Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box *

Transcription

1 LAURA LEANTE Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box * Introduction In this paper I will consider how live performance contributes to the creation of meaning in progressive rock. I will start from the general assumption that music experience is not exclusively auditory, but takes place at several sensory levels. This is particularly evident in progressive rock, where since the early light shows of Pink Floyd the reception of music involves different media. The visual elements in album art covers and concerts are indissolubly linked to sound: together, they contribute to a single process of signification. The semantic use of colours and shapes accompanies the employment of lights, special effects, masks, and graphic representations of surreal, fabulous, or disturbing atmospheres. Although progressive rock bands are all influenced by a shared psychedelic experience, they take different directions, often reaching opposite results. Suffice it to mention, for instance, the concerts by Pink Floyd, in which the attention of the audience is attracted by the entirety of the stage, and sometimes when flying objects are employed goes even further, in a game of depth and perspective not unrelated to that depicted on the Ummagumma album cover. The show therefore affords the possibility of listening to the music and, at the same time, of watching what happens around the musicians and what is projected at their back; it is not a coincidence that Pink Floyd s name is often associated to the geometries present in the art covers of their records (the clearest example being the triangle of the prism and of the pyramids in The Dark Side of the Moon) and in the staging of their shows (especially the circle of lights around the screen they had on stage since the early 1970s) 1. An example diverging from Pink Floyd s concerts is represented by the early shows of Genesis, where the attention of the public focuses on a single individual. It is in fact Peter Gabriel who animates the songs of the band and is responsible for most of the mise-en-scène with his masks and costumes. Although the importance of live events and of multimediality in rock has been highlighted by several scholars 2, an in depth analysis has not been carried out in popular music studies yet. Such a situation mirrors a general tendency within musicology. Even one of the very few exceptions Nicholas Cook s Analysing Musical Multimedia (1997) does not investigate live performance. However, the interest of scholars in this issue has been growing in the last few years: a special mention should be made of Jane Davidson s article on Annie Lennox, one of few analyses of gesture and movement in pop music published to date (Davidson, 2001). In contrast, reviews and interviews published in newspapers and magazines in the 1970s are rich with descriptions of the visual elements in progressive rock concerts: all the more reason for pursuing a thorough study of multimedia in rock. This paper stems directly from my current research on the processes of meaning construction in the performance and reception of music, as part of the larger project Experience * I would like to thank Serena Facci and Gianmario Borio for organising the conference Composition and experimentation in British Rock: , and - most of all - for being a constant source of advice and support in the preparation of this paper. Many thanks also to Martin Clayton, with whom I discussed my analysis of the gesturality employed in The Musical Box, and to John Covach, for the stimulating comments on the lyrics of the song. I would also like to thank the friends who helped me collecting the video materials. 1 Such association emerged from some informal conversations I had with friends and other acquaintances; I believe this topic deserves a more systematic and extensive research. 2 See for example Macan, 1997.

2 L. LEANTE Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box and meaning in music performance, based at the Open University. Here I will consider a specific case study within British progressive rock: the early Genesis ( ), and in particular Peter Gabriel, his gesturality, and his use of masks in the live performance of The Musical Box. I will focus on the changes that took place in the performance of this song over the period of about three years and I will highlight how new meanings accompany the reception of these changes. With this paper I intend to propose a methodology of analysis that I believe unveils stimulating perspectives and could be applied to other progressive rock repertories and to popular music in general. Methodology In his study of gesturality oral narratives, David McNeill explains how: Gesture and speech arise from a single process of utterance formation. The utterance has both an imagistic side and a linguistic side. The image rises first and is transformed into a complex structure in which both the gesture and the linguistic structure are integral parts. (McNeill, 1992: 29-30) McNeill also suggests that gesture adds information which is conveyed through sight and which would otherwise often be inaccessible in verbal communication. Similarly, I intend to demonstrate that watching a concert can enrich music with new meanings. In other words, meaning in music is constructed or modified also through the visual channel. I do not mean to suggest that live experience reveals the meaning of a piece of music or a song; nevertheless, it offers a meaning which can be very different from that attributed to the same music when just listening to an audio recording. My analysis will therefore show how the study of live performance of The Musical Box unveils the possibility of understanding this song in new ways. The categories of gesture identified by McNeill to which I will freely refer in this paper are four. The first one is that of iconic gestures, i.e. those gestures which are in close formal relationship with the semantic content of speech and describe an object or an action. The second group consists of metaphoric gestures, which represent an abstract idea and offer a concrete metaphor for a concept. The other two categories proposed by McNeill are beats, which in the case of music can mark the rhythmic structure of a piece (for instance hand claps), and deictic gestures, which involve the physical act of pointing in space, be it to indicate a place, a person, or an object. Within the iconic gestures I would like to highlight the subcategory of pantomimic gestures, as discussed by Rimé and Schiaratura: these are mimetic acts, in which the hands represent themselves in the description and reproduction of an action they performed (Rimé- Schiaratura, 2000: 246). The categories listed so far refer to studies of gesturality in verbal communication. The context of a music performance is clearly different. In a recent article, Martin Clayton (2005: ) has stressed the need to consider other types of body movement linked to music, which I also adopt in this analysis. The two groups of gestures identified by Clayton are movements employed in music and vocal production, which I will consider as underpinning this study, and body and instrument manipulators. The various types of movement and gesture (summarised in table 2) are not always neatly distinct, and often overlap: for instance we will see how, in the performance of The Musical Box, Gabriel manipulates the microphone, at times obtaining an iconic effect, and other times marking the beat and stressing the rhythmical structure of the song. A difference between the approach I adopt in this study and McNeill s perspective lies in the meaning attributed to the word gesture. While McNeill uses it referring to the movements

3 of the hands and arms 3, I will use it in a wider sense, closer to that suggested by Adam Kendon 4 and to the etymology of the term, from Latin gerere ( to carry ), and analogous to the meaning of comportment. The Musical Box The Musical Box is the opening track of the 1971 album Nursery Crime, and is also the song that inspired the cover of the record, drawn by Paul Whitehead. The lyrics are accompanied by an introduction telling the story of a boy, Henry, who is beheaded by the mallet of his friend Cynthia while they play croquet. Henry s soul is imprisoned inside a musical box (hence the title) and when Cynthia finds the box and opens it, Henry comes out and soon is transformed into an old man. The lyrics of the song express, in the first person, Henry s emotions and desires. This tormented spirit oscillates between the reference to childhood (for instance in the nursery rhyme Old King Cole ) and (at the end) the explicit request to Cynthia to satisfy the drives and desires of the life he has never lived (with the cry touch me, touch me, now! ). The meaning of the text of The Musical Box goes beyond this surreal story and its possible readings are structured at different levels. For example, the musical box is a sexual metaphor which derives directly from the colloquial use of the word box to indicate the vagina. Therefore, the story of Henry who is first imprisoned in a box, and then escapes it and tries to vent his frustrations in eros (another box ) seems to be a reference to a sexual intercourse 5. The ironic element is present throughout the song, which derides a particular lifestyle, i.e. the values and habits of the most wealthy and conservative classes of British society, with reference to the education that Banks, Rutherford and Gabriel received at Charterhouse, the exclusive public school they attended. It is in this light that the narration and Nursery Crime s art cover must be understood: Cynthia, the nurse, the game of croquet, and the garden of the aristocratic mansion all contribute to the same cultural context which is the object of the irony. The Musical Box was included in Genesis live performance from the second half of 1971 and it was a constant presence during the Nursery Crime Tour, the Foxtrot Tour, and, as an encore, during the concerts accompanying the albums Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway 6. The song is particularly relevant to the story of the band s live shows also for another reason: it is during its performance that Peter Gabriel wore a mask and a costume for the first time. During a show in Dublin, on 28 September 1972, in fact, Gabriel left the stage during the last instrumental section of the song, only to come back wearing a woman s red dress and the mask of a fox (a reference to the cover of the album Foxtrot). In the following months this costume was replaced by the mask of and old man a more direct representation of Henry. The videos I have worked with are indicated in table 1: PLACE AND DATE OF PERFORMANCE TOURNÉE 1. Pop Shop Belgium, March 1972 Nursery Crime 2. Bataclan Club France, January 1973 Foxtrot 3 The gestures I mean are the movement of the hands and arms that we see when people talk (McNeill, 1992: 1). 4 an utterance is any unity of activity that is treated by those co-present as a communicative move, turn, or contribution. Such units of activity may be constructed from speech or from visible bodily action or from combinations of these two modalities [ ]. Gesture is the visible bodily action that has a role in such units of action (Kendon, 2004: 7). 5 The presence of sexual metaphors in The Musical Box is confirmed by other versions of the song s introductory story told by Gabriel on stage, which differ from the story of Henry and Cynthia and present a more explicit erotic content (see for example Russell, 2004: 35-36). 6 See Russell, Composition and Experimentation in British Rock,

4 L. LEANTE Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box 3. Shepperton Studios England, October Selling England by 1973 the Pound 4. NBC Studios California, December 1973 Selling England by the Pound 5. (place and date unknown) between The Lamb Lies November 1974 and April 1975 Down on Broadway Table 1: List of the video clips used in the analysis of The Musical Box Of the five videos, two present a complete performance of the song, one a shorter version, and two clips comprise only short fragments. Generally, when studying behaviour and gesturality, it would be ideal to have (at least) one video camera focusing consistently on the subject analysed; this is unfortunately not the case in the surviving video material from the 1970s, whose quality is also often quite poor. Nevertheless, although the camera shot is not fixed on the singer, it is possible to reconstruct through the fragments available in the different clips the movements and the gestures performed by Gabriel. Moreover, although it is clear that through the years there is an evolution, a certain degree of change in the gesturality performed, the three shows filmed between January 1973 and December 1973 present more similarities and consistency than I first hoped. The most recent video the one from the The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour has not offered useful material for the analysis, especially due to the quality of the image (the worst of the five films); nevertheless, this clip helped to confirm that, by the time of the The Lamb tour, The Musical Box had reached a more definitive and stable presentation in performance. On a macroscopic level, the only substantial difference between the January 1973 show and the later ones can be found in the change from the fox to the old man mask. The version of The Musical Box included in the album Nursery Crime is approximately 10 minutes and 30 seconds long. Half of it consists of instrumental sections and short passages, variously distributed and of different lengths (graph 1). The gestures performed by Peter Gabriel when he is on stage during these instrumental parts are mostly manipulators (of the microphone, for example) and beat markers (when playing the flute or the tambourine). A few examples of iconic, metaphoric, and deictic gestures in the performance of this song are indicated at table 2 and figure 1. On the whole, the analysis of Gabriel s gesturality shows that during the first half of the story of The Musical Box the singer performs mostly metaphoric and iconic gestures (only partly pantomimic). On the contrary, deictic gestures and beat markers are prevalent in the second half of the piece. I would like now to focus on the presence of a specific tactile gesturality and on how it introduces the erotic aspect in the narration. Immediately before the last instrumental section of the song, and soon after the Old King Cole nursery rhyme, Gabriel sings the words and I want, and I feel, and I know, and I touch showing the palms of his hands and moving his fingers as if they were touching, feeling something. This same gesture is associated to the four different verbs and, being at times pantomimic and at times metaphoric, it turns out to have a polysemic character: wanting, feeling, knowing, and touching are all expressed in the same way, emphasizing a tactile character (table 3, figure 2). This gesture returns when Gabriel gets back on stage wearing the old man mask and asks Cynthia to move her hair so that he can see her face, and to show him her body ( let me get to know your flesh ). The repetition of the same kind of gesturality introduced before reveals that the knowledge (even that of the face) that Henry is meaning is a physical and not a visual experience. Most of all, this gesture is rich with the tactile qualities indicated above, and adds to the sense of unease generated by the story. I think it is even more interesting to stress that in the last bars of the song (when Henry cries touch me, touch me, now! ), the tactile element which is now explicitly addressed in the lyrics is missing from the gesturality, which, on the contrary, relies more on iconicity, deixis,

5 and beat markers. Gabriel opens the zip of his costume (a gesture which is at the same time manipulator and deictic), shows his chest (again, a deictic gesture), holds the microphone (manipulator gesture), moves his torso while shouting now! (a beat marker), and ends the song with the simulation of a sexual intercourse. Even the act of holding the microphone (itself a manipulator gesture) participates the overall iconicity of the performance. I will try now to understand how the meaning of this song changes if we compare this live performance with an earlier one, in which Gabriel, during the finale, gets back on stage wearing the red dress and the fox mask. As I pointed out above, both the dress and the fox refer to the album cover of Foxtrot, which was published a few days after Gabriel wore the costume for the first time. Both these elements reinforce the reference to The Musical Box present in Foxtrot s art cover and in the lyrics of Supper s Ready 7. The sensuality expressed by the fox costume is clearly a female sensuality (the low neck line being quite different from the zip) and the gesturality does not show the deictic and iconic features I highlighted above. On the contrary, Gabriel holds a tambourine and the end of the song is characterised by the extensive use of beat markers. Even the cry accompanying the last words of the lyrics sounds more ambiguous and remind me of an animal cry, rather than Henry s intimate feelings. Table 5 includes a detailed comparison of the gesturality employed by Gabriel during the last minute of the performance of The Musical Box in two shows, from January 1973 and from December 1973, in which the singer wears respectively the fox and the old man mask. The overall meaning resulting from the analysis of these performances sheds further light on the surreal dimension that many have already noticed of Paul Whitehead s art covers. This emphasis stems from the live experience of the song, which cannot be grasped just listening to the record. What happens then as a consequence of the passage from the use of the fox mask to that only a few months later of the old man? It is about this point that I venture to put forward a hypothesis concerning stylistic issues in the changes of the meaning of the song. I suggest in fact that the old man mask, Gabriel s gesture highlighting both Henry s physicality and his deeper emotions, and the strong chiaroscuro lighting effects on stage are reminiscent less of surrealism than of expressionism (and I refer in particular to certain German expressionist cinema in early 20 th century). This remains just an idea that still needs to be investigated and, possibly, confirmed; nevertheless, it shows once more the potential and the multiplicity of new perspectives that can be offered by the study of the live performance of a song. Conclusion The analysis of The Musical Box has highlighted several points. First of all, a study of this kind unveils a change in the meanings attributed to this song and in the way it was conceived during the Genesis tours. In particular, the study of Gabriel s gesturality and costumes allows understanding of how the singer structures the narration of the text and builds the representation of the lyrics. For example, in this paper I have shown how the association of the same gesture to different verbs gives the latter a specific tactile connotation which anticipates the more explicit erotic element of the lyrics. Most of all, I have demonstrated how the passage from the use of the fox mask to the old man mask is accompanied by a more extensive employment of iconic gesturality, which enriches the live performance of the song with new meanings. In the whole, the possibility to watch the performance of The Musical Box in a concert allows audiences to receive a number of elements including inter-textual references that cannot be experienced through listening to the record. 7 On the cover of Foxtrot there is a fox with the body of a woman and a red dress. In the background it is also possible to see Cynthia and the nurse on the croquet lawn. In the lyrics of Willow Farm, in Supper s Ready, a musical box is cited. Composition and Experimentation in British Rock,

6 L. LEANTE Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box This opens new perspectives to the interpretation of meaning in music and to the way it takes shape. Such considerations call us I think to engage in a more systematic and extensive study of multimedia in live performance, especially in progressive rock. Bibliography Bright, Spencer 2000 Peter Gabriel. An authorized bibliography, Pan Books, London. Clayton, Martin 2005 Communication in Indian Raga performance, in. Musical communication, a cura di Mill, D., MacDonald, R., Hargreaves, D. J.,, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p Cook, Nicholas 1997 Analysing Musical Multimedia, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Davidson, Jane 2001 The role of the body in the production and perception of solo vocal performance: A case study of Annie Lennox, Musicae Scientiae, 5/2, p Macan, Edward 1997 Rocking the Classics. English progressive Rock and the Counterculture, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford. Kendon, Adam 2004 Gesture. Visible Action as Utterance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. McNeill, David 1992 Hand and mind. What gestures reveal about thought, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. Rimé, B. - Schiaratura, L Gesture and speech, in Fundamentals of non-verbal behavior, a cura di Feldman, R. S./ Rimé, B., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Russell, Paul 2004 Genesis. A live guide , Saf Publishing, London.

7 Video SPOKEN/SUNG TEXT DESCRIPTION GESTURALITY TYPOLOGY Now I d like to take you to a peaceful English game of croquet where at this precise point in time little henry is approaching his first shot, but little Cynthia* is behind little Henry The right forefinger points (downwards) behind the back [he s referring to Cynthia, who is behind Henry] Deictic Ex. 1 Shepperton Studios 8 (Introduction to the song) * Ho!!! He moves, leaning forwards with the knees slightly bent, moving the body sideways [he imitates Cynthia s height and her way of peering at Henry] The arms perform the gesture of using a croquet mallet [Cynthia hitting Henry s head] Iconic Iconic - pantomimic Sssst!* The right forefinger, straight, make a quick horizontal movement in front of the nech [it indicates Henry is being beheaded] Iconic Ex. 2 Pop Shop And the nurse will tell you lies Of the kingdom *beyond the skies The right forefinger points at the sky (followed by the eyes) Deictic Ex. 3 Shepperton Studios Time* left to live out **my life *The hands imitate the act of holding a flower and removing its petals **The right hand performs a wavy movement in front of the eyes from left to right [indicating the flow of time] Iconic pantomimic Metaphoric Table 2: Examples of iconic, metaphoric and deictic gestures in the performance of The Musical Box. The stars indicate when the gesture is performed. 8 A video recording of this performance can be found at

8 L. LEANTE Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box LYRICS DESCRIPTION GESTURALITY TYPOLOGY And I want And I feel And I touch And I know The hands, with the palms turned upwards, imitate the act of touching and feeling Table 3: Description of the tactile gesture at its first occurrence in the performance. Metaphoric Iconic Iconic pantomimic Metaphoric

9 LYRICS DESCRIPTION GESTURALITY TYPOLOGY She s a lady, she s got time *Brush back your hair, and let me Both hands perform the gesture of moving hair from a face Iconic pantomimic Get to know your *face The hands, with the palms turned upwards, imitate the act of touching a face Iconic pantomimic He moves his head and his tongue Pantomimic *She s a lady The forefinger points at a imaginary person [Cynthia] Deictic She s *mine He points the forefinger to himself Deictic *Brush back your hair, and let me Both hands perform the gesture of moving hair from a face Iconic pantomimic Get to know your *flesh The hands, with the palms turned upwards, imitate the act of touching a face Table 4: Second occurrence of the tactile gesture (the star indicates when the gesture is performed). Iconic pantomimic Composition and Experimentation in British Rock,

10 L. LEANTE Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box TEXT/SECTION OF PERFORMANCE Bataclan Club (January 1973) fox mask 9 DESCRIPTION AND TYPOLOGY OF GESTURES Shepperton Studios (October 73) old man mask Why don t you touch me Touch me Why don t you touch me Touch me Touch me Now, now, now, now, now! Now, now, now, now, now! Now, now, now, now, now! Now, now, now, eh! Now, now, now, eh! Coda strumentale The left hand holds the microphone and the right hand holds the tambourine. Gabriel leans forward and moves his shoulders marking the beat [beat markers] After leaving the microphone on the stand, he walks on stage and plays the tambourine marking the beat [manipulator, beat markers] The left hand holds the microphone [manipulator], while the right hand opens the zip on the chest of the suit [manipulatore] Both hands hold the microphone [manipulator] The right hand opens the suit to show the chest [manipulator/ deictic/beat marker] Both hands hold the microphone [manipulator] While holding the microphone with both hands, Gabriel leans forward marking the beat on the word now [beat maker] While holding the microphone with the left hand, Gabriel shows his chest marking the beat [manipulator/ deictic/beat marker] While holding the microphone with both hands, Gabriel leans forward marking the beat on the word now [beat maker] He walks on stage holding the microphone [manipulator]. After leaving the microphone, he moves his hips imitating a sexual intercourse and marking the beat [iconic, beat marker] 9 A video recording of this performance can be found at

11 He holds the microphone, he extends the stand and marks the end of the song by hitting the tambourine on the mic stand [manipulator, beat marker] He leans on his knees: then he lies down on his back holding the microphone [iconic, manipulator] Table 5: Description of Peter Gabriel s gesturality during the last minute of the performance of The Musical Box in two shows from 72 and time (in seconds) s instrumental sections sung sections Graph 1: Distribution of sung and instrumental sections in The Musical Box, as included in the album Nursery Crime. Composition and Experimentation in British Rock,

12 L. LEANTE Multimedia Aspects of Progressive Rock Shows: Analysis of the Performance of The Musical Box Figure 1: And the nurse will tell you lies, above the kingdom *beyond the sky Example of deictic gesture. Figure 2: Tactile gesture