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Composition And Experimentation In British Rock 1967-1976

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LAURA LEANTE


Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box (1)


Introduction

In this paper I will consider how live performance contributes to the creation of meaning in progressive rock. I will start from the general assumption that music experience is not exclusively auditory, but takes place at several sensory levels. This is particularly evident in progressive rock, where - since the early light shows of Pink Floyd - the reception of music involves different media. The visual elements in album art covers and concerts are indissolubly linked to sound: together, they contribute to a single process of signification. The semantic use of colours and shapes accompanies the employment of lights, special effects, masks, and graphic representations of surreal, fabulous, or disturbing atmospheres.
Although progressive rock bands are all influenced by a shared psychedelic experience, they take different directions, often reaching opposite results. Suffice it to mention, for instance, the concerts by Pink Floyd, in which the attention of the audience is attracted by the entirety of the stage, and sometimes - when flying objects are employed - goes even further, in a game of depth and perspective not unrelated to that depicted on the Ummagumma album cover. The show therefore affords the possibility of listening to the music and, at the same time, of watching what happens around the musicians and what is projected at their back; it is not a coincidence that Pink Floyd's name is often associated to the geometries present in the art covers of their records (the clearest example being the triangle of the prism and of the pyramids in The Dark Side of the Moon) and in the staging of their shows (especially the circle of lights around the screen they had on stage since the early 1970s). (2)
An example diverging from Pink Floyd's concerts is represented by the early shows of Genesis, where the attention of the public focuses on a single individual. It is in fact Peter Gabriel who animates the songs of the band and is responsible for most of the mise-en-scène with his masks and costumes.
Although the importance of live events and of multimediality in rock has been highlighted by several scholars (3), an in depth analysis has not been carried out in popular music studies yet. Such a situation mirrors a general tendency within musicology. Even one of the very few exceptions - Nicholas Cook's Analysing Musical Multimedia (1997) - does not investigate live performance. However, the interest of scholars in this issue has been growing in the last few years: a special mention should be made of Jane Davidson's article on Annie Lennox, one of few analyses of gesture and movement in pop music published to date (Davidson, 2001). In contrast, reviews and interviews published in newspapers and magazines in the 1970s are rich with descriptions of the visual elements in progressive rock concerts: all the more reason for pursuing a thorough study of multimedia in rock.
This paper stems directly from my current research on the processes of meaning construction in the performance and reception of music, as part of the larger project "Experience and meaning in music performance", based at the Open University. Here I will consider a specific case study within British progressive rock: the early Genesis (1972 - 1975), and in particular Peter Gabriel, his gesturality, and his use of masks in the live performance of The Musical Box. I will focus on the changes that took place in the performance of this song over the period of about three years and I will highlight how new meanings accompany the reception of these changes. With this paper I intend to propose a methodology of analysis that I believe unveils stimulating perspectives and could be applied to other progressive rock repertories and to popular music in general.

Methodology

In his study of gesturality oral narratives, David McNeill explains how:

"Gesture and speech arise from a single process of utterance formation. The utterance has both an imagistic side and a linguistic side. The image rises first and is transformed into a complex structure in which both the gesture and the linguistic structure are integral parts". (McNeill, 1992: 29-30) (4)

McNeill also suggests that gesture adds information which is conveyed through sight and which would otherwise often be inaccessible in verbal communication. Similarly, I intend to demonstrate that watching a concert can enrich music with new meanings. In other words, meaning in music is constructed - or modified - also through the visual channel. I do not mean to suggest that live experience reveals "the" meaning of a piece of music or a song; nevertheless, it offers "a" meaning which can be very different from that attributed to the same music when just listening to an audio recording. My analysis will therefore show how the study of live performance of The Musical Box unveils the possibility of understanding this song in new ways.
The categories of gesture identified by McNeill to which I will freely refer in this paper are four. The first one is that of iconic gestures, i.e. those gestures which are in close formal relationship with the semantic content of speech and describe an object or an action. The second group consists of metaphoric gestures, which represent an abstract idea and offer a concrete metaphor for a concept. The other two categories proposed by McNeill are beats, which - in the case of music - can mark the rhythmic structure of a piece (for instance hand claps), and deictic gestures, which involve the physical act of pointing in space, be it to indicate a place, a person, or an object.
Within the iconic gestures I would like to highlight the subcategory of pantomimic gestures, as discussed by Rimé and Schiaratura: these are "mimetic acts", in which the hands represent themselves in the description and reproduction of an action they performed (Rimé-Schiaratura, 2000: 246).
The categories listed so far refer to studies of gesturality in verbal communication. The context of a music performance is clearly different. In a recent article, Martin Clayton (2005: 374-378) has stressed the need to consider other types of body movement linked to music, which I also adopt in this analysis. The two groups of gestures identified by Clayton are movements employed in music and vocal production, which I will consider as underpinning this study, and body and instrument manipulators.
The various types of movement and gesture (summarised in table 2) are not always neatly distinct, and often overlap: for instance we will see how, in the performance of The Musical Box, Gabriel "manipulates" the microphone, at times obtaining an iconic effect, and other times marking the beat and stressing the rhythmical structure of the song.
A difference between the approach I adopt in this study and McNeill's perspective lies in the meaning attributed to the word "gesture". While McNeill uses it referring to the "movements of the hands and arms" (5), I will use it in a wider sense, closer to that suggested by Adam Kendon (6) and to the etymology of the term, from Latin gerere ("to carry"), and analogous to the meaning of "comportment".

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