DAI GRIFFITHS Memorable Music, Forgettable Words?
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DAI GRIFFITHS Memorable music, forgettable words? Dilemmas of song in British progressive rock, c. 1972 “I hold that a long song does not exist. I maintain that the phrase “a long song” is simply a flat contradiction in terms. The degree of excitement which would entitle a song to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. There are, no doubt, many who have found difficulty in reconciling the critical dictum that “progressive rock” is to be devoutly admired throughout, with the absolute impossibility of maintaining for it, while listening, the amount of enthusiasm which that critical dictum would demand.” You may have guessed that those are not my own words, but a cover version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Poetic Principle, published in 1848, the original of which1 substituted “poem” for “song”, and for “progressive rock” Milton’s Paradise Lost, and was part of a complex debate in critical theory, contriving to bring together questions of duration with the role of the artist in society. These issues are durable ones, and can be found in the song, as a particular musical form, at the period which this conference examined. Indeed, during a piece which I’ll examine in more detail later, Robert Wyatt, then with the Soft Machine, drew attention to similar concerns, by singing these words: “Just before we go on to the next part of our song Let's all make sure we've got the time Music-making still performs the normal functions - background noise for people scheming, seducing, revolting and teaching That's all right by me, don't think that I'm complaining After all, it's only leisure time, isn't it?”2 In their history of critical theory, the heartland of 1950s New Criticism, W.K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks explain that: “Poetic theory had passed in the course of the centuries from a classic or Aristotelian focus on drama, through a heroic focus on epic (and then a hidden or implicit focus on satire and burlesque) to the romantic focus on lyric, the songlike personal expression, the feeling centred in the image.” (Wimsatt-Brooks, 1970: 433) Indeed, an equally peremptory version had already appeared some thirty years before Poe’s article, during the central, fourteenth chapter of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817): “a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry”. (Bate, 1970: 378) As Poe’s example from Paradise Lost suggested, the problem was how to identify the genuinely poetic in a piece of great length and the likelihood, in such a circumstance, of having to disentangle poetry from prose, possibly via some intermediaries such as poetic prose or prosaic poetry. In turn, as John Stuart Mill emphasised, these arguments were bound up in the issue of who was allowed to identify themselves as a poet, and judgement over what constituted poetry (Wimsatt-Brooks, 1970: 434-5). Length became a suspect device, since, as Wimsatt and Brooks put it: “One conceives [too] that an art formed on the principle of a vast assemblage of diversely interesting parts will tend to promote a certain looseness of relationship among such parts, and in the parts themselves a certain extravagance of local coloring.” (Wimsatt-Brooks, 1970: 433) As musicians we may be reminded by this of Nietzsche’s famously backhanded comment on Wagner: 1 I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase ‘a long poem’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms. The degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. There are, no doubt, many who have found difficulty in reconciling the critical dictum that the Paradise Lost is to be devoutly admired throughout, with the absolute impossibility of maintaining for it, during perusal, the amount of enthusiasm which that critical dictum would demand. (Poe 1848). In Bate (1970), p. 352. 2 Moon in June, Soft Machine Third (1970). D. GRIFFITHS - Memorable music, forgettable words? Dilemmas of song in British progressive rock, c. 1972 “Wagner is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details. Here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in music who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness.” (Nietszche, 1888: 627) To cut abruptly to the issues I’m discussing in this paper, all this seems to me true, and that its truth is bad enough, for song, period, and for “popular” song, even worse. The adjective “popular” works in many and mysterious ways,3 and I want strongly to assert that one of its key insistences lies in the temporal domain. Popular songs are part of a bunch of shorter forms lined up against any idea that music can be genuinely or honestly listened to for any long period of time. As I wrote with reference to Radiohead, a band sometimes presented as latter-day heirs to the progressive legacy:4 “I tend to see this as to a large extent a matter of the occupation of time, so that songs form an alliance in brevity with some other musical forms: Beethoven’s bagatelle, the character piece, the modernist Stück, the miniature, the compressed version of operas found in their overtures or preludes. There aren’t really so many forms of music that are intrinsically lengthy: in classical- romantic music the sonata-form movement, with its tonal opposition, extensive harmonic and motivic development, became a formal “template” that could consciously be expanded by a composer such as Brahms; the continuous “stream of consciousness” of the Wagnerian opera; composed pieces of musical modernism that, rightly or wrongly, assume listener concentration. For the latter, Joyce is the literary equivalent (with Wagner somewhere in his background, too), describing famously in Finnegan’s Wake “an ideal reader suffering an ideal insomnia”.5 But against this view, Edward Macan’s assertion: “Effectively tying together twenty or thirty minutes of music on both a musical and conceptual basis is a genuine compositional achievement, and a well-constructed multi-movement suite is able to impart a sense of monumentality and grandeur, to convey the sweep of experience, in a manner that a three- or four-minute song simply cannot.” (Macan, 1997: 49-50) America How did progressive bands musically derive the durational length Macan considers to be so virtuous? A way into this question is offered by comparing the original 1968 recording of Paul Simon’s song America, from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album Bookends, with the cover version by Yes, recorded in 1972 by the line-up of Fragile and Close to the Edge (including Rick Wakeman and Bill Bruford). A way into this question is offered by comparing the original 1968 recording of Paul Simon’s song America, from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1968 album Bookends, with the cover version in 1972 by the line-up of Fragile and Close to the Edge (including Rick Wakeman and Bill Bruford). Paul Simon’s song is a good example, and pace Macan, of what sometimes happens in the short story, a relatively short time period (3’35”) evoking something of the “great American novel”, an epic theme conveyed through the listing of tiny localized details: Mrs Wagner’s pies, the named towns of Saginaw and Pittsburgh, a Greyhound bus and the New Jersey turnpike. The lines of song seem to invite being considered as lines of poetry, for instance, the simple rectitude, reminiscent of Robert Frost, of the line: the moon rose over an open field, the inner musicality of a line such as: 3 Not a day too soon, the journal “Popular Music” has begun to question its existence. See 24/1, 2005. 4 See Q Classic: Pink Floyd and the story of Prog Rock, Emap, 2005. 5 Griffiths (2004), pp. 26-7. “When Schoenberg was bothered by the fact that his pieces were short and always needed the instantaneous setting of texts to get finished, in the pop song view of the world, he was doing fine. What happened next was the issue.” Griffths (1999), p. 425-ff. Michigan seems like a dream to me now, and, ultimately pop’s great easy trick, the packing of meaning into a throwaway phrase: all come to look for America Little of what we’d find to celebrate in Paul Simon’s song applies to the cover version by Yes. The original Yes version lasts 10’33”, this version rendered faithfully on Keys to Ascension (1996) at 10’28”. However, of all things, in the US a 45-rpm single version was issued, cut drastically down to 4’12”, and this is the version I’ve attended to. Diagram 1 shows Paul Simon’s song compared with the Yes single edit version, while Diagram 2 provides further detail of the Yes recording. The Yes version has four distinct sections, the first containing Simon’s first two verses, the second a slow movement corresponding to the contrasting bridge of the Simon song, the third a rock/boogie scherzo corresponding to Simon’s last verse, and a final quick coda with no words. Even as a single edit, the Yes version is a strong appropriation of the original rather than a faithful rendition. (Griffiths, 2002: 52) Once underway, the relation between the original and cover is fairly close for the first three verses, apart from small extensions and elisions put in for musical interest. (The long version includes non-verbal references to America from Bernstein’s West Side Story!) It’s at Paul Simon’s final verse, starting “Kathy I’m lost” that the cover really does “get lost”, or “forget” its direction.