Motivic cohesion and parsimony in three songs from Gentle Giant's Acquiring the Taste (1971)

Abstract

In addition to a hierarchy of harmony and fundamental pitch, large-scale modal or tonal music generally needs to generate considerable portions of its substance from a limited number of melodic ideas in order to be readily comprehended as musical form. In Western musical tradition this has typically been achieved by means of motivic development. A distinctive trait in the mainstream of popular music in the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, is the predominance of clearly demarcated phrase-bound structures, where either no smaller unit than the phrase could be perceived, or where the smaller units (as in the case of riffs and ostinato figures) have functions that are subservient or complementary to the phrase-structure. Some genuine exceptions from this otherwise highly dominant tendency can be identified in the music from the so-called progressive rock movement in the early 1970s. This article investigates the case of the British group Gentle Giant (active 1970–1980). A motivic analysis of three songs from the album Acquiring the Taste (1971) elucidates how a small set of motives could be used in concatenations to unify larger and more dynamic song structures than what is possible in non-reducible phrase-bound forms.