Long Prog Rock Tracks

I wrote this a few days ago and have been wondering where to post it. It isn't directly appropriate to a spiritual journey, unless on the basis that God is interested in every aspect of life even prog rock. I considered setting up a second blog for non-spiritual musings, but didn't want the hassle, and didn't feel I should attempt to partition my life into God and not-God compartments. So I've settled for including in this blog an occasional entry with no obvious spiritual relevance.

My Favourite Long Tracks

What do I mean by a long track? Some songs are longer than others. American Pie, for example, weighs in at over eight minutes. Don McLean manages to sustain our interest over that length of time with some obscure lyrics and a couple of changes in tempo, but basically it is one song. ELP also manages to make a single tune last over eight minutes in Abaddon’s Bolero by turning it into a vast slow crescendo. But for truly long tracks, there needs to be a greater variety of melody or mood than either of these examples.

To use classical analogy, one way to do this is to combine a number of movements into a single piece. Karn Evil 9 appears as one track on my CD, but it is basically three movements. The music twice stops and starts again. Another classical analogy is the rhapsody, which my “Classical Music for Dummies” describes as “a freeform rush of different musical ideas, one after another”, as exemplified by Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (6 minutes) or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (17 minutes).

There are also what I might call ‘song suites’. A sequence of distinct songs which are joined together musically and thematically to create a longer track. One example is Turn of a Friendly Card by The Alan Parsons Project. This seems at first to be three or four songs simply run into each other, but the earlier melodies return towards the end so that the suite hangs together as a single coherent concept. Similarly ELP’s Tarkus could be described as four instrumental sections alternating with three songs.

I would be hard pressed to distinguish between ‘rhapsodies’, ‘song suites’ and ‘pieces consisting of several movements’, but all my favourite long tracks seem to fall somewhere on that spectrum. I don’t know of any really long track that is basically one single musical idea. (Perhaps someone else does?)

So here is a list of my favourite long tracks. Two further criteria are a) I have not included whole albums (such as Days of Future Passed; Thick as a Brick; Snow Goose; Journey to the Centre of the Earth), but only tracks or ‘suites’ within an album, and b) I have not included any track under 15 minutes.

• 15:49 Spock’s Beard – Flow
  
• 16:19 The Alan Parsons Project – The Turn of a Friendly Card (suite)
• 16:24 Pendragon – Not of this World
• 16:37 Triumvirat – Across the Waters
• 16:55 Colosseum – Valentyne Suite
• 18:00 Caravan – The Dabsong Conshirtoe
• 18:09 The Nice – Five Bridges Suite
• 18:27 Tangerine Dream – Force Majeure
• 18:28 Keith Emerson – Piano Concerto No. 1
• 20:03 The Tangent – In Earnest
• 20:25 Focus – Hamburger Concerto
• 20:44 ELP – Tarkus
• 20:47 Vangelis – Chariots of Fire (side two of the soundtrack LP)
• 21:01 Spock’s Beard – The Healing Colours of Sound (I only know the live version)
• 22:44 Caravan – Nine Feet Underground
• 24:39 Renaissance – Song of Scheherazade
• 25:03 The Flower Kings – Stardust We Are
• 25:14 The Tangent – A Place in the Queue
• 27:47 Wobbler - Hinterland
• 29:38 ELP – Karn Evil 9