Pictures at an Exhibition

I was talking to my aunt about music earlier tonight. She’s a music teacher and seems to know everything about that subject. I asked her if she had heard of the album “Pictures at an Exhibition” by the progressive rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It’s a live album where the band liberally interprets a classical piano suite by 19th-century Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. I’ve been listening to it a lot recently.

My aunt told me (as I already knew) that the original Mussorgsky version of “Pictures at an Exhibition” is a genre-defining classic. However, she said she had first heard about ELP’s version a few weeks ago from a “disturbing former hippie”. She explained at length how creepy and disheveled he was, and that he must have been a burnout from the sixties. In my experience, most people who like progressive rock fit that description quite well.

I find it amusing that most people who like my favorite genre of music are creepy, disheveled former hippies. One can derive many insights from this; I’ll leave it an exercise to the reader.