Mark Giordano, Tom Greif, Brett Gover, Lewis Gordon, Peter Gunther, Stephen Houlgate, Patricia Huntington, Craig Hanks, Christine Holz, Joanie Jurysta James, Leslie Jones, Tony Kirven, Nick Kokoshis, Dana Lawrence, Michael Lind, Raymond Lotta, Chris Mitchell, Tina McRee, Brad Merriman, Edward Macan, Brenda MacDonald, Lisa Mikita, Innes Mitchell, Sam Martin, John Martin, Lynne Margolies, Thomas and Coral Mosbo, Clay Morgan, Todd May, Martin Matustik, Kate Murphy, David Orsini, Jeff Rice, Garry Rindfuss, Jane Scarpontoni, Dale Smoak, Chelsea Snelgrove, Gary Shapiro, Catrina Thundercloud, George Trey, Jerry Wallulis, Cynthia Willett, Deena Weinstein, and Robert Young.
For their friendship and encouragement, I would like to thank my colleagues in the philosophy department at DePaul University: Ken Alpern, Peg Birmingham, Cindy Kaffen, Daryl Koehn, David Krell, Niklaus Largier, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Will McNeil, Darrell Moore, Michael Naas, Angelica Nuzzo, David Pellauer, and Katherine Rudolph.
Thanks to the people at Open Court Publishing for their support of this project, especially my ever-patient editor, Kerri Mommer.
I have the great fortune to be married to the African Japanese queen of Kansas, Bascenji. Thanks, my Yoko and SdB, my dear Kathleen, standing by your vinegar boy and guttersnipe even under conditions of dark existentialism.
Finally, for giving me life and for giving me much in life, this book is dedicated to my parents, Eve and Gene Martin.
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. About a year-and-a-half ago, I felt sure that I was coming to the end of writing the first book-length study of the music of Yes. Then it came to my attention that a fellow Yesologist named Thomas Mosbo had just published a book on the group, Yes, but what does it all mean? Still, finishing music of Yes in the late spring of 1996 (the book came out in October of that year), and turning to the writing of the book you are reading now, I gave in once more to a feeling of certainty, namely to the idea that I was writing the first intellectually oriented study of the larger field of progressive rock.
Foiled again! Indeed, at a bookstore party for the release of music of Yes, my graduate assistant, Aaron Fichtelberg, came up to me and said, “Hey, have you seen this?” He was holding Edward Macan’s Rocking the Classics. As many readers will know, the book features a concert photograph of Yes on its cover. Zeitgeist or what? As a matter of fact, I fervently hope so.
About six months later, as I was entering into the final stages of writing this book, I happen to see an advertisement in The Wire. (This is an English magazine, by the way, that often attacks progressive rock in terms that, by now, are all too well known to readers. Well, The Wire and other nemeses of progressive receive some well-deserved lashings in what follows.) I purchased that particular issue of the magazine to read an interview with Chris Cutler, percussionist and composer with Henry Cow—one of the greats, in my view. (The interview is discussed in chapter 3.) Then what should I come across but an advert for yet another book on progressive rock, Paul Stump’s The Music’s All That Matters. Having the advantage of intense insomnia, and therefore almost always being awake in the middle of the night, I called over to London to order the book. It arrived perhaps ten days later (as it turned out, the book was released on the day I called), and, on first glance, the book looks pretty doggone good.
So, not the first book on Yes, but the second; and not the first book on progressive rock, but perhaps the third—depending on what happens between now and October.
I engage with Edward Macan’s book throughout, but especially in my third chapter. For the sake of deadlines and continuities, I could tell that it would be fatal to try to read Paul Stump’s book as I was completing this one. Still, as a scholar and theorist, I am committed to taking account of and building on the work of others, and giving credit where it’s due; in addition, at least my place in the order of publication gives me the opportunity to address what I think is an important question anyway, namely the Zeitgeist. Therefore, I come back to these issues in the afterword.
I am happy to see that others are taking up the cause of progressive rock in a systematic way, and I don’t see any need to inject any element of competition into this field. Progressive rock is important enough to me, and I daresay to my fellow authors Macan and Stump, and to those who have sympathetically followed the music in these past decades, that three or five or ten books does not exhaust the field. Indeed, with this book and the books by Macan and Stump, there is finally the start of a basis for a much better discussion of what progressive rock is all about, and one can only hope that this discussion will be extended further. Clearly, too, there is a need for more work on the oeuvres of particular groups and artists, and I hope that, both as a theorist and as the series editor of “Feedback: The Series in Contemporary Music,” I can play a part in helping such work come to fruition.
There are, however, some important differences between the books by Macan, Stump, and myself. Perhaps the reader will find it useful, here at the outset, if I lay out the basic differences in approach and say what mine is. (The books also differ in perspective, but this is best dealt with in the larger body of the text.)
Quite simply, Edward Macan is a musicologist by academic training and profession, Paul Stump is a music journalist whose aim is to tell the history of progressive rock (as his subtitle has it), while I am a philosopher and social theorist. What we have in common, among other things, is an interest in situating the music in terms of history, society, and culture (and even, what Macan has so brilliantly placed in the center of debate, counterculture). The kind of musicology practiced by Macan is not of the purely formal sort practiced by some, but instead a dynamic intertwining of study of musical form and cultural analysis and critique. Stump is also interested in form, but perhaps more in culture and history.
On one level, my approach is similar to Macan’s. In my book on the music of Yes, I attempted to bring the discussion of musical structure and philosophical vision into a unity or synthesis. However, reading Rocking the Classics during the early stages of writing Listening to the future helped me to further sharpen my sense of what I’m trying to do.
I’m not a musicologist. When it comes to that specialized field and its language, I pick up as much as I can on the fly, as it were. On some level, I’m even quite willing to admit that, as far as analysis of musical structure goes, I’m “faking it.” That is, when it seems necessary to use some bit of technical language for something that is happening in the music, I just dig out one of the technical books I have on the subject and look it up. On the whole, however, I do not find the use of such language to be a very fruitful way to communicate either my own intellectual interest in music or with others who are interested in progressive rock. (I’m not saying that this language isn’t fruitful for other purposes.) In other words, I could try to supply terms such as “retrograde inversion” (and sometimes I do), but then I would be addressing another audience than the one I am interested in. In fact, I wrote music of Yes and Listening to the future hoping to break out of the purely academic scene.
On the other hand, I think that it is appropriate to attempt to stretch what is meant by “analysis of musical form,” and to not allow this to be only the domain of academic musicology. It is true that, when I discuss the formal qualities of a piece of music, I tend to appeal to analogies, images, and narrative frameworks. (There was a line in music of Yes about “the persistent afterglow of several tenor saxophones spreading in different directions like the opening of a flower that has petals the size and consistency of elephant’s ears.” That’s stretching things a bit, I know, but I also could say, “you had to be there”—namely at the end of “Then” from Time and a Word—and then it all makes perfect sense.) That is, I am interested in the many experiences (including nonmusical) that the piece is drawing from, and in what picture is painted, what story is told. I’m also interested in how the sounds
