Prog-Rock Politics

ok, i'm gonna put it out there, i think this whole line of criticism is bullshit. "making art for the proletariat", fucking hell you'd think none of us had the example of socialist realism. it's kitsch, ok? socialist realism is kitsch, it's frequently demeaning and insulting propaganda. the sarcastic cardew references in this thread - you know, does anybody really think his post-scratch orchestra music was a good idea?

this idea of a "bassoon solo in 13/8", how is this different from looking at arugula or whatever as somehow an "elitist" food? lindsay cooper wasn't "a bassoon", she was lindsay cooper, she was expressing her truth as a radical queer woman and what, that's somehow less valid because she played the bassoon?

does anybody really think his post-scratch orchestra music was a good idea?

It has its defenders. John Tilbury for one.

rush utterly otm, of course.

Just to play devil's advocate, I guess you could come up with a statistics-based argument about the listening habits of specific socioeconomic communities and extrapolate from there but I don't find that very helpful if the conclusion is an eminently essentialist and conservative one, i.e. 'this is what background x listens to', as though there were no room for variation and, indeed, queer life experiences in particular.

I mean, if we were just going by anecdotal experience, I would probably say that Rush and Pink Floyd ARE working class music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIGKlicb8n0

(Rush and rush both obv OTM, though.)

lol, well played.

tilbury's biography of cardew reminds me a bit of THE CROWN actually: a deep dive into a life which quietly but mordantly outlines its increasingly isolation within absurdity and i think sadness while paying mind to the rich complexity (and immobility) of many of the issues surrounding it, and doing justice to cardew's own seriousness of mind even when he was wildly wrong. so i'd push back a bit against rush's "obviously he was a patronising idiot! nothing to see here!" -- well, no, he really wasn't, he was struggling with an issue which it's easy to run away from, which is basically education. to argue that other ppl are being patronising i think you have to engage with the strongest version of their thinking (even when it's extremely tangled and contradictory in its evolution) and not just a message-board cartoon (even then that's excellent handy fun and i am as kneejerkily prey to it as anyone reading lol). it's not as if cardew dispensed with the combative high-seriousness and polemical rigour of the darmstadt avant-garde -- he just transferred his wars into the intra-party squabbling of the ever-shrinking splinter groupuscules of the UK maoist movement of the 70s. probably it was a waste of mind in both places, but it's not like it's something the classical avant-garde was otherwise innocent of -- stockhausen said and believed a bunch of dumb things about the motral-political value of his work also. and actually didn't the guiltiest parties when it comes to very rude message-board beef (ok i mainly mean boulez, permanbanned from ilx in the very early days) also run into a creative wall innovationwise at some point in the 70s?

as far as i know cardew never broke with the scratch orchestra or with the idea of the scratch orchestra -- and one of the SO's hinge-points, aside from the help that the better musicians gave the weaker ones, and the unskewed insight that the weaker musicians occasionalt gave the overttained ones, was the question of *which* works were good works for SO to perform (it's interesting for example the riley's in c was a staple, a piece that relatively unsophisticated players can give excellent (as in interesting) performances of, bcz its subtleties are generative and unexpected rather than on-page complex, present in the output rather than best grasped via score-reading on (= opaque if you don't read music and if ordinary music education omits to engage with them anyway).

s/b even WHEN that's excellent handy fun plus some other stupid typos which are more easily decoded 🙄

as far as i know cardew never broke with the scratch orchestra or with the idea of the scratch orchestra

Not sure about this tbh, can't remember - however, apart from Stockhausen and Cage, the other person who gets a severe kicking in "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism" is Cornelius Cardew!

tbh i'm a bit rusty on the details of which very sharp corner was taken when -- i wrote a piece for a crafts council exhibition in 2013 abt the parallels between CC and his dad michael (who was a famous potter, if there can be famous potters) and how both of them chose to move from the high-profile high arts circuilt to small and local education (MC ran a workshop kiln in nigeria, CC did a lot of youth work). i think this is definitely extremely relevant to CC's latterday output. but i don't have the ideological details at my fingertips any more.

http://www.soundmatters.org.uk/content/documents/exhibition-guide/CC_SM_guide.pdf (you have to scroll down to page 7 for me, and the final sentence is weirdly screwed up)

(who was a famous potter, if there can be famous potters)

Careful there, you'll make Keith cry (it doesn't take much)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK_2t_kd5XU

It's the first thing I do before listening to a song, read the lyrics.

Before listening to a song? No. Before typing a sweeping dismissal of the lyrics? Perhaps.

Seeking out and reading lyrics to a song you don't like seems a strange pursuit though.

Mike Barnes - A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s (March 5, 2020)
Music journalist Mike Barnes (MOJO, The Wire, Prog, and author of the acclaimed biography Captain Beefheart) goes back to the birth of progressive rock and surveys the cultural conditions and attitudes that fed into, and were in turn affected by, this remarkable musical phenomenon. He examines the myths and misconceptions that have grown up around progressive rock and paints a vivid, colourful picture of the Seventies based on hundreds of hours of his own interviews with musicians, music business insiders, journalists and DJs, and from the personal testimonies of those who were fans of the music in that extraordinary decade.

https://images.roughtrade.com/product/images/files/000/186/307/hero/Omnibus_Omnibus.jpg?1577747154

so i'd push back a bit against rush's "obviously he was a patronising idiot! nothing to see here!"

― mark s

hell, mark, i'd push back against that statement. "insincere" is one of the last words i would ever think of to describe cardew - he was very obviously sincere, excruciatingly so. the other side of my rejection of "authenticity" criticism is that I think music can be honest and sincere while at the same time being condescending, didactic, and trite. to put it in a fairly offensive and tasteless way, just because clapton's kid died doesn't mean i have to consider "tears in heaven" great art.

(for the record i'm not personally much taken with cardew's work with AMM or with the Scratch Orchestra! i recognize it's conceptually interesting but i don't find it particularly listenable - and that's not a blanket dismissal of EAI)

so if we're not going to talk about magma, how about univers zero, who i've seen described as doggedly apolitical. of course even that description is challenging - offshoot band present released that hamfisted "new atheist" track "delusions" in 1998, and honestly, less so in the '70s than now certainly but being inspired by lovecraft is an inherently political act, just like being inspired by wagner (or coltrane!) is.

lol i just found this in the youtube comments to HYMNEN

Paul Buckmaster (2 years ago (edited))
Maxwell Clark: It is Cardew who is the imperialist; he understands nothing of Stockhausen, whom I knew personally, and whose music I introduced to Miles Davis, May 1972, while collaborating with Davis on the "On The Corner" Sessions (including "Ife"). I had brought LPs of Gruppen, Mixtur, Hymnen., as well as Wuorinen's "Time's Encomium". Davis had them playing all day, over a week, on his autochanger. He couldn't get enough, and recognized KHS as the towering genius he truly is. Cardew, as typical of any dyed-in-the-wool British imperialist — cleverly, but not quite-so-cleverly — twists the discourse into falsehood and mere puerile calumny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buckmaster

(arranged the strings for space oddity among many other things, he actually died in 2017, maybe posting this comment finished him off)
(probably this belongs on another thread but this is where we were just talking abt cardew so)

Dayum.

this version of hymnen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDxpa-XPMTo

Ridiculous though it may be to portray Cardew as an accomplice to British imperialism, it is indeed remarkable to note that Stockhausen briefly mattered to one of the greatest African American musicians of all time (alternatively: to one of the greatest musicians of all time who happened to be African American).

honestly that's something i've never been able to understand, how it was _stockhausen_ of all the composers who blew the minds of the rock and jazz worlds collectively back in the late '60s, early '70s. i'd hire his press agent in a minute.

You mean, over and above Ligeti or Boulez or Carter or…?

MD's stockhausen fandom isn't new info particularly -- ian carr talks abt it pp258-59 if the 1984 paladin edn of his miles davis -- and actually i see that buckmaster is also mentioned on those same pages, inc.the possibility that PB introduced MD to those very records (he certainly caused them to be around at that point, and discussed knowledgeably, tho it's apparently likely MD was already aware of what KS sounded like)

buckmaster is accurately afaik described as a pupil of UK 12-toner humphrey searle but the all-important major tom/elton john connection is sadly not made :)

(i am listening to hymnen precisely bcz i'm currently looking into aspects of rushomancy's question: ignoring any specific musical conundra he was choosing to confront, i suspect two parts of the answer are KS's own personal charm and charisma (considerable, he was in many ways his own press agent) but also the wide availability of his work on deutsche grammaphon from c.1961

The hippie/proto-New Age stylings of his mid to late 60s 'intuitive' music in particular no doubt helped broker him a wider audience (cf. Aus den sieben Tagen and Stimmung).

*helped him broker

You mean, over and above Ligeti or Boulez or Carter or…?

― toilet-cleaning brain surgeon (pomenitul)

or cage! it seems like nobody would talk about cage without dismissing him as a cheap punchline. fucking ridiculous!

It is Cardew who is the imperialist; he understands nothing of Stockhausen, whom I knew personally,

I suspect Cornelius Cardew knew Stockhausen a lot better, personally, than Paul Buckmaster.

lol I deliberately didn't mention Cage because I find his music profoundly uninteresting as a listening experience, barring an exception or two. But the intervening years certainly haven't agreed with me, so perhaps it's some form of justice.

xp

Aside from the reasons given so far, Stockhausen also worked far more with electronics than any of those, except possibly Cage, so it makes sense that musicians who were exploring electric instrumentation might have looked to him. There's also just the powerful visceral impact of some of his music.xps

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Musique concrète's protagonists don't appear to have been as 'marketable' fwiw.

Wrt Cage, I can see why jazzers might not have been taken by a guy who scorned improvisation and rockers might not have identified with
ideas of non-expression/non-intention. That said, Zappa and Patrick Moraz appeared on the 1993 Chance Operation tribute and a number of rockers have worked with the prepared piano.

Stockhausen was a pioneer wrt live electronics, which seems significant.

lol I deliberately didn't mention Cage because I find his music profoundly uninteresting as a listening experience, barring an exception or two.

― toilet-cleaning brain surgeon (pomenitul)

this is how i feel about stockhausen!

That's totally fair. The thing too is that both composers' outputs are so massive that there is likely much that could tip the balance either way were I to hear it.

Love both, although it took me a little while with Stockhausen.

To go back to this thread's original premise, part of me feels like Stockhausen is a prime candidate for proggiest major postwar composer, if only because of his penchant for high-minded yet unintentionally silly conceptual grand narratives. Berio, too, but for completely different reasons (mostly having to do with proto-polystylism).

also his penchant for quilting together traditions, which is key to what makes prog "progressive" imo: not just the world-music tape-tapestries (telemusik and hymnen are distortion-heavy cousins to all you need is love) but also his constant drive towards at combining competing elements in the avant-garde (composed serialism, musique concrete, electronic composition, live electronic manipulation of all the above, plus some cheekily unacknowledged thefts from the early minimalists, and -- post his starvation-tantrum to persuade his wife to return to him in 1968 -- free improvisation)

Played not bad jazz piano, in his spare time, so I believe.

Wouldn't be surprised given his son Markus's musical path.

also indeterminacy of course