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Why Prog is the Music of my Life [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-27  

This was inspired by KLWhite's recent diary "Please Write Your Diaries". I had started this a few weeks ago and gave up, so here goes again.

In "music appreciation" class we learn about how this or that trend in art followed another, and who used that 'style' and who 'influenced' who, but we do not hear much about the personal relationships that took place.

For example, although when he was a teenager Beethoven did meet Mozart once, he never studied under him because Mozart died before they could arrange it. Travel between cities in those days took many weeks. Still, musicians in those days did exchange ideas as composer Alma Deutscher demonstrates here.

Recently I realized that I had been watching a thread of civilization like this happening over my own lifetime and I wanted to share what I saw. It is different from reading about it in history books. You will see several names highlighted throughout to emphasize the chain of personal relationships, and there are links to performances.

The Early Years

In the Twentieth Century we had the phonograph and radio, and it was possible to at least hear people, or performances of their works, without traveling to see them in person like the young Beethoven had to do. My parents had 78 RPM record albums, the kind that weighed 8 pounds, and I remember playing the ones by Glenn Miller. For some reason they also had an album of sea shanties. They had LP's too, including several by The Dave Brubeck Quartet and I near wore out our copy of Take Five. They seemed to really like Broadway musicals too.

We had a baby grand piano in the living room though thinking back I never saw either of my parents touch it. Nonetheless, I took piano lessons when I was 11 and 12, bicycling over to the house of this old lady who gave lessons. Her house smelled like cat pee.

Composer Aaron Copland

In junior and senior high school I played the Saxophone. We did a mixture of classics like Beethoven, but also modern pieces including several by Aaron Copland (born 1900). Many people have heard his Appalachian Spring and his score for the ballet Rodeo, but he also wrote some more esoteric stuff full of dissonance like A Lincoln Portrait and Emblems. Those are the ones we played, along with some very modern pieces by other composers where the time signature would change every couple measures. (This makes it devilish hard counting rests.) Once we got beyond the “complete train wreck” stage of rehearsing these pieces they turned out to be quite beautiful — to me anyway. And nothing like Beethoven.

The Record Store

In college I no longer had time for formal musical activities but I still listened to it a lot. Across High Street from the university campus was a record store and when I had enough time between classes I would often walk over there.

Frank Zappa

In 1968 Frank Zappa (born 1940) and his band The Mothers of Invention released their album “We’re Only In it for the Money” as an obvious response to the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. The album covers were quite similar which is what caught my eye in the record store. The musical arrangements were imaginative, the lyrics outrageous, all executed with an impressive level of virtuosity. My mother hated it; I loved it. I had never heard anything like this. It was not like the older types of “rock” that I had never cared for.

What is “Prog”?

Prog, or Progressive Rock, has been described as “classical” music played with rock instruments which is as good an approximation as any. Uncommon and shifting time and key signatures are used regularly and it is not unusual for some pieces to be 10 or 20 minutes in duration. If there are lyrics they tend to be more philosophical in nature. You can't dance to it and radio DJ's did not want to play pieces that long so it mostly lived on through album sales and live performance. This is similar to the situation Jazz was in since WW2. You have to sit down and listen.

Although Prog reached its peak popularity in the 1970s there are still fans and performers of it today and there is an annual music festival in New Jersey called "ProgStock". Some of the performers are getting a bit long in the tooth.

It turned out that this was the music that would stick with me. My exposure to non-mainstream “serious” music in high school band had accustomed my ear to understanding the forms and sounds but I also credit my parents’ Dave Brubeck albums.

Ginastera

The Ginastera album cover

One day I walked into the record store and over the music system they were playing a very aggressive piano piece unfamiliar to me, vaguely Russian. I asked the salesman (who looked somewhat like Frank Zappa) what it was and he congratulated me on my perspicacity before directing me to the album cover. It was Alberto Ginastera’s (Argentinian composer born 1916) piano concerto. I took it home and wore that out too.

Emerson Lake and Palmer

In 1971 British rock legend and composer Keith Emerson (born 1944) wrote Pictures at an Exhibition, a rock styling of the piano suite written by Modest Moussorgksky in 1874 and later arranged for orchestra by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Although I was familiar with Moussorgsky's piece from high school music appreciation class I had never heard anything like the way Emerson, Lake, and Palmer did it. It was exciting. It turns out that among Emerson’s acknowledged influences was the music of Aaron Copland and Alberto Ginastera. Emerson named his son, born that same year in 1971, Aaron Emerson.

Pictures at an Exhibition by ELP

Keith Emerson started writing his own versions of pieces inspired by these composers and in 1972 he did a rock version of Copland’s piece Hoe-Down from the ballet Rodeo, though Emerson played it faster, being unencumbered by human dancers trying to keep up with it. Very fast and complex keyboard work was one of Emerson’s trademarks. It appears on the ELP album “Trilogy”.

Then in 1977 he did a rock interpretation of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. As Copland was still alive, permission was needed. Copland’s publisher said “forget it” but when Copland himself heard the piece he said “This is brilliant. This is fantastic.” and he granted permission and the song appears on the “Brain Salad Surgery” album. According to the booklet that accompanies the Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Welcome Back My Friends, 40th Anniversary Reunion Concert DVD:

The instrumental reworking of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man became the third bestselling instrumental track ever and still holds that honor.

Of course I bought all these albums and still have the recordings, now as mp3s.

By the way, also on the Brain Salad Surgery album is a piece titled Toccata that is a reworking of that Ginastera piano concerto. Permission was needed for this as well and Ginastera’s response was “Diabolic!” Ginastera’s wife assured Emerson that this meant he liked it.

A New Generation

On Decemeber 8, 1993, Frank Zappa died. Two weeks later, on the same day that Zappa had been born in 1940, a little girl named Rachel Flowers was born, 15 weeks premature, weighing less than 1.5 pounds. The hospital allowed her father to come in and play his guitar for her. The odds were against her, but she made it.

Rachel became totally blind at about 2 months of age due to retinopathy of prematurity. When Rachel was two years old she showed an interest in the sounds that the family piano made when she banged on it and so her mother Jeanie taught her to play Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Her parents (both musicians) soon discovered that young Rachel had an uncanny ability to play a melody on the piano after hearing it only once or twice, including pieces by J. S. Bach. She had perfect pitch. Rachel began formal training in classical music at age 4.

In 2002 at age 9, Rachel Flowers first heard the music of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and she fell in love with this style of music, along with Jazz, as additions to her previous exposure to classical music. When she was 10, Rachel met Ray Charles. Here you can watch her multi-tracking Take Five while he operates the recording equipment.

She will eventually go on to play all sorts of keyboards as well as Keith Emerson ever did, including multi-manual pipe organs, guitars (copying Frank Zappa's style perfectly), jazz flute, ukelele, and sing (with a vocal range of 3.5 octaves). She can even play the flute and piano simultaneously which is amazing to watch. Although she can read Braille Music Notation, Rachel finds it is easier to learn by ear because Braille ties up one hand. She would go on to become one of today's best performers of Keith Emerson's keyboard music in exactly his style, perhaps because she learns it by ear.

The Internet and YouTube

Now in the Twenty First Century we do not even need to go to the record store (do they still exist?) to get Jazz and Prog music and people can directly interact with each other without leaving home, almost anywhere in the world.

While still in High School, Rachel Flowers began making YouTube videos of herself playing Keith Emerson’s compositions and he became aware of this. Many pianists find Emerson’s compositions very challenging but Rachel plays them easily. Here she is at age 19 playing Hoe-down at full speed.

Rachel Flowers and Keith Emerson

They met for the first time in 2014 when Emerson was scheduled to perform at a restaurant near where Flowers lives in California. He knew who she was from her videos. After the performance, he signed his conductor's baton and gave it to her. They met a few times at NAMM conventions as well. (National Association of Music Merchants)

In 2015 Rachel Flowers met Dweezil Zappa (Frank Zappa’s son, born 1969) at the NAMM convention and he invited her to play guitar with his band "Zappa plays Zappa" in Las Vegas.

In February of 2016, plagued by focal dystonia causing loss of control of his right hand, Keith Emerson killed himself in frustration. He was 71 years old. Tribute concerts were put on in both the US and England performing his music and Rachel Flowers was invited to participate. The concerts were titled Fanfare for the Uncommon Man. Emerson's son Aaron Emerson played keyboard on his father's version of Fanfare.

A very moving performance

Rachel played the piano on one of Emerson’s most famous orchestral pieces, The Endless Enigma. It is very obvious in the YouTube recordings of the event that Rachel is crying but she gets through it without missing a note.

In 2017 a documentary about Rachel Flowers was released, titled Hearing is Believing. If you do not have time to watch it, this article describes it well.

Rachel is a regular performer at ProgStock and has released three albums of her own compositions, with two more in the works. She performs in multiple styles. At NAMM conventions you can often find her at the Nord Keyboards booth.

I am 73 years old. I will probably not live to see the collapse of modern society but a lot of people reading this will. It makes me very sad to think that Rachel Flowers will experience the coming collapse - she is only 29 - but I hope that somehow our centuries of traditions in music can live on, maybe without all the electronics, in people like her. She plays astoundingly well even in complete darkness.

More Rachel

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