Originally Posted by
Baribrotzer
OK, first: This is a variant of the question, "What is prog?" Most of the people here have come to the consensus that, "What is prog?" has no definitive answer. Or, more accurately, that it has thousands or even millions of answers, each of them slightly different from any other, each consisting of one person's own definition, and each right for that one person, but not exactly right for anybody else. There have been occasional proposals to define "prog" statistically - that the more attributes such as odd meters, meter changes, key changes, extended harmony, jazz-oriented improvisation that a song, album, or band's body of work has, the more likely it is to fit under the "prog" umbrella. But nobody has seriously tried to compile such a list of attributes and formally codify such a definition.
With that said, I'll stick my neck out and say that "avant-prog" tends to have a more "difficult" or "advanced" musical vocabulary: "angular" melodies with large jumps; highly chromatic harmony often involving such 20th-Century classical developments as extended tonality, polytonality, or atonality; irregular or cross-metered rhythms; extreme extensions of song structure, sometimes going completely outside that form and toward through-composition; and improvisation borrowing from similarly advanced jazz. It may not have all of those qualities, but it usually has several. It tends to have a lot of dissonance, and to require repeated listening to absorb or understand, but the best of it can stand up to repeated listening.
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