Prog goes back at least to the sixteenth century. Here’s proof:
From “Can Synthesized Music Touch Eternity?“:
The scholastics, typically dated from St. Thomas Aquinas in the late Middle Ages, believed in the unity of all truth. Not that all truth was knowable, but it is potentially integratable. Whatever was true in one discipline had also to be true in every other discipline; one truth, stretching infinitely vertical but also horizontally to infinite applications. Similarly, whatever was true in the course of time in this world is a reflection of a truth that God ordained to be so outside of time.
The model went as follows. There is the forward march of time, which is the world you and I know, experience, report on, and it is defined by struggle, triumph over nature, and a sad ending that comes with mortality, dust to dust. On the other side of life, there is new life in a complete world that lives outside of time, birth, and death. It is the transcendent realm, a kind of place where we can live at one with God and in full knowledge of all that is true. This was Heaven.
This model implies a certain well-known geography, which is metaphorical but aids in understanding. Time is what you experience in life. Heaven is ascendant and transcendent. It is a realm somewhere up there that is out of time. And of course there is also Purgatory (which exists within time but is only known after death) as well as Hell, the eternal foil to paradise.
The highest goal of life on earth – and this goes for art, liturgy, learning, technology, science, commerce – was to reach outside of time and touch (or see or feel) that heavenly realm. Doing so, it was believed, would inspire us toward better lives because it would fire the imagination toward the goal of all our mental and spiritual actions, to love God and others ever more perfectly. Also, it’s psychologically and spiritually awesome to gain a glimpse of God or even to touch the Presence.
Eternity to Taste and Hear
This sensibility is embodied in Eucharistic theology, in which the faithful are granted the privilege of literally consuming the body of Christ. It is a way for time to touch eternity in the most tangible possible way, literally draw on the transcendent as a source of life and salvation. The art created in light of this sensibility was structured to achieve this very Eucharistic effect, to create visuals and sound that permit us some slight hint of access to the eternal.
What does eternity sound like? This was the task of the 16th-century masters to discover. And this task – which is not so much didactic as experiential – inspired vast creativity all over England and the Continent. There was Victoria in Spain, Tallis in England, Josquin in France, Palestrina in Italy, Di Lasso in the Netherlands, Isaac in Germany, and literally thousands of other musicians who contributed to the task. And their legacies are remarkable. Their music can still today transport your mind to another realm, exactly as the Scholastic model suggests.
I used to refer to what’s on the top shelf — my very favorite recordings — as “the music I would save if the house caught on fire.” Never mind that: 1) people matter more than stuff, and; 2) there’s no way that, if the house caught fire, I could actually pull it off.
Randy Newman makes diamonds. You can feel the pressure and time and heat that go into his songs, creating the effect of lush spaciousness in tunes typically clocking in under three minutes. His eagerness towards satire is a product of his style, immersive first-person character sketches delivering broad social commentary and comedy in lines simply phrased, acidic, and wrought with compassion. His skill at delivering his own songs is often eclipsed by his influence as a songwriter and his work as a hired gun — “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” from his 1968 self-titled debut has been covered something like 75 times, and his scores and songs for films are in themselves a major achievement — and yet his unmistakable voice, coupled with arrangements measured to plumb the intellectual and emotional depths, carry such weight that as a performer of his own music he’s peerless.
It’s been too long since I last posted something other than an obituary (although the music world did just lose another great in Glen Campbell). A concert, then, offered a welcome opportunity for change. Last night (August 8) I attended a collaboration of two rock icons at the Colosseum in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Although I must confess I did not stay the entire show (due in large part to a rather frenetic work week), what I did see impressed me, at least as a fair-weather fan of these two legends.
Frampton exited to much applause for a second time as Miller and his band prepared to return to their greatest hits, but it was at this point that I left (I never would have done this on a Friday or Saturday night, I promise). I did check out the setlist and confirmed my suspicions: Miller concluded the night with the hits “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Rock’n Me,” and “Jet Airliner,” among others. Despite my early exit, this proved to be a wonderful experience. Having known just a few of the songs of both performers going in, I did not exactly know what to expect – but I did not leave disappointed. From the humorous (Frampton accidentally burping on the talkbox while performing “Do You Feel the Way We Do”) to the touching (Miller dedicating “Living in the USA” to the members of the United States armed forces), this concert did not disappoint.
First, let’s give proper credit to James Parker, who is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and a white man who hates prog rock: he manages to avoid, in his review of David Weigel’s book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, the adjective “pretentious.” Kudos. Props. Cheers. Scattered applause.
Progarchy 
