Speakers
Chris Anderton
Dr Chris Anderton is Associate Professor in Cultural Economy, with a particular focus on the music industries, music culture and music history. He is the author or co-editor of several books including Understanding the Music Industries (2013), Music Festivals in the UK. Beyond the Carnivalesque (2019), and the forthcoming books Music Management, Marketing and PR: Creating Connections and Conversations, Media Narratives in Popular Music, and Researching Live Music: Gigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals. He has also guest edited issues of the academic journals Rock Music Studies (which focused on progressive rock) and Arts & the Market (which focused on live music research).
Perpetual Change? Genre, Style and Idiolect in Progressive Rock
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Chris Anderton
In this presentation I will argue that while progressive rock may be regarded and discussed as a genre, meta-genre, style or network of styles (as often seen in academic and journalistic work and in fan discussion), we might also examine the development of progressive rock at a more granular level by adopting and adapting the notion of musical idiolect. I draw on the work (in literary theory) of John Frow (2005) and John Rieder (2010) in understanding genre “as a form of symbolic action” (Frow 2005: 2) wherein the “types” (Fabbri 2012: 180) of music that are defined and discussed as progressive rock do not form “a set of texts” but are instead “a way of using texts and drawing relationships among them” (Rieder 2010: 193). I argue that our understanding and use of the term progressive rock should be regarded as occurring within a “genre field” (drawing loosely on the work of Pierre Bourdieu) in which genre, style and idiolect are mutable forms that change over time and in relation to geographical, historical and promotional industry factors (Rieder 2010) and to the various “communities of practice” (Bowker and Starr 1999) within which those definitions and understandings develop. I suggest that musical idiolects (both “personal” and “collective”) should lie at the heart of our analysis of these discussions, alongside processes of “enrolment” (Latour 1999) that include a “retrofitting” of the past (ibid.).
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Keywords: progressive metal, Between the Buried and Me, analysis, form, recapitulation, motive
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Re-evaluating the ‘death of progressive rock’: critical reception and journalistic narratives in Melody Maker magazine, 1971-76
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Chris Anderton
Academic and journalistic accounts of ‘progressive rock’ typically construct it as a British genre that emerged in the late 1960s, flourished commercially and artistically from 1972 to 1974 and sank into decline by the late 1970s due primarily (in Britain) to the emergence of punk rock in 1976 (Macan, 1997; Stump, 1997; Martin, 1998). These studies tend to focus on recorded artefacts, hence rarely examine how the bands that they classify as ‘progressive rock’ were discussed in the contemporary British press of the era. Of particular interest to this presentation is the weekly magazine Melody Maker, which had consistently championed ‘progressive’ music since the late 1960s, though it also covered a variety of other musical styles. An analysis of the magazine will be offered that focuses on the years 1971 to 1976 in order to examine the common myth that ‘punk killed prog’. It suggests that the use of the term ‘progressive rock’ must itself be questioned in an early 1970s context, and that signs of press condemnation and dissatisfaction pre-date the emergence of British punk. It also casts light on other factors covered by the magazine which may also have influenced the potential success or otherwise of ‘progressive’ rock bands during this period, including changes both in British radio programming policies and the university/college gigging circuit.
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Keywords: Melody Maker; music history; journalism; progressive rock
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