As a new resident of Edinburgh this event caught my eye:
https://sites.eca.ed.ac.uk/theprogectconference/
Not much info there, anyone know more about it?
Rob
As a new resident of Edinburgh this event caught my eye:
https://sites.eca.ed.ac.uk/theprogectconference/
Not much info there, anyone know more about it?
Rob
http://robmartino.com
Solo Chapman Stick
Interesting, but as the event is allegedly in two weeks and there's no final programme posted on the website, it seems tenuous.
I see John Covach from the US is scheduled to pontificate, so I hope for his sake the event is happening! And everyone else of course.
BTW, how the heck do they expect you to pronounce the name of the event. The Prog-ect?
A program has been posted -
https://sites.eca.ed.ac.uk/theprogec...ogect-2016.pdf
http://robmartino.com
Solo Chapman Stick
On first glance, it looks ridiculous.
But why not? I'm sure there've been many academic studies of punk, and yet most of the actual music is far slighter than prog - just a primitive take on rock 'n roll. However, the critical rejection of prog in the late Seventies seems to have been mirrored by an intellectual rejection as well. What academic study there was, at least as far as I'm aware, came from the RIO end of things: most notably by Chris Cutler, who took a fairly extreme, purist position but was impossible to refute or even argue with for that very reason.
Although I can also understand why not: Prog was a musical movement and a musical movement only. It had no larger accompanying social movement or philosophy beyond "Let's make a new sound that no one has made before," or, "Let's combine these old sounds in a way no one has done before". I suppose you could say that it took certain musical tendencies in late psych to their logical extreme, coupled that with a strong attitude among the musicians of being artists, not entertainers, and added an optimistic trust in their audiences being willing and able to follow them as far as they could go in their experimentation. But it was never unified at all, to the point where a number of the bands seem to have thought rather poorly of one another. Indeed prog was, and is, so un-unified that its fans have reached the consensus that it cannot be defined at all.
Last edited by Baribrotzer; 05-23-2016 at 01:53 AM.
^Punk is the biggest sacred cow in rock over here. It's been analysed and pontificated on beyond belief. I'm dubious as to how much of the music really merits that.
This looks very interesting!
Dont think I saw such an extensive academic event dedicated to prog, wonder if there will be any turnout
I just read the agenda and I think so too!Originally Posted by flytomars
This looks very similar to the Journal of Popular Culture conferences that my dad went to for years and wrote for consistently. He was in literature, so rarely delved into music, but his colleague and friend did a contribution on Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick. I'm trying to get him to give me a copy. So as odd as this may sound, things like this are not that uncommon in the academic sphere. And if you read the agenda, they cover a tremendously wide spectrum, and even have so "what is Prog?" type sessions and some sessions on Prog fans.
Looks pretty cool to me! Too bad I can't make it. I'm actually going to be in Scotland in August.
Bill
I am going and will be speaking on Wednesday. This is the second conference within Progect, the first took place in Dijon in late 2014. Don't think it's open to the general public, but I am not sure.
Most of the music itself probably doesn't. But punk, unlike prog, was a large and well defined social movement, and hence you would expect considerable academic interest. Prog was just a small, artist-centered faction within the much larger hippie movement, and that movement contained much more cohesive and interesting socially revolutionary or politically active factions to write about.
Last edited by Baribrotzer; 05-22-2016 at 09:14 PM.
It looks good and about what one would expect as far as topics in the modern academia climate. I think next year they should bring in a literary person to explore the "word salad" type lyrics of Jon Anderson and others influenced by him. That might be a little too "cosmic" for the poor materialistic academics to fathom, but at least they could go the route of its relationship to Surrealist poets, Rimbaud, Novalis, etc.
"Pontificate" is about right; the title of his panel suggests "beating--or re-treading--a dead horse."
Popular music as a legitimate field of academic study--the "academic Madonna industry," as Simon Frith (Fred's brother) put it--entered the university at precisely the same time as a post-rock generation of scholars marinated in punk did.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
^I think that's right. There's no doubt that the fact people who came of age with punk dominate the media is a reason for its totemic status.
If his kind of academic study of rock has to occur (and there's an argument to be made that it doesn't!), then prog is as worthy of this kind of attention as anything. It's a legitimate part of the history of rock, whether some like it or not...not just a footnote to be blithely written off as, oh well, The Sex Pistols saved us from Rick Wakeman and ELP (as happened yet again in a documentary shown here on Friday).
This looks really interesting - I wish transcripts or something would be available. Seems like there are many interesting presentations scheduled. I'd like to understand what's corrupt about Power & the Glory: Robert Sivy (University of Kentucky, USA) “Exposing Corruption in Gentle Giant’s The Power and the Glory” or hear the Georgie Born conversation etc.
I think it may be more a matter of The Power and the Glory dealing with corruption and exposing it, than that album being corrupt itself.
"On the Lyrical Existentialism of Gibby Haynes" by Oedipus MacShwetty.
I hope that it's a good conference and good luck with your presentation. It's good to know that there's some degree of musicological research taking place around progressive rock music.
^ Ditto, and tell us if proceedings are published.
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
Thanks for your encouraging words, much appreciated. I will keep you posted if anything's published. There is a book out from the Dijon conference of 2014. You can get it from Amazon (and surely other sites too): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prog-Rock-E.../dp/2364411750
At first I thought: PE have spent quite some years dicussing what prog is so...
But there are lots of interesting subjects:
Henry Cow and beyond: A conversation between
Georgina Born and Simon Frith
Philippe Gonin
(University of Burgundy, France)
“Deciphering a creative process: Magma and
Mëkanïk Dëstruktïw Kömmandöh”
Franco Fabbri(University of Milan, Italy)
“The Age of Binaural Listening”
Andrei Sora (University of Surrey, UK)“
Prog meets the Balkans: Romanian Progressive Rock
Paul Carr
(University of South Wales, UK)
“Matching Mole, Progressive Style, Genre and Protest”
Thanks! Is it in French, English, a mix?
Henry
Where Are They Now? Yes news: http://www.bondegezou.co.uk/wh_now.htm
Blogdegezou, the accompanying blog: http://bondegezou.blogspot.com/
Punk-rock is indeed easier for an academic babble than serious plunging into the murky waters of late '60s English middle-class where Symphonic rock was born.
Good luck with that project!
Btw, it would be great if you are going to film some of that and then upload on YouTube.
Last edited by Svetonio; 05-25-2016 at 01:37 AM.
These are indeed great points of interest in the programme. Fabbri's works have been highlighted in many academic foras involving the topic of "Prog", including a seminar in Bologna (or Verona?) a few years back where Chris Cutler was also one of the main contributors. I believe they even had a jam afterwards featuring, a.o. Hugh Hopper and Tony Pagliuca (of Le Orme). I kept a pdf transcript of some of the lectures bookmarked on my former laptop, but I remember it being somewhat in line with a couple of the ensuing ones in question.
Of course, both Fabbri (ex-Stormy Six) and especially Georgina Born (ex-Henry Cow) are high-profile academics in their own right now. Although most participants at PE would apparently deem their musical credentials as either "elitist" or "unlistenable".
I'd like to attend this seminar. If it'd been this upcoming autumn I'd do it, seeing as my oldest kid is enrolled at the University of Edinburgh.
"Improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness" - Fred Frith
"[...] things that we never dreamed of doing in Crimson or in any band that I've been in," - Tony Levin speaking of SGM
There is also, within punk, a "clean", intentional, post-modern intellectual current: It was born as a stripping-down, a casting-off of excess, a Marxist return of Art to the People; its background, formation, and artistic aims were fairly clear and well-documented; and it had the published manifestoes and sense of making history required for a proper "movement". Within punk, there were always people who knew exactly what they were doing on a cultural and political level, and could hold forth at length and in depth about the hows, whens, and whys of said movement. They may have lived it, but they editorialized upon it at the same time, and they were knowing in a few rock musicians were or are. All of which made punk quite well-suited to academic study.
Certainly far more so than the relatively chaotic growth of prog out of psych, orchestral pop, jazz, the BBC's restrictive broadcasting policies, Music Appreciation classes, and a dozen other threads; perhaps with parallel artistic impulses, but with a hundred different ways of realizing those, with a hundred different philosophies behind it - or with no discernible philosophy at all, other than, "Let's do something different and interesting!" And with little or no editorializing - they were too busy doing it to worry about how or when or why.
Last edited by Baribrotzer; 05-24-2016 at 08:33 AM.
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