Some will be aware of my enthusiasm for the music of the English rock band Genesis. I still listen (and sing along in car) to their music from the mid-1970s. I wrote about the impact it had on me as a teenager when I first heard it, in an earlier blog post here.
Genesis’s music of this period always seemed distinctive to me. I didn’t know it at the time, but part of what made it stand out and what I was responding to was a complexity of musical composition and the rejection of the blues scales. They considered themselves a quintessentially English band and deliberately chose not to play the American style of 12-bar blues songs unlike so many other English bands. They were not absolutely alone in this. This was the period of progressive rock, after all, when serious young men with long hair were hailed as Romantic intellectuals whose lyrics placed them alongside Byron and Shelley, and as Bohemian prophets whose music had Wagnerian grandeur, complexity…and length.
Time will tell whether any of these accolades were appropriate - the music of the period is in a resurgence at the moment - but my guess is probably not for the most of them. However, to a boy in his late teens, the music of these young men (who were not much older than me) Genesis really did seem distinct and different and better than all the rest. Even today as I listen to those tunes I think they have something that distinguishes them from all the others. If any music of this time and genre is to be appreciated in the future I would put forward the music of Genesis of this period as the most likely.
I am guessing that many who read this, especially those readers in the US, will not be aware of the music I am referring to but will be aware of the pop band that Genesis became in the 1980s. It was to the dismay of many thousands of spotty teenage high-school students like me, that the Genesis of the 1970s succumbed to commercial pressures and morphed into more conventional pop group, with huge success (they have sold over 100 million albums worldwide). I don’t begrudge them this at all, but I always wished that somewhere along the way we could have heard a continuation of the compositional style of this 1970s music so that it developed and matured as both I and the members of the band did.
But it didn’t happen.
Then, recently, I discovered that since the days of the disbandment of Genesis - they haven’t released an album for about 30 years, Tony Banks, who was the keyboardist for the group has released three classical music collections in the last 15 years, with the most recent being released two years ago. He is now 70 years old.
Each set of recordings is a collection of orchestral suites of seven, six, and five pieces respectively called, ‘7’, ‘6’, and ‘5’. (It’s a shame there aren’t three albums called 6, 6, and 6! - that’s a joke that only Genesis fans will get…).
I have been listening to them for the last few weeks and enjoying them and certainly recommend them to you. I wanted to wait a while before doing so as I am such a diehard Genesis fan that my opinion can be influenced by nostalgia for their past music and the desire that it be good!
So here are my thoughts in the music itself. First, these are not orchestrations of music written for a rock band - another conceit of the 1970s is that everyone wanted to record a concerto for rock band and orchestra with the LSO (as caricatured in the movie This is Spinal Tap). Rather they are compositions of a more mature composer that evokes English Romantic music of the past - Vaughan Williams, Delius, or Elgar maybe Think The Lark Ascending.
Naxos, incidentally, is a well-known recording label that focusses exclusively on the classical genre, and while I’m sure they hoped the name of the composer might attract attention and raise sales, they wouldn’t have produced works that they felt were of substandard quality.
So take a listen. You can google ‘Tony Banks’ and 5, or 6, or 7 to listen and you’ll find them on YouTube. As an example here is a 15-minute piece from the most recent recording, 5, called Prelude to a Million Years.
Tony Banks today
…and in his youth!
