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Preface: Future anterior

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 and silences combine and unfold. In my view, this approach has both its strengths and its limitations, but that is also why it is good that the discussion around progressive rock is finally taking off and that books are being published from a number of perspectives. The music certainly seems big enough, to me, to warrant a diversity of studies and perspectives.

I also try to bring to this book the perspective of a musician who has performed in various rock, jazz, and avant-garde contexts for twenty-five years. I am not a “schooled” musician, but, on some level I “know” what I’m doing—and I think I have some sense of what other musicians are doing as well.

The analogies and other ways of getting at the form of the music serve an instrumental function in my work. My larger aim is to develop the philosophy and social theory of progressive rock. As far as philosophy goes, then, I am interested in what might be called “musical ideas.” Progressive rock is a fertile territory for such exploration—indeed, progressive rock is most likely rock music’s first real “music of ideas.” The very idea of “musical ideas” works on several levels, from the more purely formal to those places where it is difficult to distinguish “music” from “philosophy” (or “thought,” “theory,” etc.). If we were to ask what Beethoven’s “idea” was in the Ninth Symphony, we might give an answer in terms of the Western musical canon and the possibilities of an expansion of the harmonic universe, or we might answer in terms of the Enlightenment, ethical and political universalism, and brotherhood. I’m interested in how it all comes together. These notions are explored further in the third chapter.

In social theory, my aim is perhaps different than what the reader might at first expect. Of course I am interested in understanding the “role of music in society,” and therefore I offer an extended historical and cultural perspective on progressive rock, especially in the second and third chapters. But, even more, I am interested in the way that the “aesthetic” is a crucial and essential dimension of human life—and not just as entertainment, but as “world disclosure” and as dream of another world. Great art engages in “poiesis,” the creation of worlds. It seems clear to me that progressive rock aspires to this and, at least in the best work, contributes to such creation. This is where the division between “politics” and “art” breaks down, for it is obviously a “political” act to imagine a world—even if that world contains little of, or even seems to negate, what counts as “politics” in our world. These themes are explored in the first chapter.

This is, then, a book of arguments. I would be happy if it could be placed alongside books such as Macan’s Rocking the Classics and Theodore Gracyk’s Rhythm and Noise (which I take up in the second and third chapters), books that attempt to deal with rock music in a systematic way, dealing with the music and its ideas and culture, rather than primarily with personalities and biographies. Go to your local bookstore and look at the section on rock music, and you will find that such books are few and far between. It may be that most rock music cannot really sustain such argumentation (and I am not saying that there is something necessarily wrong with rock biographies); but some rock music clearly can, and progressive rock is in that category.

The arguments found here are sometimes a tangled weave, often quite polemical, sometimes defensive, often presented with the idea of going on the offensive. (Certainly the latter is seen well enough in the title of the first chapter.) Indeed, the arguments here are often sprawling and sometimes seem to go far afield of the subject of progressive rock. The tangle and sprawl might even be seen as mimicking much progressive rock. My aim is not to excuse flabby argumentation or thinking that is too diffuse; however, I hope that the reader will see that it is a strength of progressive rock that it can be part of a wide-ranging discussion of philosophy, culture, and society. In our present period of fragmentation and overspecialization, it is difficult to find much that could really be called a “culture”—which is why one trend in recent political thought is geared toward a revival of “tradition” (not only in art, but in “family values,” etc.). As far as the West is concerned, it seems to me a fact of great significance that the last “culture” we have seen where ideas freely circulated between art, politics, and theory, was the sixties counterculture—and progressive rock was a part of that scene. Since then, unless one goes in for neotraditionalism (the political basis of which is highly suspect), it has been a difficult uphill battle to find a way to keep trends in art, politics, and philosophy from simply carving out their own little niches and staying there.

Perhaps another way of stating this theme, and of showing readers my larger perspective, is to say that my largest interest in this music and its associated ideas and politics is indeed emancipatory and utopian. In other words, my interest and perspective is of a piece with the countercultural politics of the sixties. Although there are certain aspects of the more academic discussions that are useful in understanding progressive rock (or the sixties counterculture, for that matter), a purely academic discussion seems quite pointless to me.

There was a great deal of discussion between my editor, Kerri Mommer, and myself regarding the title of this book. In fact, this is the first of my books to have a title that I did not come up with entirely on my own. My original proposal, speaking of academic perspectives, had been what is now the book’s subtitle. I think that what we ultimately chose for the title captures very well what progressive rock has tried to do; yet the title also provides a different, perhaps complementary, perspective to Edward Macan’s main title, Rocking the Classics. The question arises, however, whether the future that progressive rock musicians were listening to is in any sense still “the future”? In a BBC special on the music of Yes that was aired around 1971 (around the time that Fragile was released), Jon Anderson spoke somewhat dramatically to the possibilities that were being opened up by progressive rock. He said something to the effect that, as much as the music might seem advanced and adventurous, he was looking forward to seeing (hearing) how much further along music would be in another ten or twenty years. Quite clearly, Anderson was listening to the future. But it would be difficult to argue that the future he was listening to, or perhaps “for,” has come to pass.

Indeed, I would invite the reader to take a look, at the outset, at pages 245 and 246. These pages contain a partial list of the progressive rock albums dealt with here (primarily in chapter four) and also other important rock (and a few jazz) albums that were released in the years 1968 to 1978. This is just a list, really, but looking at it can convey the sense of a certain rhythm and a certain movement (to use one of Jon Anderson’s favorite words). “Listening to the future,” the idea, not the book title, has to do with following out a certain rhythm and movement—but it seems that these have led somewhere else, to another “time.”

In other words, the world that progressive rock portended is not the world that we live in now. And this has important implications for how we listen to the music in this world, this world that the music was not listening to. I attempt to proceed in terms of both of these worlds, the world that I think the music was listening to, and the world that we have. This book hopes to be a bridge between the two.

Chicago, June 1, 1997