A style of rock that overtly displays musical influences from Western classical styles or otherwise seeks to expand rock's stylistic and conceptual boundaries through exceptional technical prowess or fusion with prestigious or exotic styles. The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was its founding document, both in its incorporation of classical referents such as orchestral instruments and in the implicit claims it made for the seriousness and complexity of popular music. The Moody Blues established a model for ‘symphonic rock’ when they collaborated with the London Festival Orchestra to produce Days of Future Past (1967). A group of mostly British bands continued to develop Progressive rock through the late 1960s and 70s, including the Nice, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Deep Purple, Yes, Procol Harum and Pink Floyd. Further experimentation and eclectic fusions arose through the work of Genesis, King Crimson, Jethro Tull and, in the United States, Styx, Kansas and Boston.
In a broader sense, the term is often used to describe musicians such as Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Steely Dan, Rush and Laurie Anderson, who in various ways absorbed influences from classical music, although an ironic stance differentiated most of them from the progressive rockers. Art rock might properly include the classically influenced Heavy metal of the 1980s, yet the very fact of its popular success seems to have disqualified heavy metal as art, so demonstrating the ideological implications of such cultural categories. Apart from heavy metal, the audience for art rock has been comparatively small since the genre's heyday in the 1970s.
J. Rockwell: ‘Art Rock’, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. J. Miller (New York, 1976, 2/1980), 347–52; rev. as ‘The Emergence of Art Rock’, ibid. (rev. 3/1992 by A. DeCurtis, J. Henke and H. George-Warren), 492–9
B. Martin: Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock (Chicago, 1996)
E. Macan: Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (New York, 1997)
ROBERT WALSER