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Progressive rock (also referred to as prog rock or prog) is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of "a mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of the 1960s as much as take its rightful place beside the modern classical music of Stravinsky and Bartók."

Progressive rock bands pushed "rock's technical and compositional boundaries" by going beyond the standard rock or popular verse-chorus-based song structures. The Oxford Companion to Music states that progressive rock bands "...explored extended musical structures which involved intricate instrumental patterns and textures and often esoteric subject matter." Additionally, the arrangements often incorporated elements drawn from classical, jazz, and later world music. Instrumentals were common, while songs with lyrics were sometimes conceptual, abstract, or based in fantasy. Progressive rock bands sometimes used "concept albums that made unified statements, usually telling an epic story or tackling a grand overarching theme."

Progressive rock developed from late 1960s psychedelic rock, as part of a wide-ranging tendency in rock music of this era to draw inspiration from ever more diverse influences. The term was initially applied to the music of British bands such as Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, reaching its peak of popularity in the mid 1970s.

Although retaining considerable popularity, progressive rock sales were in the decline by the end of the 1970s as disco and punk rock gained popularity. Elements of the genre are present in 1980s neo-progressive rock as well as 1990s and 2000s progressive metal and new prog.

Precursors
Allmusic cites Bob Dylan's poetry, The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! (1966) and The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) as the "earliest rumblings of progressive and art rock", while progressiverock.com cites the latter as its "starting point". The Beach Boys' concept album Pet Sounds (1966) and Jefferson Airplane's second album Surrealistic Pillow (1967) were both big influences for many progressive rock bands.

From the mid-1960s The Left Banke, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys had pioneered the inclusion of harpsichords, wind and string sections on their recordings to produce a form of Baroque rock and can be heard in singles like Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (1967), with its Bach inspired introduction. Freak Out!, released in 1966, had been a mixture of progressive rock, garage rock and avant-garde layered sounds. In the same year, the band "1-2-3", later renamed Clouds, began experimenting with song structure, improvisation, and multi-layered arrangements. In March of that year, The Byrds released "Eight Miles High", a pioneering psychedelic rock single with lead guitar heavily influenced by the jazz soloing style of John Coltrane. Later that year, The Who released "A Quick One While He's Away", the first example of the rock opera form, and considered by some to have been the first prog epic.

In 1967, Jeff Beck released the single "Beck's Bolero", inspired by Maurice Ravel's Bolero, and, later that year, Procol Harum released the Bach-influenced single "A Whiter Shade of Pale". Also in 1967, the Moody Blues released Days of Future Passed, combining classical-inspired orchestral music with traditional rock instrumentation and song structures. Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, contained the nearly ten-minute improvisational psychedelic instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive".

By the late 1960s, many rock bands had begun incorporating instruments from classical and Eastern music, as well as experimenting with improvisation and lengthier compositions. East of Eden, for example, used Eastern harmonics and instruments such as a sumerian saxophone on the album Mercator Projected in 1969. Some, such as the UK's Soft Machine, began to experiment with blends of rock and jazz. By the end of the decade, other bands, such as Deep Purple and The Nice, had also recorded classical-influenced albums with full orchestras: Concerto for Group and Orchestra and Five Bridges. This use of classical music would crystallise in the '70s with Amon Düül II's orchestral score on Made in Germany (1975), Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother (1970), and several works of Frank Zappa.

Peak in popularity and decline
Progressive rock's popularity peaked in the mid-1970s, when prog artists regularly topped reader polls in mainstream popular music magazines in Britain and America.

Bruce Eder claims that "the rot" in progressive rock "started to set in during 1976, the year Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP) released their live album Welcome Back My Friends". Eder claims that this album was "suffering from poor sound and uninspired playing" which "stretched the devotion of fans and critics even thinner." He claims that "the end [of progressive rock] came quickly: by 1977, the new generation of listeners was even more interested in a good time than the audiences of the early 1970s, and they had no patience for 30 minute prog-rock suites or concept albums based on Tolkienesque stories." He asserts that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, "ELP was barely functioning as a unit, and not producing music with any energy; Genesis was redefining themselves ... as a pop-rock band; and Yes was back to doing songs running four minutes ... and even releasing singles."



From 1975 to 1976, progressive bands elaborated their stage shows, thus moving away from their original ethos of "music first".

In the late 1970s, Great Britain was going through difficult times due to a poor economy, frequent strikes and shortages. With its exotic, literary topics, much of progressive rock was dismissed by British youth. Punk rock, a simpler and more aggressive style of rock that emerged in this era, and disco, which also emerged during this period, helped move critical opinion and popular support in the UK away from progressive rock, ending the genre's reign as a leading style there.

By the end of the 1970s and 1980s, progressive rock had fallen into disrepute. It was dismissed as overblown, pretentious and elitist. Fans were embarrassed to publicly admit they liked an act associated with the genre and record stores stocked progressive rock acts in the back of the store sans labels.

Despite this supposed opposition between the two styles, bands which emerged in the aftermath of punk, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Japan, and Simple Minds, all showed the influence of prog, as well as their more usually recognised punk influences.

Progressive rock fans
The genre had a period of great popularity in the United States during the 1970s. The vast majority of progressive rock concert attendees were male. Audiences were reserved in their behavior tending to sit and intently concentrate on the performance. This contrasted with more overt and emotional reactions of audiences of other rock music genres.

1980s revitalization


The early 1980s saw a revitalization of progressive rock, as established acts renewed themselves and new artists appeared. The period's progressive music has been called "neo-progressive rock". Many 1980s progressive bands were influenced by minimalism, world music, and the New Wave. The digital synthesizer became a prominent instrument.

Some progressive rock stalwarts changed musical direction, simplifying their music and making it more commercially viable. Containing members of major prog-acts from the 1970s, the supergroup Asia debuted with a mainstream rock-oriented album. Asia's commercial success demonstrated popular demand for a more radio-friendly British progressive rock, which could combine progressive rock with hard rock, also following the North-American Top-40 bands such as Styx, Journey, and Rush.

1990s and 2000s


The progressive rock genre enjoyed another revival in the 1990s. A notable impetus to this revival was the 1991 foundation of the Swedish Art Rock Society, an association created to rescue the values of classic progressive rock, with Pär Lindh as chairman. This society was a catalyst for new Swedish bands such as Anekdoten, Änglagård, Landberk and Pär Lindh Project, which joined the scene between 1992 and 1994. These bands became part of progressive rock's "Third Wave", spearheaded by Sweden's The Flower Kings, the UK's Porcupine Tree, Norway's White Willow, and from the United States, Dream Theater, and Spock's Beard.

Progressive rock has also served as a key inspiration for genres such as post-rock, post-metal, and power metal. Former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy has acknowledged that the prominent use of progressive elements and qualities in metal is not confined to bands conventionally classified as "progressive metal".

New prog (also known as nu prog or post-prog) is a term that appeared around the mid-2000s to describe a number of alternative and experimental bands who incorporated elements from progressive rock or had an expansive, musically diverse, approach to their music in a way that has been identified to be progressive, but using a more musically contemporary template. Notable musical groups described as post-prog or new prog included 30 Seconds to Mars; Coheed and Cambria; Muse;.