Reconsidering the ‘symphonic orthodoxy’: progressive rock’s formative years in Europe.

There has been a marked resurgence of academic, media and commercial interest in progressive rock music over the last fifteen years, with a number of articles and books now reassessing its styles, meanings, politics and appeal. However, much of this work has discussed progressive rock through a ‘symphonic orthodoxy’ which preferences a limited, though commercially successful, range of British groups which operated in a relatively narrow sonic landscape during the early to mid-1970s. This presentation questions that orthodoxy by drawing on the lay definitions and understandings of fans to extend the scope of progressive rock both musically and geographically. It focuses on the formative years of progressive rock at the beginning of the 1970s, and argues that progressive rock was inspired by the explorations of a European youth counterculture whose music was influenced by local socio-political and economic contexts, as well as by the music and attitudes of the American counterculture and of European Romanticism