Dr. Prog and Mr. Post: Or, A (Draft) Theory of (Postmodern) Music Genres

In my attempt to define the meaning of prog music in contemporary times, I tried to figure out which features were perceived as important for the genre (and which artists were perceived as being part of a ‘canon’) by the listeners, posting a survey in strategic locations of the internet and doing some research in the results of awards, in the festivals’ line-ups, in the critic’s choices and so on. The results brought me to a ‘canon’ and a synoptic grid of features, which I confronted with the results of an analysis of ten songs taken from the canon itself and some thirty other songs from genres that have not very much to do with prog. I found out that many of those features were not to be found in the canonized music more often than they were in the other examples. So, could there be something those very different kinds of music had in common? In my paper I shall present a ‘draft theory’ that tries to answer to that question by borrowing elements from the theories of Franco Fabbri, Jennifer Lena and Angel Quintero Rivera about music genres, and by hybridizing them with concepts drawn from the postmodern debate, resulting in a model that I think could tell us something more not only about prog, but also concerning some other very ambiguous genres of contemporary music (that I will briefly mention in the form of a suggestion for further research on the topic) and their mutual hidden relationships.