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Originally Posted by Zer0
But what defines traditional music? It could mean music going back hundreds of years. Would jazz and blues musicians not have broke a traditional boundaries as well and set off a creative revolution in the early part of the 20th century? Musicians are always trying to break "traditional" music and create something new and different no matter what decade.
I certainly respect the likes of The Velvet Underground and The Beatles for what they've contributed to music but there's been plenty of other bands throughout the past few decades which have had a profound impact by doing something different. A lot of these bands don't get recognition until after they've split up, as was the case with The Velvet Underground, and I'm sure there are some bands today that will be seen as revolutionary in 20, 30, 40 years time but it's impossible to compare them to 60's bands at the moment because they have not yet been filtered by time.
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Yes youre right, its those jazz and blues musicians along with the pioneers of the sixties and the musicians XVIIIth century who were the real revolutionaries.
To answer this question, one has to ponder upon the tricky question of what is a musical revolution and what are normally its reasons and its consequences. A musical revolution represents an essential turning point that brings in a completely different musical style: not just a new instrument or a new time signature or a new approach to singing, but a certain change in musical conscience. Roughly speaking, there have been three important musical revolutions over the course of the last few centuries - the Classical Revolution of the XVIIIth century, the Jazz Revolution of the early 1900's, and the Rock Revolution of the 1960's. The first one established a new type of music - music for the sake of art, music that had to be listened to as a self-estimated value, not devoted entirely to church or festival or other applied necessities. The second one was a crucial point in toppling the old, bearded values of Classical: music was rejuvenating, throwing off the shackles of the European style and going back into the masses. And the third one was very important in that it was a blistering, successful attempt at reconciliating everything: old values with new ones, 'elite' with 'working class', and protest audiences with conservatives. Come to think of it, what is rock music? Out of all the known genres, it is probably the hardest to define. If one takes Dylan's 'Mr Tambourine Man', the Clash's debut album, and Yes' Close To The Edge, all of which are normally considered to be 'rock', one can see that such enormous gaps that exist between the three can hardly be found in any other type of music.