OUIN DIT LA CROIX

30 après

E.M. - Disco Expres

Saturday, September 24, 2022 10:06 PM

THE NEW RITUAL

Like “E.L. & P.”, the staging of Yes…defines them

translation:

Yes performs in Paris at Palacio de Deportes at the Versailles Gate and I arrive in Paris with the sole purpose of seeing them and, possibly, interviewing them. Everything was well organized, because our correspondent in Paris, José Antonio Alvarado, had everything prepared and arranged with the record company, a possible exclusive interview (they only gave another one for the magazine "Rock and Folk”).

A long time before the performance, I enter with Jose on stage and I am impressed by the scenery they are still setting up. Roger Dean, the sensational designer of all the latest albums, has conceived a surprising stage set, filled with poetry close to an Alice in Wonderland of the 21st century.

The group on stage appears completely cohesive. The first thing that may surprise you is the perfect integration of Wakeman, which at no time is the star (as with Emerson in ELP). It is a solid group with a great singer in front.

They performed the theme "And You and I”, which is Anderson’s favorite. The sound is prodigious and encompasses the perfection of “Yessongs", which is perhaps the best recently recorded live LP. “Close to the Edge”, highly applauded by the public, who immediately recognizes it, and soon after comes the first long piece of their latest “Tales from Topographic Oceans” which is very well received by the French public.

With the impressive background decoration, the music of Yes sounds doubly good and there are moments when a kind of dragon’s mouth begins to smoke that slowly invades the scene. The show is beautiful. All the stage effects are done only once and are never repeated. The following is a new surprise. Perhaps the most spectacular is a long piece of percussion made in the dark and with the only lights that come off a kind of gigantic toad that houses Alan White and his drums. The effect is overwhelming and the public breaks their hands clapping. Yes should come to Spain. Yes on stage, in addition to being a sensational group, are an absolutely modern spectacle.

The recent visit of Emerson Lake & Palmer has served so that in our country - critics and fans - they live “in situ” one of the musical events (let’s call it that) that could never be reflected in the album, at the moment the only suitable conductor among the “distant interpreter” and the listener.

The staging of a group like Yes or EL&P, in which the listener participates as a positive element (it cannot be otherwise, given the magnitude of the scenic elements) of an audiovisual show, can motivate a radical change in the position of the fan or the spectator before the music - once absolutely subjective - now formalized through plastic elements.

It is continually debated in this regard, especially since lately the motivation in music has destroyed its abstract circle and has broken into the forms. The musical “representation” today has taken the literal meaning of the term: today dolls are slaughtered on stage, authentic “choreographies” are staged, lighting technology is tremendously complicated.

Well, this has no other meaning - none revolutionary - that does not mean taking advantage of the physical presence of the receiver to “induce” what the interpreters believe “is” their music. There is nothing new in the system, the operators - beware that they are years old - have already established it. Staging a musical concept is almost as old as the music itself.

Another thing is to find this system valid, another thing is to accept as listeners to yield our interpretation right to the arbitrary forms that the interpreters want to give it. I personally think that music has the tremendous prerogative of total individual abstraction, play can even be an attempt on the freedom of the listener to offer him the plastic interpretation of music, an interpretation that belongs to the individual sensitivity and to the possibilities of abstraction of each one. The musician owns the idea, the forms are elaborated through the listener’s perception. No one can access them, not even the author himself.

This comment, which accompanies Gonzalo’s story, is intended only to focus attention on a system that is recent among us in the face of that visit by Emerson Lake & Palmer to Barcelona, ​​in which this issue came up.

Yes, Genesis, EL&P, Pink Floyd, Jobriath, Cooper, etc. They must visit our country so that the fan is a conscious witness of this new ritual, and thinks, applauds or rejects, and it does not happen as we could see in the attitude and appreciation of many colleagues - during the EL&P interview - that there is no element (because nobody has bothered to look for it) that allows judging in one way or the other something that can be much more important than it seems.