The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

by David Weigel

The unquiet secret of Cruise to the Edge is that the concept doesn’t quite come off. By playing three classic albums, note for note, Yes makes the muffed notes more noticeable. A video before each forty-minute block is synced to “The Firebird,” the Stravinsky-inspired song that Yes used to play on stage. The composer’s strings would build, and shudder, and then the band would stroll in, grabbing the melody to toss it elsewhere. Nice touch. Maybe a bit sepulchral now. On the walk from the theater to one of the all-night lounges, you can hear megafans grumble about what went wrong.

Sonneck consulted a doctor, a specialist in “female diseases,” and asked him to explain the power of music played this way. “[He] smiled in the strangest manner,” wrote Sonneck, “and at the same time said all sorts of things about magnetism, galvanism, electricity, of the contagion of a close hall filled with countless wax lights and several hundred perfumed and perspiring human beings, of historical epilepsy, of the phenomenon of tickling, of musical cantherides, and other scabrous things.”6 The doctor could not define the condition. The writer could. This was “Lisztomania,” a frenzy induced by music—surely some kind of a fluke.

Liszt, inspired by the composer Hector Berlioz, came up with the “tone poem,” a classical-music type that abandoned form to follow an idea within one movement. “In the so-called classical music the return and development of themes is determined by formal rules which are regarded as inviolable,” Liszt wrote in 1855. “In program music, in contrast, the return, change, variation and modulation of the motives is conditioned by their relation to a poetic idea.”

“I didn’t, and don’t, have the technical qualifications or capacity to ‘know’ what was involved,” Fripp recollected in 2001. “We might recall that the young Stravinsky of The ROS didn’t ‘know’ what he was doing either: for him it was more an instinctive and intuitive process.”

In “How Time Passes By,” an essay from the same period, Stockhausen imagined a technological advance that could allow new music to be written over the limitations of analog. He envisioned a key on which, “if one presses only very lightly, the oscillation keeps a constant phase—the pitch remains the same. The heavier the pressure, the more irregular become the phase-relationships and the more indeterminate the pitch.”

They were English, at the exact moment when invocation of the word no longer instilled confidence.

“The only reason I’ve been able to come up with as to why we became musicians was because there wasn’t anything to rebel or fight against,” remembered future King Crimson drummer Michael Giles, raised near Portsmouth, well south of London. “We weren’t doing it with another agenda as a means to escape. If we were seeking to escape, then it would have been from a kingdom of nothingness.”31

“I had a chord sequence which became very much a Genesis trademark, where we would be in E minor and go to the chords C and D, often keeping the bass note down on E,”