and establishes the tempo for the band’s entrance and thefirst verse. Throughout the song, there is an unusual variety of colors and textures:instruments drop in and out, there is auxiliary percussion (especially in the bridge),and perhaps most notably Wakeman switches constantly and seamlessly betweensix very different types of keyboards: the Mellotron, a MOOG synthesizer, aHammond B3 organ, a harpsichord, a piano, and an electric piano.Instrumental virtuosity, as a staple of prog rock, is also audible almost immedi-

ately in Chris Squire’s very active bass line, heard as soon as the full band entersafter the introduction. Even when we hear the guitar and keyboard solos furtheron in the song, Squire’s bass lines remain very busy, sounding much more guitar-like (indeed, Squire doubled some of the bass parts on guitar, to make them soundbrighter and punchier). This type of virtuoso bass playing—evident also in theplaying of other important rock bassists of this era, including the Who’s JohnEntwistle and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones—is a key signifier of the progressivesound and style, and paved the way for prog bands like Rush, and also for a num-ber of more contemporary, so-called neo-progressive bands, such as Primus, thatfeature a virtuoso bass player.Finally, “Roundabout” offers a good example of how meter is treated in different

ways in prog rock. Meter in rock tends generally to be one of its most rigid charac-teristics: beat is almost always organized in 4/4, and larger structures then tend tobe organized in multiples of four, with musical phrases typically in 4+4 or 8+8groupings. In “Roundabout,” following the unmetered introduction, there is a longopening passage in 4/4 time, but when the verse begins irregular phrases of fivemeasures are introduced. Within the phrases are individual measures of regularand slightly irregular length, in a pattern consisting of 4+4+4+4+6 beats. Thisirregularity is intensified at the tail-end of each verse, where there is an alternationbetween 4/4 and 2/4 measures.The chorus is also metrically irregular, comprising three-measure phrases

counted as 4+4+6. Perhaps most unusual is the linking passage that is heard beforethe third verse, presented in a frenetic 13-beat sequence: 4/8+3/8+3/8+3/8. Thebridge and solo sections are in a stable 4/4 rock groove, though the keyboard solosare heard over the 4+4+6 structure of the chorus. In the penultimate section of thesong, an extended a cappella vocal section, which is itself an unusual formal andmusical inclusion, seemingly unrelated to anything else and prefacing the actualconcluding section, the meter again becomes irregular. This section is comprised of

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alternating measures of 4/4 and 3/4 and is counted in 7. The song closes cyclically,reintroducing the opening, unmetered acoustic guitar passage.Given that Adorno provides a theoretical foundation for the concerns shared

among others by prog rock musicians, we are tempted to address the question ofwhat Adorno would make of YES and “Roundabout,” in light of his assessment ofmusical progress and his critique of popular music. After all, for Adorno, “Round-about” might simply exemplify the tendency of regressive music towards aestheticcompromise through what he called the “arbitrary preservation of the antiquated”(Philosophy 7). However, if we abandon Adorno’s infinitely demanding perspective,a song like “Roundabout” and its formal and technical difficulties—its seeking mas-tery of the musical material—could be seen as serving an important “progressivesocial role,” embodying Adorno’s “antinomies”: contradictions or paradoxes in theformal structure of the music that, as Zabel describes it, “express the contradictionsof society itself” (199).Perhaps, in the end, it could be argued that songs like “Roundabout” actually begin

to approach Adorno’s vision for music, insofar as they eschew mass consumerism asa primary aim, and instead emphasize the importance of structural listening. Theyforce listeners to bring different musical elements together: juxtaposed classical androck aesthetics, metrical irregularity, layered/quasi-symphonic instrumentation,formal expansion, and thematic development. As a result, they lead listeners to valuemusical complexity, to recognize and reject formulaic structures, and quite simply topay closer attention to the music they are hearing. Following Adorno’s ownargument, such structural listening creates the possibility in listeners of recognizingand rejecting forms of life—political, economic, social, artistic—that do not offercomplexity and that do not demand that individuals make their own connectionsbetween experiences. Songs like “Roundabout,” then, can give us the tools and offerpossibilities for listeners to unveil, of their own accord, the false pleasures offered byboth commoditized popular and classical music, while at the same time reaching andengaging with a mass audience, via mass media.

Pink Floyd’s Progression: Doing this Properly

Beyond the question of lyrics and the manner in which they allow for a critique ofthe social totality that includes the instrumental rationality embodied in the cultureindustry, we can also look to Pink Floyd as an example of what makes progressiverock progressive.4 Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially successful groupsin the movement, today as during its liveliest period. Indeed, they have provided anumber of albums that have become classics not only of progressive rock, but alsoof rock and even popular music in general. Their existence as a group even repeatsthe general chronology of the progressive rock movement: formed in 1965, theyrecorded their first album in 1967. Their last tour was short but grand. They per-formed The Wall 31 times in 1980–1981, each time building a wall between themand the audience, a literal and metaphorical wall that would come crashing down

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at the very end of the concert under psychological and social pressure. Their subse-quent album, The Final Cut, is deemed even by the band members to be closer toa solo album by their main songwriter Roger Waters, and, as in the following twoalbums, some lyrics aside, the music can hardly be called politically or musicallyprogressive by any standard. The arrival of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967and the crumbling of The Wall in 1981 can then serve as symbolic markers of theera of progressive rock.Authors who have dealt with progressive rock seem to agree that progressive

rock was born out of a desire to bring substance to rock music and to prove thatrock music can be valid, serious music. This desire led musicians to incorporateelements from serious, legitimate, classical music. Adorno’s criticism of popularmusic is perhaps the most elaborate and radical expression of the overall malaisethat many musicians experienced about popular music in the mid to late 1960s.The experimental phase of psychedelic music, which opened the way for the inno-vations of progressive rock and in which a great number of the musicians whowould go on to form progressive rock bands participated, gave them the chance toexperiment with texture and form. That being said, Pink Floyd were able to findsuccess beyond the psychedelic scene and to leave it before it was co-opted by themusic industry because they were not a part of this scene—that is, because theirfocus was the music itself (Mason 50).Even though at that point their sets mostly comprised songs with long improvi-

sational passages following one or two riffs or themes, and had moved away fromusing R&B standards as vehicles for long improvisations, Nick Mason, the band’sdrummer and only continuous member, recounts how the members of Pink Floydwere struck by the changes brought to blues-rock and R&B by groups like Cream.They realized that songs did not need to have a standard structure:

for me that night was the moment that I knew I wanted to do this properly. Iloved the power of it all. No need to dress in Beatle jackets and tab-collar shirts,and no need to have a good-looking singer out front. No verse-chorus-verse-cho-rus-solo-chorus-end structure to the songs, and the drummer wasn’t at the backon a horrid little platform... he was up at the front. (Mason 51–52)

The decision (even if it was retrospective) was to forgo all the elements of success-ful popular music to date, even those they had felt necessary to take on. The goalof the band nonetheless became to acquire more equipment and to sign a recorddeal—the material necessities of producing music professionally.What is more, the readiness of their audiences within the psychedelic scene to

let them improvise allowed them to develop under-explored elements of popularmusic, namely texture, dynamics, the slow building of songs, and complex struc-tures. “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” appears as a revolutionary song, containingno identifiable sections, playing on the dynamics between quiet and loud andrevolving around a climax near the middle of the song, and featuring none of thesinging of words usually seen as necessary to the craft of songwriting. Indeed,

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Roger Waters whispers throughout the first part, until the build-up climaxes withhis primal scream, over and following which David Gilmour vocalizes withoutwords, taking the song back down toward less intensity. Of “Careful with that Axe,Eugene,” Mason recounts, “In time it extended into a lengthy piece of up to tenminutes with a more complex dynamic form. That complexity may only have been‘quiet, loud, quiet, loud again’, but at a time when most rock bands only had twovolume settings—painfully loud and really, really painfully loud – this was ground-breaking stuff” (107).That being said, Pink Floyd, like all other groups at the time, needed to address

the issue of singles: record companies demanded singles, and exposure to largeraudiences and the more professional tour circuit demanded that groups producesingles which would 1) sell, 2) play on the radio, and 3) bring them to televisionshows such as Top of the Pops and provide the background for promotional videos.The format of singles was unequivocally verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus,and so Pink Floyd obeyed that rule—more than a norm, it was a clearly stated andrestated rule that was demanded of groups by record executives—and produced aseries of, for the most part, ill-fated singles. Instead, and against the wishes of theirrecord company and managers, they gained their popularity through their live con-certs, as well as through the emerging LP market. The industry, they felt, wasinterested only in singles and in making money from the underground music scene(Mason 86), using Pink Floyd and other groups as their figureheads.The singles market created demands that made progressive rock impossible. It

limited most songs even on LPs to the three-minute format so they could also serveas singles. And, while EMI had decided in the mid-1960s that LPs had no future,Pink Floyd obliged but would ultimately fail as a singles group. After The Piper atthe Gates of Dawn was released, Pink Floyd felt pressure to release a single topromote while on their tour supporting Jimi Hendrix. And so they took a possiblealbum track, “Apples and Oranges,” added overdubs and echo to the mix—but stillthe song was not up to the task and failed as a single: “This was a case of trustingthe advice we were given, and learning that sometimes, if not always, it was best tostick with our own instincts, and make our own decisions” (Mason 96).They found inspiration in their fellow musicians. On that same tour with

Hendrix in 1967, they were amazed by the technical proficiency of the musiciansin the other groups—and especially by the virtuosity of the Nice’s Keith Emerson.Nonetheless, even at the height of their experimentation with long-form songswhen they often played only four or five songs in the course of a one and a halfhour concert, they still released the ill-fated single “Point Me at the Sky” in 1968,which they may never have played live (the B-Side was “Careful with that Axe,Eugene”). And three years later they collected their singles with B-Sides in a collec-tion entitled Relics, even as within one year they had finished Atom Heart Mother,which featured their first LP side-long recording, the title piece, and as they wereentering the studio where they would write their second LP side-long song,“Echoes.” In these parallel attempts to satisfy the industry demand for singles and

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the popular demand (and personal preference) for complex and new structures andmelodies, we can see that, just as the singles market limited what progressive rockgroups could do, the LP market created new opportunities for them to expandtheir fan base beyond their concerts and create a following that would precedetheir concerts to the United States.Yet, even with the opportunity of recording LP side-long pieces, there were chal-

lenges to working within the LP format. Whereas Interstellar Overdrive lasts underten minutes on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it would often last around 20 min-utes in their live shows. The band would thus devise two entirely different versions,which were almost different songs, since there is no room for improvisation, hesi-tation, or mistakes on records, which must stand up to repeated listening. Masonexplains that “[t]he trick was to construct these songs again so that they workedwithin the limitations of what was then a traditional song length” (82–83), reflect-ing once again on the strategies allowing the band to advance their own approachto music within the context of the demands of the music industry.In order to have the material means to achieve their musical goals, and starting

with their first album, Pink Floyd negotiated a deal with their record company totake a 5% cut of the profits instead of the 8% on which they had agreed earlier, inexchange for having unlimited time in the studio to perfect their songs. This timespent in the studio would become very important in the recording of their secondalbum, since all the band members were learning recording techniques and partici-pating in every step at least in some capacity: no one was ever recording an instru-ment alone. They were able to use all this knowledge and skill in the preparationof songs like “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” The song embodies theattempt to “do this properly” and to abandon the standard elements of popularmusic. The vocals are limited to Roger Waters’s vocal range, which is far from thekind of voice that is celebrated on the radio; the lyrics are based on Chinese Tangperiod poetry and are an effort to deliver other meanings than those offered bypopular songs; the drum parts are featured prominently and are based on the jazzpatterns of the time; and the song had been played and perfected in concert forsome months, evolving slowly up until the point when the band recorded it in thestudio.The title track to this same 1968 album, A Saucerful of Secrets, introduces a new

kind of long song, which would lead to the LP side-long songs of the followingalbums. For the first time, a song was carefully constructed, neither following thestandard song structure nor relying on improvisation, but importing elements fromclassical music instead. Mason explains that “Roger [Waters] and I mapped it outin advance, following the classical convention of three movements. This was notunique to us, but it was unusual. With no knowledge of scoring, we designed thewhole thing on a piece of paper, inventing our own hieroglyphics” (118).The sounds at the beginning of the piece were achieved by placing a microphone

very close to a cymbal so that all the tones could be caught, bringing the cymbal tothe foreground—and indeed the film Live at Pompeii shows Waters playing the

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cymbals and the gong for the first part of the song, eschewing his role as bassist.The middle section was based on what they had done in the past during theirimprovisations, copied techniques used at the same time by classical pianists, andby Mason’s admission was “probably lifted from a John Cage piece” (119). Thethird and last section builds in intensity, relying on an organ, a Mellotron; eschew-ing lyrics, it featured a choir in the studio and for a few concerts, and then DavidGilmour’s vocal capacities.The title song on the album Atom Heart Mother, their first LP-side-long record-

ing, went further still in the same direction opened by A Saucerful of Secrets. Thesong fully integrates classical music and features an orchestra as well as a choir asintegral components. However, live performances required a different arrangementof the song that could be played by the quartet, without a choir. In concert, it thusresembled their other 20-minute-plus length songs. The band worked with RonGeesin, a composer and arranger who had built one of the first electronic homestudios. Geesin offered the group a novel approach to the meeting of classical androck, one that was not a mere importation of one kind of music into another.5 Asa result, the song does not have the “orchestral” feel that we find throughoutprogressive rock at the time:

He understood the technicalities of composition and arranging, and his ideaswere radical enough to steer us away from the increasingly fashionable but extre-mely ponderous rock orchestral works of the era. At the time arrangements ofsuch epics tended to involve fairly conservative thinking; classical music gradu-ates had been indoctrinated with a lack of sympathy for rock and “crossing over”was still seen as something of a betrayal of their years of discipline and training.(Mason 136–137)

“Echoes” is the endpoint of the first period in Pink Floyd’s progression, buildingon what had been done in the carefully constructed A Saucerful of Secrets andAtom Heart Mother but relying solely on the four-piece band and all their musicaland technical skills. Pressures from the record industry remained strong, if only asa sort of superego, and “Echoes” was placed on the second side of the Meddle LP,perhaps because “we were still thinking, perhaps under record company influence,that we should have something suitable for radio play to open an album” (Mason148). Pink Floyd had already encountered the difficulties of having rock musictaken seriously even by those who subsidized their work. In the late 1960s, theupper echelons of the music industry divided pop and classical absolutely and,“although the pop releases were subsidizing the classical recordings, the staff whocreated them were treated like other ranks by the top brass” (Mason 79). In spiteof these pressures from the industry, “Echoes” is for Gilmour the first piece ofwhich he is really proud; it is also the last LP side-long song they would record, astheir next three albums would explore the possibilities of concept albums, structur-ing LPs into albums that comprise one coherent LP-long suite, for which songs like“Echoes” opened the way.

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In measuring the progress accomplished by Pink Floyd, we must be as careful asNick Mason is. He refers to other bands’ proficiency and virtuosity—while admit-ting their own lack in these regards—and remembers that the song “Echoes” failedto measure up to its original self when it was performed in 1987 with the largesupport band made of session musicians who were much too proficient to unlearntheir technique and improvise freely—indicating that Pink Floyd’s creative impetuscame out of a lack of technique and skill, rather than the other way around. Healso tempers his own enthusiasm about the newness of the elements in their com-positions, improvisations, and songs: they were never the only ones to do any onething, although much of what they did was unusual, rare, and not standard in rela-tion to the music industry in general. We can also add that their songs, by makingit possible for us to bring together different elements across a complexly structuredsong or across an album, and even across different albums when it comes to theirfour most successful LPs, allow us to transfer these same activities to our relation-ship to our society.In addition, in their lyrics Pink Floyd allow us in a straightforward manner to

criticize the totalities that are at the heart of modern society: capitalism, war, fas-cism, madness, and alienation. More importantly perhaps, Pink Floyd open them-selves to our criticism of them as part of the music industry, without letting theirmusic be co-opted by the music industry, since they bring our attention to thepresence of these elements of the social totality in their very music, as they areplaying it, and as we are listening to it. “Have a Cigar” gives us the voice of themusic industry manager with irony—recognizable as such without overshooting themark—whereas the irony of “Money” forces us to evaluate our priorities; and“Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” subverts the disco craze into a criticism of theimperative to obey, in the clubs just as much as in schools. (In the film the chil-dren are marching to the rhythm of disco music.)What is more, with The Wall the rock concert itself becomes a fascist rally, the

singer becomes a fascist leader in the repetition of the opening song, during whichhe asks that fans be lined up against the wall he has constructed: the rock singerleads just as the fascist does—but he can expose it and lead us to decide for our-selves the degree to which we will pay attention, including whether or not we willcheer when the singer/fascist calls out to the audience member who is smoking ajoint...and should be put up against the wall. The symbolism of the wall lies in theinsurmountable distance between the musicians and the audience, the difficulty ofreaching the audience which is itself a result of the decisions made by the band justas much as of the decisions suggested or imposed by the industry. The parody ofthe trial of these decisions, which closes the concert, pushes the figures that appearthroughout the concert and the songs to the extreme of ridiculousness, effectivelybreaking down the wall and revealing the musicians as nothing more than a stringof people strumming barely audible instruments. Such thematic elements in the lyr-ics and performance come only to add to the structural elements of their music:while it could be argued that lyrics about money and a giant wall across a stage

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force meaning and interpretation upon an audience, the manner in which themusic is structured continues to demand creativity and engagement from listeners.As such, the music is the proper site of resistance to alienation.

Conclusion

In these focused studies of Pink Floyd’s progression as a composition unit, andYES’s song “Roundabout,” we have attempted to defend two theses. First, progres-sive rock does play the role Adorno wants music to play, and it plays this role bet-ter than serious music in spite of failing to meet his criteria for seriousness,because it reaches a wider public. And, second, progressive rock does from insidecapitalism what Adorno wants serious music to do outside capitalism: offer thepossibility of structural listening to the listener. Yet, like serious music, it cannotdo more than offer such a possibility or try to force the listener to strive to createconnections between the elements of the music.YES and Pink Floyd are two examples of how progressive rock was born out of

a desire to prove that rock music is valid, serious music, and that rock is not stuckwithin the bounds of instrumental, commercial logic. And they are but examples:not all prog rock is progressive, and not all progressive rock is prog. Progressiverock must be understood on the basis of the conventions it overturned, on thebasis of the questions it tackled, and not on the basis of what other musiciansmight attempt to do. It begins within the rock tradition and expands from withinthe music industry, to push forward attentive and even structural listening, to bringattention to the alienation of everyday life and bring forward utopian images thatlead the listeners to question their day-to-day life. Rather than doing the work forus, it allows us to see alienation proper to life in a capitalist context and createshabits through which we become able to partially overcome this alienation.Historically, prog made possible a gradual process of musical creation through

which the most commercially viable progressive rock groups were able to pushback against the demands and standards of the music industry, to work with thebest artists of their time, and to create music that did not obey the needs of theindustry. The music industry comes first, musicians encounter it first as listenersand then as musicians, before attempting to serve both the industry’s goals andtheir own goals as musicians, eventually subverting the first if they are successfulin the pursuit of the second.Success, in terms of creating both musical and political progress, follows the

commercial success that gives bands the resources and the power to exit from acontract and so to extract compromises from the industry. Such creation, in a con-stant tension with the culture industry, allowed the music of commercially success-ful bands to find echoes over time rather than to disappear as cultural products do.One such echo is the continued presence of a set of progressive rock classics onthe charts and their discovery by new generations of listeners. Another perhapsmore important echo is the fundamental change in the elasticity of the rock form

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even as the standard form of song-writing remains unchanged. Simply, new possi-bilities are open, as we can see in the music of non-prog groups such as the Cure,Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, System of a Down, or Radiohead.Given the capitalist structure of the cultural industry, perhaps all we can hope

for in terms of political and musical progress is the kind of musical creation thatwas introduced by progressive rock, where conventions are broken over and over,in ever new ways, as the old ways to break them become assimilated into the verymanner in which music is made. Yet, against Adorno, we can also measure successin reaching a large number of people over a longer period of time, which goesbeyond the imperatives of the cultural industry. Inter-generational reach and lon-gevity, in the relatively new tradition of rock music, may be the indicator of thecreation of music that is progressive because it remains new every time it is heard,no matter the context and no matter the music that succeeded it and went beyondwhat it made possible musically speaking. Such classics as Dark Side of the Moonare thus able to “speak to us” as Bach or Schoenberg continue to do.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] In musicological circles, and in particular in the realm of pop music scholarship, Adornorose to some prominence towards the end of the 20th century. He has his detractors anddefenders, as the musicologist Richard Leppert has noted; however, Leppert also assertsthat, notwithstanding the divide on Adorno in scholarly musical circles, it remains the casethat “the terms of [Adorno’s] critique of musical mass culture…have largely remained cur-rent even among those who most stridently oppose him. That is, music criticism hasretained the aesthetic query that lies at the heart of Adorno’s concern: is the music ‘authen-tic’?” (Leppert, in Adorno, Essays 346).

[2] We can already suggest that progressive rock is not progressive socially—that is, it has notcreated social equality or incorporated members of oppressed groups. Whether it has led toit is another question, which is almost impossible to answer. Without having the time toexpand on this issue here, it appears that progressive rock is tied to the white male membersof the middle class, achieving some success in the popular classes perhaps only later on, dur-ing the arena tours. Likewise, progressive rock has been defined as middlebrow music—amixture of high and low art, themselves at the time associated with the bourgeois and work-ing classes respectively. The movement might have contributed to the disappearance of classdistinctions in the taste for low or high art, without however affecting class structures. Anec-dotally, the movement seems to be exclusively white, and female musicians and singers wereextremely rare, at least during the period when it enjoyed its greatest success.

[3] The centrality of new music to Adorno’s thinking can be found in one of his most importantworks on music, a book entitled Philosophie der Neuen Musik. First published in German in1948, it is usually translated into English as Philosophy of Modern Music. A better translationwould be Philosophy of New Music, and indeed recent editions of the book—notably RobertHullot-Kentor’s 2006 translation for University of Minnesota Press—have adopted “new”rather than “modern.” When Adorno is writing about “new” music in the 1940s, he is notthinking of chronology, but rather about progress (“Fortschritt”—advance). In Philosophieder Neuen Musik, Adorno addresses the issue of musical progress directly, by contrasting the

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music of Arnold Schoenberg with that other highly influential composer of the 20th century,Igor Stravinsky. Adorno locates Schoenberg—and the free atonal, expressionistic music hebegan composing around 1909—at the epicentre of what he calls an “heroic decade”(Philosophy 5) of radical or progressive music, of music that aspires to truth and knowledge,that emerges out of historical inevitability and in its extreme dissonance “illuminates themeaningless world” (Philosophy 133); Stravinsky’s music, by contrast, is archaic and regres-sive, drawing on an outmoded musical language as it fails to engage dialectically with “themusical progress of time” (Philosophy 189).

[4] Studies of Pink Floyd lyrics are a common approach to the band, alongside the history ofthe group. For an example of such a study, in relation to Adorno’s thesis, which mightcomplement this article, see Macan.

[5] See Geesin, for his view of the composition of the album, and where it fits within his own,even more radical attempts to work within the music industry to create new, meaningfulmusic, as well as on the tensions between “serious” musicians and rock music.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley, CA: U of California P,2002. Print.

———. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. NewYork: Seabury Press, 1980. Print.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott.Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. Print.

Anderson, Jon. “I’ll Return to YES When They Wake Up.” Interviewed by Ray Shasho. Exam-iner.com. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

———. “Interview with Jon Anderson (YES).” Interviewed by Dmitry M. Epstein. DMME. Web.15 Nov. 2014.

Carpenter, Alexander. “Stepping Down from the Pedestal: Schoenberg and Popular Music.” De-Canonizing Music History. Ed. Vesa Kurkela and Lauri Väkevä. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK:Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 21–35. Print.

Cooper, Kim, and David Smay. “Introduction: Bubble Entendres.” Bubblegum Music is the NakedTruth. Ed. Kim Cooper and David Smay. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2001.

Covach, John. “Progressive Rock, ‘Close to the Edge,’ and the Boundaries of Style.” Understand-ing Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis. Ed. John Covach and Graeme Boone. New York, NY:Oxford UP, 1997. 3–31. Print.

Geesin, Ron. The Flaming Cow: The Making of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. Stroud, Glos.:The History Press, 5 2013. Print.

Lucky, Jerry. The Progressive Rock Files. Burlington: Collector’s Guide Publishing, 2000. Print.Macan, Ed. “Theodor Adorno, Pink Floyd, and the Psychedelics of Alienation.” Pink Floyd and

Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! Ed. George A. Reisch. Chicago, IL: OpenCourt, 2007. 95–119. Print.

Mason, Nick. Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books,2005. Print.

Moore, Allan F. “Progressive Rock.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford UP.Web. 17 May 2014.

Skratt, Stephen. “Prog Rock: In Praise of a Much-Reviled Musical Genre.” Macleans 14 June2013. Web. 1 Sept. 2013.

Wilsmore, Robert. “Intermezzo No. 3: ‘as they produce the movement’ (the ‘YES’ of YES).”Parallax 16.3 (2010): 105–06. Print.

Zabel, Gary. “Adorno on Music: A Reconsideration.” The Musical Times 130.1754 (1989):198–201. Print.

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Notes on Contributors

Jérôme Melançon teaches political philosophy and Canadian politics at the Univer-sity of Alberta’s Augustana Campus. He has published on Radiohead as well as ondissent, power, anti-colonialism, democracy, the role of critical intellectuals, and onliterature, and he is the author of two books of poetry.

Alexander Carpenter is a musicologist at the Augustana Campus of the Universityof Alberta. His research interests include gothic rock, Arnold Schoenberg and theSecond Viennese School, popular music, and the connections between music andpsychoanalysis.

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