160061 VO Analysing Progressive Rock (2022W)

With its ambitious themes drawn from literature, mythology, fantasy and science fiction as well as its fusion of rock’s raw energy with classical music’s space and structural complexity, the progressive rock of bands such as ELP, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Yes presents an attractive repertoire to the popular music analyst. This course aims to develop a set of music-analytical tools to help us analyse this musical style and understand what it meant in its cultural and historical context.

We will develop a set of critical tools to describe the musical style of progressive rock and its social relevance in the Britain of the 1970s and beyond. Classical music analysis is (or has traditionally been) limited to those parameters that can be accurately captured by written notation—metre, pitch structure, large-scale form. Its techniques, therefore, are inadequate for popular music, where the sophistication and grounds for enjoyment often lie more in rhythm and timbre, in performance and articulation, and in production processes. In this course, we both adapt traditional analysis and develop new tools to better understand prog rock. And, while autonomous classical works have been seen as possessing some timeless and placeless beauty that lies beyond society, in this course we prefer to see music as a cultural practice. The prog rock recordings we analyse, then, are heard as traces of a dynamic cultural activity, and the purpose of analysing them will be to understand the mutual mediation between music and society. This will entail attending to the ways in which musical structures produce/gather meaning in their various contexts—lyrics, artwork, concert performances, promotion and marketing, as well as the identities (class, race, gender, etc.), worldview, and lifestyle of the audience.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- describe the defining features of the progressive rock of the late 60s and the 70s,
- deploy a toolkit of techniques for understanding how extended prog rock songs and concept albums function,
- relate musical meaning to the contexts in which musical practices are situated,
- show how various extramusical elements—such as words, images, poster and album art—contribute to and shape meaning in prog rock,
- examine the ways audience beliefs and attitudes affect and are affected by prog rock and its themes, and
- relate the various musical structures found in prog rock to the wider social, political and economic milieu.