Mattia Merlini

Mattia Merlini, a musicologist born in 1995, has recently published the essay “Le the ashes of prog”, which challenges many of the most deeply rooted beliefs held by critics and casual fans about progressive rock. The genre — Merlini argues — did not “die” in the late Seventies under the blows of punk, only to briefly rise again in the mid-Eighties with the neoprog of Marillion, IQ, Twelfth Night and others. This legend may roughly describe (albeit in a rather simplistic way) the fate of one specific strand, British symphonic rock, but it gives an inadequate picture of the genre's evolution as a whole. In fact, it's not just inadequate: it's actually harmful. By tying the very idea of “prog” tightly to the specific traits of the symphonic strand, it ends up obscuring and almost denying the existence of a hugely rich array of successors and innovators who, combining different musical influences with a similarly exploratory spirit, carried the progressive attitude through all the decades that followed.

Among the heirs to prog's ideals, Merlini identifies not only Pallas, Pendragon, Spock’s Beard, Big Big Train and similar acts – who are in fact treated analytically as the least “progressive” of the bunch – but also artists from the metal, post-rock, alternative rock and electronic fields, as well as true eclectics like Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Björk, Susanne Sundfør. Adopting this perspective, however, requires a shift in outlook regarding the distinctive traits, or rather the “founding values,” of prog aesthetics: if rock's “cultural elevation,” the pursuit of instrumental virtuosity, and the adoption of a fantasy/sci-fi imagery are no longer the cornerstones of the progressive mindset, then what are the new elements that define the (post-)prog approach?

Aware of the complexity of the question, and convinced that the ultimate authority on a genre lies not only with critics but also and above all with the “people” tied to that genre, Merlini conducted his inquiry as a piece of field research, digging through the archives of music periodicals and directly canvassing fans through an online survey circulated among the leading progressive communities on today's web.

“Le the ashes of prog” takes stock of the motivations, methods, findings and outlook of Merlini's research, offering detailed analysis and food for thought for rereading established beliefs about progressive music in light of seemingly distant areas such as postmodernism or synthwave. This is an essay aimed at an academic readership, and its reading is recommended to those comfortable both with the vocabulary of musical analysis and with the argumentative forms typical of a scholarly text.

Rather than offering a conventional review, we preferred to reach out to Mattia Merlini by email, asking him a few questions that could yield a concise, more “accessible” version of his book, in the form of an interview. Enjoy the read!

Author: Mattia Merlini

Title: The Ashes of Prog — What Remains of a Popular Music Genre

Publisher: Ricordi – LIM

Pages: 283

Price: €20

Essentially, the idea of the “death of prog” is a generalization born of a historiography shaped by the discourse that has dominated the genre ever since. British criticism, as the scholar Chris Anderton has recently shown, had already been deeply divided for years over whether prog was a legitimately rock form of expression, and this helped foster a narrative in which decadent, inauthentic prog gave way to punk, seen as fresh, vital and true to rock's roots. Punk's militant critics, of course, did their part to spread this reading of events.

Not only are there fascinating cultural and social reasons why this version of events came to prevail, but there's also a fundamental, more strictly musical issue that still leads many people to endorse it today, namely what I call the “Anglo-symphonic stereotype.” This is a fossilized image of what prog is supposed to be, one that mainly refers to the (symphonic) archetype – full-bodied arrangements, classical influences, unconventional harmonies, free-roaming keyboards and all the rest we still readily associate with prog – imposed by the Anglophone scene. Just consider how different the scenes that developed in Italy, Germany, France and many other countries were (and how different their fates were too, starting from the mid-Seventies) to understand that this is an inappropriate reduction, and to see how pointing to the flops of the great symphonic-prog idols to justify the notion of a universal “death of prog” is an argument that leaves a lot of cards on the table.

The very concept of “progressive rock” was anything but static over the years that, in retrospect, are most often associated with the movement. The adjective “progressive” was used, interchangeably with others, to describe everything from Led Zeppelin to the Grateful Dead… Yet over time “prog” came to be defined as a distinct genre, and a “canon” of bands emerged that pretty much everyone regards as its pillars. How did this happen, and above all, when?

What does or doesn't enter a genre's canon is decided by the many social actors who help define the genre itself (e.g. the press, websites, event organizers, record labels, scholars, artists and, not least, fans themselves). The construction, in the second half of the Seventies, of the aforementioned “prog vs punk” narrative strongly contributed to identifying, on one side, the “progressive dinosaurs” (e.g. Yes, Genesis, ELP, Gentle Giant etc.) and, on the other, the “uncouth enemy” intent on belting out angry songs over four filthy guitar chords. Things, as always, are a bit more complicated than that, but that canon still persists in the collective imagination today. Over time, however, another one took shape (see the rest of the interview, ed.) which, operating much more in the shadows, has not received nearly as much attention and is therefore far less defined. Prog has always been multifaceted (just as it is today), but in the past, far more than now, it underwent some rather clear-cut crystallizations. In academic circles, an important year is 1997, when the first monographs devoted entirely to prog were published, both by Anglophone authors, which on one hand kicked off a line of scholarship that continues to this day, and on the other helped cement the classic canon. You only need to read snippets from books just five years older to find far more unexpected lists of names.

We're used to associating the term “progressive rock” with a set of recognisable traits: labyrinthine compositions, imaginative lyrics and intentions, an emphasis on instrumental prowess… In your book, you take an extra step and try to identify the “values” underlying these stylistic features. What are they, and why is it important to consider them?

The research at the core of the book starts from the premise that a musical genre doesn't exist except in the discourse of those who engage with it, as I mentioned earlier. The term “discourse”, which will surely come up many more times in this conversation, refers to Michel Foucault's socio-cultural analysis, which holds (to put it very simply) that to a certain extent our relationship with reality is shaped by the linguistic-cultural exchanges we have with others. In the central part of the book I try to trace a “common thread” that can trigger plausible discourses of legitimation towards this or that artist, attempting to set aside preconceptions in order to discover which characteristics the prog community seems to value. The goal is then to check whether there's actually any characteristic that can be said to be present across a fairly heterogeneous sample of music that the community itself considers “progressive”.

For now I'll just summarise the first of these two steps in order to answer your question: I can tell you that I seem to have identified the following characteristics: eclecticism (the fusion of stylistic devices and sounds from otherwise distant traditions), complexity (rhythmic above all, but also harmonic and linked to virtuosity), rupture (of standard song lengths and of song form), “deep” lyrics, the use of the concept album, and above all a not always clearly defined “progressive attitude”, whose definition I attempt in the final part of my book.

In light of your analysis, you make a striking argument en passant: “That prog — especially classic prog — has been so widely associated with symphonic sounds and highbrow quotations is entirely contingent”. In other words, the classical references underlying both the sound and the compositional developments of the most celebrated prog tracks wouldn't be essential elements of the genre at all?

They certainly were essential for one specific incarnation of prog: the British, symphonic prog of the Seventies (which underlies the very “Anglo-symphonic stereotype” I mentioned earlier). What I mean by that statement – a bit provocative, I realise – is that treating those traits as an essential characteristic of prog is one of the main reasons why today's discourse on the genre seems so contradictory, especially if we consider the dualism between neo-progressive (e.g. the most famous work of Marillion, IQ, Pallas, Spock's Beard, The Flower Kings, Big Big Train etc.) and everything else that's considered prog (which in the book I call “post-progressive”). These are the two “ashes of prog” referred to in the book's title.

Many readers will remember one of the many cult moments Richard Benson has given us, namely when he rails against those neo-prog bands, wondering how anyone could call “progressive” something that Genesis and Van Der Graaf Generator were already doing decades ago. And this is essentially one of the great contradictions underlying the misunderstandings about the contemporary prog scene: treating the traits of British symphonic prog as essential to defining the genre works well for understanding the genre's evolution towards neo-prog, but works much less well for answering the question: “So what do Porcupine Tree have to do with prog, then?”. To try to answer this question (and others like it) we need to look elsewhere and conceive of prog in a much more flexible and inclusive way, one capable of explaining what holds the community's discourse together when Genesis, Marillion and Porcupine Tree are mentioned in the same sentence. In this sense, symphonic sounds and highbrow quotations are just one of the ways (albeit among the most celebrated, it can't be denied) in which one can make prog.

Some of the names you mention I grouped together by consulting the same sources I mentioned earlier, when talking about the search for values observed within the prog community. I compared the names appearing in festival line-ups dedicated to the genre with critics' and readers' awards, the charts on reference websites and forums, label rosters and so on. Then I directly surveyed the audience, with a single survey (which some readers may even have taken part in) dedicated both to researching the aforementioned values and to identifying names representative of the genre. I chose ten tracks by as many bands, as varied as possible among those that emerged with a certain frequency from these sources, in order to analyse them and see how many of the values I mentioned earlier they contained (spoiler: very few). Of course, a subjective criterion also comes into play in the selection: while trying to vary things as much as possible, I opted to choose tracks about which I myself felt I had something potentially interesting to say. Tracks that would lend themselves to fairly diverse analytical approaches and for which external material was hopefully also available (interviews, videos, various stories) that could enrich the discussion. But while bands like Anathema or King Crimson appear quite clearly canonised (thus earning their own dedicated pages of musical analysis), the same can't be said of Agalloch or Igorrr. Artists like them are in fact only briefly addressed in a later section of the book, where I discuss those “limbo phenomena” that, while not canonised for one reason or another, seem to produce music containing no fewer typically authenticating characteristics of prog than canonised bands include (indeed, often even more!).

It depends on the lens used to understand the concept of “prog” – which is perhaps the crucial point of the book. If we use the more inclusive and elastic ones I propose, then certainly post-prog bands are no less progressive than their hippie (or pseudo-such) forerunners. If anything, it's precisely the bands belonging to the neo-prog strand that lose a few points, because they base their music largely on the mortal remains of a single incarnation of what prog can aspire to be (again, the Anglo-symphonic one), thereby betraying the deepest meaning of the term “progressive”. That's why in the last part of the book I propose splitting the two currents based on two completely opposing interpretative models, based on very different mechanisms and interests, where neo-prog turns out to be the more conservative (or at least nostalgic) fringe of the two ashes in question. If instead we wanted to use the “narrow” definition derived from all the historiographical stereotypes I mentioned at the start, well, then the contemporary progressive scene would probably indeed be rather bleak – although even just the vitality of its community seems to me to suggest that this isn't the path to follow.

Some of the post-progressive artists you've analysed are associated with the “progressive” label by most fans of the genre. For others this isn't the case: some include them under the term, some don't. You call them artists of the “limbo” between prog and non-prog. Is there some specific musical characteristic they lack in order to be more widely recognised, or does the acceptance of this “borderline” music depend mainly on social dynamics?

I imagine many will already guess my answer at this point: the second one! The presence of that “progressiveness” which can act as a common thread holding musical phenomena together is indeed important, as I said earlier, but on its own it isn't enough to place an artist within the genre. It's perhaps a necessary characteristic, but certainly not a sufficient one to achieve that. This then raises the question of what makes such “authentication” more or less likely to happen, and that's a question very difficult to answer. My hypothesis is that the more characteristics valued by the prog community are evident in the limbo music in question, the more likely it is that, sooner or later, a process of at least partial canonisation will take place.

Your text doesn't position itself from the perspective typical of music criticism, but instead adopts a musicological approach. What is, at its root, the difference between these two approaches, and in which aspects does it emerge most clearly in your way of proceeding?

Music criticism normally aims to "evaluate" music, to express a value judgement (hopefully as reasoned and well-substantiated as possible) on a musical work. To do this, it can often draw on tools also used by musicology (so much so that, especially in the field of classical music, musicologists are often critics too), which however pursues very different goals. My book, for instance, has no intention of suggesting to the reader which records to listen to and which not, and at most sometimes offers overviews that I hope might pique the reader's curiosity and encourage them to dig deeper into certain areas. Instead, it aims to tackle a complex problem using the rules of scientific research – while frequently trying to soften its tone by challenging some of the more tiresome orthodoxies of academic style, without undermining its rigour in doing so. It's important to specify that musicology, contrary to what many might believe, is only partly musical analysis, as my book also demonstrates: out of more than 250 pages, only about twenty go into the specifics of individual tracks. It is, through and through, a humanities discipline that tries to relate scientifically to its object of study: to say something reasoned and well-argued about music, engaging in dialogue with other fields that are often very different from one another, ranging from sociology to philosophy, by way of history, film studies, literary theory, psychology and so on – often borrowing many of its tools from these disciplines too. This is why I believe it's far more important than one might think for a musicologist to have an all-round humanities education (as far as possible). A musicologist who can't play any instrument may have certain limitations but can still be an excellent musicologist; a musicologist who is a skilled musician but unable to engage with other fields of knowledge has, in my view, far more serious limitations. I myself began my university studies in philosophy and currently teach philosophy and human sciences in secondary school, and I can say that without that kind of background, "Le the ashes of prog" would probably have remained a ghost book.

Within the musicology of popular music, the method you've adopted doesn't seem fully aligned with certain contemporary trends, which strongly relativize the role of musical analysis in favour of the study of social processes. How did you go about building your "hybrid" path, and what advantages do you think it can offer?

As I was telling you at the start, my position on how we relate to music, and in particular on how musical genres are formed, doesn't align with the "essentialist" perspectives that hold – drawing on a multifaceted tradition dating all the way back to Aristotle – that genres exist as such, that they are in some sense "already given". I tend to find it more plausible that they are social constructs, as argued for instance by Franco Fabbri in the field of musical genres or by Rick Altman in the case of film genres. However, as you said in your question, I'm not radical in this conviction, to the point that some might say I tend to insert into my reasoning certain caveats that make my approach "neo-ontological", letting some element of essentialism back in through the window and somewhat tempering the arbitrariness of the discourses that define musical matters.

So genres are indeed born and nurtured within a discursive dimension, but a confrontation with musical material cannot be entirely absent. To give an example I think is fairly clear, for all its absurdity: it would be hard to pass off Vasco Rossi as prog, whereas it's already more credible that this could happen with Caparezza, to name someone equally far from the canon. This is because the discourses of a community are still grounded in the shared raison d'être that is listening to music, and I don't think it's plausible that they are therefore entirely arbitrary (that said, this isn't necessarily the position of scholars more radical than me). What remains to be asked is why one hypothesis seems more acceptable to us than another, and a confrontation with the musical material seems to me essential in this regard.

I believe the main advantage is, quite simply, not losing sight of the real reason why all of us – as listeners and scholars – are here in the first place: the music. There is a two-way, reciprocal relationship between the two poles – music and society: the latter, by influencing how we think, organizes and shapes how we understand music, which in turn informs and steers that same sociocultural factor. I don't mean to say that genre therefore "resides in the music", but that there are "reasons within the music" for which certain discourses (including those that form genres) get legitimized and others don't.

A key point in your closing discussion is a parallel between the progressive approach and certain elements of artistic postmodernism. Can you summarize it for us, and show how, in your view, this interpretive key helps both to clarify the specificities of neoprogressive within post-progressive, and to draw a surprising "bridge" between neoprog and a genre that seems worlds apart, such as synthwave?

As my students well know – some of whom occasionally decide to be examined on postmodernism rather than Sartre because it seems considerably simpler and more appealing, only to often bitterly regret it afterwards – postmodernism is actually full of internal dialectics and contradictions, to the point of often coexisting even with its own opposite: the modern. So I can't even hope to give readers an overview of the phenomenon that claims to be clear, concise and coherent; I'll limit myself to mentioning one aspect that's particularly relevant to the discussion on prog, and I'll do so through a film example. Are you familiar with the classic films of Quentin Tarantino? Well, that's a typical example of postmodern cinema, which retrieves elements from the cinema of the past (which the director loves so much) and skilfully remixes them, sometimes wanting to pay homage to its sources, in other cases with a more ironic attitude. One of the fundamental aspects of postmodernism (in music too) is precisely this recycling of elements from the past: since history has ended, all we can do is keep playing with the remains of its mortal spoils. The artist, as Fredric Jameson put it, moves from being an author to being a librarian. I believe both strands of post-progressive (neoprogressive and the catch-all category into which all other kinds of post-prog can be lumped) are based on this postmodern mechanism of simulation, of recycling precisely, but they use it in very different ways. Neoprog, in fact, "simulates" a specific music of the past (British symphonic prog) with nostalgic intent (and in this it's largely similar to synthwave, which does the same with certain electronic music of the Eighties), whereas post-prog "simulates" a myriad of different kinds of music, with the aim of dismantling rock clichés from within by grafting foreign elements onto them – similarly to how, originally, classic prog used to do with classical music. But this is only the tip of the iceberg because, as if the internal contradictions of postmodernism itself weren't enough, prog took its first steps precisely in the transitional era between modern and postmodern, and for this reason it embodies values that can be ascribed to both currents of thought… and here I'll stop, for the readers' sake.

What are the future directions for your research on popular music in general and progressive in particular?

For better or worse, I remain an essentially curious and voracious person, both as a listener and as a scholar. So it's genuinely difficult for me to significantly narrow down my field of interest. One thing that comes to mind immediately is that right now I think Italy in particular needs to wake up when it comes to ludomusicology, that is, the branch of musicology concerned with the study of video game music. Last spring I gave a talk at the plenary session of the European ludomusicology society, and it was the most attended conference I've ever taken part in. Yet, out of the well over a hundred participants from all over the world, I was the only Italian scholar I saw on the list. It's a shame, especially for a country that has had, and still has, so much to say in the neighbouring field of film music, not to be equally open to similar perspectives. That's why I'd like to try to stir things up a bit! As for prog, on the other hand, I'm mainly interested in exploring further its ties to new modes of music consumption, which seem to be in stark contrast with some of the values I mentioned earlier. An example? The concept album: what value does it take on in the age of playlists and music-zapping on streaming services? But even without straying too far from the themes covered in my book: what new forms of definition, renegotiation and canonization are being put into play by the social actors immersed in this new digital reality? These are aspects I'd like to explore further – and am partly already exploring – in a more general sense, but prog can certainly represent an interesting case study.

Popular music studies are a relatively young field and their scope of inquiry is constantly and rapidly evolving, so there's a constant need to cast an attentive eye over these phenomena, which otherwise risk going unnoticed – and another example that comes to mind in this respect is precisely synthwave, which you mentioned earlier: all going well, a paper of mine on the subject will be coming out shortly, and I believe it's one of the very first scholarly contributions on the topic, just to give you an idea of how urgent it is to explore the countless nooks and crannies of this discipline, and at the same time how exciting it is for those interested in doing so. Leaving the analysis of our present to future generations is certainly a viable path, and in some respects an advantageous one; being able to tackle it ourselves, from the inside, right now, offers perhaps more partial perspectives, but ones that would otherwise be destined to disappear: it's an opportunity we can't afford to miss!

Ride the wave of great music

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Marco Sgrignoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition