Originally Posted by
Baribrotzer
Because they're hitting the same wall that the classical guys hit for much of the first half of the Twentieth Century, and the jazz guys hit in the late Sixties: After a certain point, you couldn't go forward any more and get results that amounted to listenable, meaningful music. In fact, the classical guys spent much of that time and a great deal of effort trying and trying hard to progress, and only managed to find out how large, thick, and generally immovable that wall they'd hit was; and that they couldn't progress all that far beyond Webern and get something that still sounded, well, musical. As opposed to sounding like combinatorial mathematics converted into notes - which much of it amounted to.
And it turned out that the thing to do was to move sideways rather than forward. Minimalism, Postmodernism, and most of the other more recent developments in classical music, amount to that - going back to the past, but looking at it differently and putting influences from historical styles together in a new and different way. That's happened in jazz, too. And in prog, bands like SGM, The Knells, Deluge Grander, Cardiacs, and others took that approach or are taking it: You can't get much more "progressive", at least in the "forward" direction of dissonance, musical density, and structural complexity, than Henry Cow did in the Seventies. So don't try to. Instead, look back at the great tapestry of musical history, find threads that you truly love, and put them together the way you want to.
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