Composition And Experimentation In British Rock 1967-1976
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MARK
SPICER
Genesis's Foxtrot (*)
One of the most ironic developments in Billboard
chart history occurred in July 1986, when Genesis, basking in the success of having
finally scored their first (and only) U.S. #1 hit with Invisible
Touch were knocked out of the top spot just one week later by their
former frontman Peter Gabriel, who, in turn, scored his first (and only) U.S.
#1 with Sledgehammer. While I must
admit to having a personal affection for their later records, I think it is safe
to say that most fans would prefer to forget the slick, synthesizer-driven pop
that characterized much of Genesis’s output in the 1980s and 1990s, and instead
look back fondly to the first half of the 1970s — the golden age of British progressive
rock — when the group was famous for crafting epic rock pieces in which the multiple
shifts of texture, affect, tonality and groove echo those typically found, say,
in a large-scale symphonic work by Liszt or Holst. Like Yes, Emerson, Lake &
Palmer (ELP), Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Soft Machine, Henry Cow,
and their other compatriots in British progressive rock during this remarkable
period, Genesis did not set out to create music that was immediately catchy or
danceable (although one can certainly imagine dancing, however awkwardly, to many
of their odd-metered grooves). Theirs was serious music intended for serious listeners.
Indeed, as John Covach has put it, “there was the perception [among fans] that
these musicians were attempting to shape a new kind of classical music — a body
of music that would not disappear after a few weeks or months on the pop charts,
but would instead be listened to (and perhaps even studied), like the music of
Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, for years to come.” (Covach, 1997: 4)
Figure
1 shows a chronology of Genesis albums released through October 1977, when guitarist
Steve Hackett left the group and the three remaining members decided to continue
as a trio. In this article, I will focus on their 1972 album Foxtrot,
the second release from the “classic” Genesis lineup of Tony Banks on keyboards,
Phil Collins on drums, Peter Gabriel on lead vocals, Steve Hackett on guitar,
and Mike Rutherford on bass. The Foxtrot album, and the European tour supporting
it, represented a key phase in the group’s development, as Gabriel’s penchant
for mime and onstage theatrics — complete with elaborate changes of costume to
portray some of the various characters as they appeared in the songs — began to
give their concerts a distinctive style that set them apart from the other British
progressive rock groups. (1)
Genesis had already attracted
quite a cult following in the U.K., but in 1972 they quickly found themselves
major stars on the continent, especially in Italy. (2)
Genesis biographer Armando
Gallo has aptly diagnosed this phenomenon, noting that “[t]he Italians had never
really identified with the twelve-bar syndrome of rock ’n’ roll, and young fans
and musicians who had grown up within Italy’s strong classical and operatic traditions
suddenly responded en masse to the English progressive scene.”
(Gallo, 1980: 40)
Figure 1: Chronology of Genesis albums through 1977 (U.K. releases)
Although their frontman’s new-found flamboyance was undoubtedly a key factor
in Genesis’s sudden rise to stardom, Peter Gabriel — looking back on this period
— has insisted that “whatever else was going on in the visual department, our
central interest was always … the writing, the composition of the music.”
(3)
Figure 2 shows the track
listing for Foxtrot, along with the CD timings for each track. The lengths
of the tracks are telling: with the exception of the brief acoustic guitar prelude
Horizons, which opens Side 2, only the second track on Side
1, Time Table, even comes close
to the four-minute mark. All of the tracks, moreover, are identified as having
been composed jointly by the five band members, a practice that would continue
through The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,
Gabriel’s last recording with the group. From a compositional standpoint, Genesis’s
working method was not unlike that of many other rock groups then and now: while
the initial musical ideas for sections of tracks might well have originated with
an individual band member, the working out of these ideas into a finished piece
was largely a result of group improvisation. (4)
I will offer a detailed analysis
of the first and last tracks on Foxtrot, although,
in the interest of teasing out those style features that are most important in
defining Genesis’s idiolect, I will also relate these tracks along the way to
some other key pieces from the group’s early period.
Figure
2: Track listing for Foxtrot
Let us focus now on the harmonic design of this Mellotron introduction. I will be dwelling on aspects of harmony in Genesis’s music for a large portion of this article, since, perhaps more than any other single musical feature, I would argue that it is Tony Banks’s eclectic harmonic palette, with its frequent chromatic twists and turns, that contributes most markedly to the distinctive "Genesis sound." Over a held pedal tone F-sharp in the left hand, the opening right-hand progression oscillates three times between B major-seventh and C-sharp chords. This suggests an alternating IV7–V progression over a tonic pedal, and yet we are made to wait over two minutes, until the onset of the song’s main groove, for the opening progression to resolve finally to its tonic; instead, the initial swerve away from this opening vamp is to a harmony that is completely unexpected — a B-flat major chord in second inversion (for ease of reading, I have chosen to spell the chord as B-flat major rather than its enharmonic equivalent, A-sharp major [III#], so as to avoid a complicated tangle of double sharps in the spellings of the subsequent chords). Though the effect of this harmonic move is quite abrupt and surprising, its voice leading is actually remarkably smooth: the bass slips down by semitone from F-sharp to F-natural, while, in the upper three parts, the middle voice is held as a common tone (E-sharp, enharmonically respelled as F-natural) as the remaining two voices ascend by step.
Two chords later, a doubly-chromatic mediant progression connects a B-flat minor to a G major triad, which initiates a brief chromaticized descending-fifths sequence leading via C major to an F-sharp major triad. By this point, of course, the introduction has drifted far from the tonic key of F-sharp major suggested by the opening vamp; accordingly, this F-sharp chord in context does not sound like a tonic arrival, but functions instead — however fleetingly — as the dominant chord of B minor. The subsequent progression moves through yet another series of chromatic chords, this time with the uppermost voice held on G-sharp as the lower voices snake up and down by step. I have labeled these chords above the staff according to their roots and quality, but since this progression again seems consciously to defy classical tonal syntax I have not attempted to make a functional harmonic analysis. As Kevin Holm-Hudson explains in a forthcoming article devoted to the subject, such “maximally-smooth” chromatic progressions were an integral feature of Banks’s harmonic language, similar to that of many late-nineteenth century composers, and therefore made “Genesis’s music notably more Romantic — in an authentic sense — than such contemporaries as Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer.” (7) I will have more to say about Banks’s neo-Romantic harmonic language a little later, but, for now, let us move on to consider some other musical aspects of Watcher of the Skies.
