Rock Goes to College

One of the fastest-selling rock albums in the U.S. nowadays is a three-LP set by a British group, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It includes mod versions of Aaron Copland's Hoedown, a movement from Alberto Ginastera's First Piano Concerto and even Sir Charles Parry's great old Anglican choral song Jerusalem. Also rising on the charts is an LP by a Dutch group called Focus that sounds at times like a combo of English madrigalists. In Detroit this week, English Rock Star Rick Wakeman begins a month-long U.S. tour featuring some unusual sidemen: Classical Conductor David Measham and a 60-member orchestra and choir.

Can all this really be rock, the average Rolling Stones freak may well ask? What it is has already been called a lot of things--classical rock, smart rock, rockaphonic, even garbage rock--but one thing is certain: the complex, educated sounds emanating from ELP, Focus, Wakeman and their like constitute a daring, exciting and hugely successful new kind of rock.

Big Beat. Many of its exponents have been students at English music and art schools and have grown up with equal respect for the classics and rock. Sales figures do not define the genre, of course, but they do measure its success: England's The Moody Blues, pioneers in the field, have sold more than 10 million records over the past six years; ELP and Yes, the most progressive of all such groups, each has between 8 and 10 million sales to its credit; the album of Wakeman's dramatic cantata Journey to the Centre of the Earth became a million-dollar seller in only six weeks.

Classical rock is something well above and beyond the familiar, and often appalling, stylistic melange known as jazzing the classics. It draws on classical style and technique in much the same way the Stones draw on blues, The Band on country, or John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra on jazz. Its sound has a white, diatonic, often ethereal quality that could never be confused with anything rooted in the Mississippi Delta or North Carolina backwoods. What certifies it as rock is its tight hold on the big beat. "We could jam with the Grateful Dead," says Guitarist Greg Lake of ELP, "but it would be impossible for them to jam with us."

Although it can hardly be said to have pushed blues rock, country rock or good old rhythm and blues into the background, classical rock's success has been an immense surprise to the U.S. record industry, which has yet to produce an American model. In retrospect, the movement could have been seen coming years ago: from the Beatles' use of a string quartet in Yesterday (1965) to The Who's so-called rock opera Tommy (1969).

Today the classical-rock groups are as diverse, bright and scholarly sounding as their names--Renaissance, Genesis, Electric Light Orchestra. By far the most provocative album of the past year is Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans (Atlantic; $11.98). A double-LP affair of almost Mahlerian proportions, Tales has four movements, each about 20 minutes long, that attempt to invoke the spirit and meaning of the shastras--"The Revealing Science of God," "The Remembering," "The Ancient" and "Ritual."

The words of Tales are impossibly elliptical, but no matter. "We write solid music," says Yes' Lead Guitarist Steve Howe with justifiable pride. Yes builds textures like an incoming tide inexorably playing over an oyster bed. Rather than hit the listener with a toe-tapping melody and then repeat it until it is ingrained, Yes builds from the smallest motifs, altering and mutating them into bright aural mosaics. "The Ancient" movement of Tales even finds Yes playing two different pieces of music--different tempos, key signatures and meters--simultaneously in a way that vividly echoes the polytonalities and polyrhythms of Charles Ives.

Recalling the hours of studio work (half improvisation, half rehearsal, with nothing written down but the words) that went into Tales, Singer-Composer Jon Anderson says, "When we would switch keys and someone would say, 'It's wrong,' my reply was that 'it doesn't hurt my ears, so let's try it.' " Thus do barriers fall, and such often enclosed worlds as rock music get a little sunshine in.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.