Speakers
Andrzej Madro
Andrzej Mądro (b. 1983) ‒ music theorist (PhD), Assistant Professor at the Academy of Music in Kraków. His interests cover both 20th and 21st century music, with Polish music in particular, as well as borderline genres including experimental and multimedia platforms, while still involving jazz, progressive rock and modern metal. Author of the book Muzyka i nowe media (“Music and New Media”, 2017), awarded by the Musicologists Section of the Polish Composers’ Union and Meakultura Foundation (“Kropka” Competition, 2018). Member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the Polish Composers' Union and the Polish Electroacoustic Music Association. He is also a lecturer at the Krakow School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. Author of websites with publicly available materials on the history of jazz and the history of popular music. As part of his didactic work, he explores the possibilities of using new technological solutions: interactive MIDI systems, computer software and network communication. Since 2017 he has been a co-organizer of the "Silver Glass" Contemporary Children's and Youth Music Competition. In 2015, for his didactic and educational achievements, he received the Award of the Mayor of the City of Krakow.
Sins of Unforgetting – 'Re(tro-pro)gression in Rock and Metal Music
Andrzej Mądro
In the last decades, progressive rock and metal has more clearly revealed developmental courses that can be considered contrary to the original idea of the genre. On one hand we see constant technological evolution in the field of (digital) music production and distribution, but on the other – in aesthetic and stylistic approaches – a kind of obsession with the past. This can especially be applied to the older bands, who once were considered to be the pioneers and ‘gods’ of the genre, are finding that the more modern and ‘contemporary’ they want to be, the more oddly inauthentic it sounds.
Perhaps new digital forms of media, particularly those of internet websites and services that allow uploading, sharing, and playing both music and videos are to blame for this situation; they have become a kind of "preservative" for cultural memory, in a way condemning the creators and recipients to forget core ideas. It is thanks to the Internet that all past music, especially the lesser known, have become public and ubiquitous and “commonplace” in the form of an open virtual archive. Rock and metal artists have therefore fallen victim to retromania, pop-cultural exhaustion, and in the stillness of post-modernity. Prog music, the former avant-garde, transformed into an arrière-garde (Simon Reynolds) and retro-garde (Elizabeth Guffey). New subspecies and microgenres still are emerging, but instead of development or radicalization, more and more often they are only bizarre reconfigurations of styles and fashions from the past. Even concepts are eroding and turning stagnant. Do musicians only have to reconstruct symbols and rituals for nostalgic sanctification of tradition? After the next waves of progressive, neoprogressive, new prog, and many others, is it time for retroprogressive rock?
Keywords: retromania, hauntology, nostalgia, progressive metal