[Glice]

Originally Posted by atsonicpark

I'm willing to say that he invented what we call "math rock", what we called "no wave"; hell, pretty much any avant-garde, or overly technical music within a rock context. Don't get me wrong, there were some prog bands that existed around the same time, but no one was doing what Beefheart was doing. I'd say just about every band on Skin Graft owes a debt to Beefheart.

I think part of the problem with this subject for me is that when people say 'music' I think of it in quite a (classical-centric), broad sense. Beefheart definitely transposed some ideas from outside of rock music onto instruments which don't generally do 'that sort of thing'. The difference between pushing music forward and pushing rock music forward is a semantic one, but important. Beefheart didn't do much in terms of harmonic, rhythmic or melodic development of music in general; similarly, someone like Steve Reich transposing ideas from African rhythmic music isn't pushing music forward so much as it is innovative.

Another pair to mention are Branca and Chatham - in as far as they applied existing techniques to instruments which hadn't really been used for that purpose. Which, from a formal point of view makes them timbrally innovative but not musically innovative.

Just to clarify that a bit - if you're playing Mozart-esque stuff on an alien instrument - electronic synthesiser, sousaphone or whatever - then the music itself remains the same, but the sonority is 'innovative' (or just 'different'). I often think that Beefheart's great innovation is using rhythmic ideas from contemporary classical, free jazz and applying them to melodic ideas from blues. The criminal thing with Beefheart isn't so much his creative impulse as it is the lack of anyone who approaches rock music with a comparable mindset. This doesn't really make him important, in my view, for music in general but he's certainly irreplaceable for popular rock music.

Partch is a difficult one for me - there are plenty of people who pushed different tonalities, and many of those people pre-date Partch. The problem for me is that Partch uses fairly standard musical structures on top of some fairly 'radical' tonal innovation. Partch is probably not very well thought of in formal musical terms for this reason, whereas the spectralists or the Xenakis fall-out tend to construct the form of the music differently based around innovative tonalities. The interesting thing about the rock mindset towards music (as I understand it) is that it's more than happy to allow dogmatic form to dominate. Interestingly, I find that this wasn't the case with jazz but, since about 1980 or so, and with very few exceptions, it is now.

To explain that idea of form - MBV's Loveless is considered a groundbreaking album. And within the rock context, it definitely is; from a timbral point of view, it is. In terms of production, it is. But on a formal level, the songs are structurally identical to the more prosaic Ecstasy and Wine or any other bog-standard late-80s schmindie. Of course, if the songs weren't bog-standard, there's no way the record would be popular within the rock context, because (repeating myself) the rock audience is inextricably tied to a form that is inherently not that interesting.

So I suppose my cards-on-the-table moment - my music theory is by no means great (you'd have to turn to fugazifan or the greatly missed noumenal for that) but I can't quite get away from the idea that rock music's hermetic notions of 'genius', 'avant-garde', 'innovation', 'trail-blazing' [etc] simply don't hold up in a broader context. But there are adjacent musics which do do something more interesting in a musical context. AMM are the first thing that come to mind, or Bailey's free-improv, but you could name any number of things where the pre-existing notions of form, structure, tonality, timbre, rhythm, melody, harmony [etc] are re-invented. That's not to say that a great deal of free-improv isn't a dead-end today, but for a while in the 60s it seems very forward thinking and impressive.