Chapter 35: Changes in the Sixties and Seventies

I. Popular Music
A. Introduction
1. The “sixties” was a time of great turmoil in numerous sociocultural spheres: civil
rights, women’s rights, the Vietnam War, and gay rights, to name a few.
2. The violence that resulted from these interests, as well as the assassinations of public
figures, shocked Americans.
3. Artistic controversies raged between progressive and conservative parties.
4. Popular music affected all other music composed in the 1960s.

B. The Music of Youth: Rock ’n’ Roll

1. The crooners (e.g., Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra) were the first musicians to market
themselves to the youth.
2. The youth audiences of the 1950s and ’60s became more interested in rock ’n’ roll.
a. Rock ’n’ roll was consciously aimed at widening the generation gap.
b. It was socially both unifying and divisive.
3. Focusing on the expanding consumerism of post-war America, music labels marketed
their products specifically to youth.
4. DJ Alan Freed began playing recordings of rhythm and blues (R&B) on white radio
stations.
a. The music was associated with dance.
b. Freed played black musicians such as Chuck Berry, but some stations insisted
on white covers of R&B tunes.
c. The Civil Rights movement was associated with this music.
5. Elvis Presley was the most commercially successful rock ’n’ roll performer.
a. He adopted a “black” style of dancing that was offensive to older Americans.
6. A new music described as “folk” also emerged during the late 1940s.
a. The early practitioners of this style were the Weavers and Pete Seeger.
b. Later artists include Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
c. Because of their political and social messages, these singers were attacked by
anti-Communist politicians.

C. The British Invasion: The Beatles

1. A series of British bands were highly successful with the American market in the
1960s, and their music altered rock ’n’ roll in several ways.
a. Beginning with the Beatles’ first appearance in 1964, musical content and
image moved in a new direction.
1) The songwriting pair of Lennon and McCartney combined different
styles of music to create a new sound.
2) Guitarist Harrison added in Eastern elements he learned from the
sitarist Ravi Shankar.
3) Producer George Martin, a classically trained musician himself, crafted
new and distinctive sounds in the studio for the Beatles.
 b. By the mid-’60s, the Beatles had turned to a style that had to be made in the
studio and was not easily transferred in live performance, adopting some of the techniques we
have seen with “classical” electronic music.
1) Beginning with Revolver (1966) they produced concept albums in
which the songs on a record were connected in some way.
2) Some of their songs took on the social justice themes used previously
by the new folk musicians.

D. A New Challenge
1. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) marked a radically different approach
to popular music, including the album art itself.
a. The electronic effects on the album have been described as an aural response to
hallucinations caused by psychedelic drugs.
b. The subject matter, while often conveyed in a campy coating of pop band on
tour, delves into deeper issues that reflected youth culture at the time.
c. Musical effects included aspects of music by Ligeti or Cage.
2. Some classical music critics hailed the music of the Beatles with accolades usually
reserved for classical musicians.
a. American composers Bernstein and Ned Rorem praised this music.
b. That popular music could be constructively compared with classical music took
a while for musicologists to understand.

E. Rock ’n’ Roll Becomes Rock

1. During the 1960s, rock ’n’ roll lost the “roll” in the title and became known simply as
“rock.”
a. This change signaled a different approach to the music, losing its direct
connections with African-American sources.
b. Grand statements dominated rock.
1) The Who’s Tommy (1969), a rock opera that became a film, prompted
the use of the term “progressive rock.”
2) Other groups connected to this theme, such as Emerson, Lake &
Palmer, produced a style known as “art rock,” deliberately using classical pieces as springboards
for their own.
2. Some rock musicians sought to overthrow tradition in many ways, including strong ties
to commercialism.
3. Woodstock (1969) became synonymous with counterculture.
a. Musicians from many different backgrounds and styles performed there.
b. It was a nonviolent response to the violence that had hit the United States in
1968.
4. Jazz and rock came together in the late 1960s; this was called jazz-rock fusion. Miles
Davis was the leading figure.
a. Fusion was criticized as overtly commercial.
5. Jazz and classical music combined in “third stream” music.
a. The term was coined by Gunther Schuller, who was a classically trained
composer (he wrote using serialism) and later became a major jazz historian.
b. The artists most associated with this style include the Modern Jazz Quartet.
 6. By 1970, popular music had taken over the commercial market for music, eclipsing
both jazz and classical music.

II. Minimalism
A. The Rise of Minimalism
1. Minimalism is a style that arose around 1960. It is difficult to define.
a. Minimalism contains aspects of classical music but also has traces of popular
music and world music.
b. Its composers’ names can be found in resources dedicated to popular or
classical music.
c. Minimalist composers often draw on a variety of music styles.
d. They are tied to the recording industry more concretely than previous styles.

B. La Monte Young
1. The cry for “Less is more!” arose in the arts, notably in the architecture of Mies van
der Rohe and paintings by Rothko.
2. Musically, the term “minimalism” said something about the process of composition,
rather than the result.
3. LaMonte Young is considered the founder of American minimalism.
a. He described it as music “created with a minimum of means” and works that
“concentrate on and delimit the work to be a single event or object.”
b. His Composition 1960 No. 7 consists of a notated perfect fifth and the direction
to “hold for a long time.”
4. Young’s String Trio combines minimalism with serialism.
a. Some of the notational aspects are not performed (e.g., tempo changes on rests).
5. Young placed restrictions on his music, particularly as regards pitch.
a. He eventually used natural acoustical resonance as a starting point for
composition.

C. Riley’s In C
1. Among Young’s followers, Terry Riley first found a wider audience for minimalism.
2. He experimented with tape loops.
a. Riley deliberately associated his music with counterculture.
3. His In C has a small score but can last for hours.
a. It is highly structured and unfolds in a precise way.
b. Performers determine how the work moves through time.
4. The work was well received.
a. That the work is not controlled by one person (as is typical of classical
performance but seen as somewhat dictatorial) added to its appeal with the counterculture
devotees.
5. Perhaps the most characteristic association with In C, the eighth-note pulse that
continues throughout, was not Riley’s idea but that of Steve Reich, who participated in the first
performance of the work.

D. “Classical” Minimalism: Steve Reich

 1. Reich received musical training in the mode that was typical for an elite Modernist, but
his exposure to a wide variety of recordings helped move him in a different direction.
2. He was drawn to early music, but not that between Haydn and Wagner.
3. Reich was drawn to percussion, including non-Western styles that became part of his
idiom.
4. His early works with tape loop (It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out) are connected with
political and social points of view.
5. Both works also include what has become an identifying feature of Reich’s music:
phase shifting.
a. Musical material gradually shifts out of phase.
b. The gradual process gave his music a sense of purpose.

E. Phase Music
1. Reich discovered that live performers, if properly rehearsed, could achieve the sound
previously reserved for tape.
2. His piece Drumming (1971) works on several levels of shifting.
a. These include gradually replacing rests with pitch and vice versa.
b. The lengthy piece holds together through contrasts of timbre.
c. Drumming was a successful piece that received numerous performances.
1) Its association with African music added to its social appeal.

F. Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians

1. One of Reich’s most influential compositions is Music for 18 Musicians.
a. An hour in length, the ensemble required is percussion, keyboard instruments,
amplied solo strings, winds, and voices.
b. It opens slowly with eleven chords that are subsequently elongated.
c. The change of harmony occurs about every five minutes, the sensation being
one of change rather than climax.
2. With this work, Reich felt he had come to a place where he was judge and audience of
the work, not the public.
3. Reich’s music began to appeal to a broad audience of professional musicians, popular
music fans, and academics.

G. Philip Glass
1. Like Reich, Glass studied music in a “typical” progression from undergrad music
major, master’s at Juilliard, job as composer, Fulbright to study with Boulanger.
2. He then studied with Shankar.
a. Shankar taught him how to organize music rhythmic patterning.
b. Glass decided to study in India.
3. Reich and Glass collaborated early on, but they moved in different directions and
became competitors.
4. Because of his study of Indian music, Glass focused on “additive structures” rather
than Reich’s phase technique.
5. In the 1970s Glass was influenced by art rock.
a. He did not use the typical instruments of rock but did amplify the music to a
rock-band level.
 b. In the 1980s he worked with Paul Simon and David Byrne.

H. Einstein on the Beach

1. In 1976, Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach premiered at the Met in New York.
a. It was not part of their regular series: Glass and the stage designer rented the
hall.
2. Glass had been working with theater and film for some time.
3. Einstein on the Beach lasts five hours without interruption as it courses through four
acts connected by musical “knee plays.”
4. All aspects of the production were coordinated by the appropriate people as a
Gesamtkunstwerk.
5. The opera was described as surreal by some and compared to Thomson’s Four Saints.
6. The loud music, though consonant, extracted a visceral reaction from the audience.
a. Some critics admired his blending of different styles.
b. Some charged that he had manipulated the audience.
7. Glass followed Einstein on the Beach with two conventional operas and numerous
other works.

I. Game Changer
1. The music of Reich and Glass demonstrated that there was no longer any need to draw
the line between high and low genres of music.
a. Minimalism was a great leveler, which was why the Modernists feared it so
much.
b. Reich noted that the music of the European Modernists honestly portrayed the
fragmented world of post-war Europe; but America had a different experience that demanded a
different medium of expression.
2. Minimalism was the first literate style to have come from the New World and to have
influenced the Old.

J. The Holy Minimalists

1. The early minimalists had a spiritual component to their music, as did an important
strain of European minimalism that stemmed from Central and Eastern Europe.
2. The pioneer in this regard is Arvo Pärt, from Estonia.
a. Pärt experimented with neo-Romanticism, serialism, and neoclassicism before
finding inspiration in Medieval and Renaissance music.
b. The early music held an appeal for him in its opportunity for religious
experience.
3. Initially his works overtly adapted the sounds of Medieval music, but these gradually
became less glaring.
4. Pärt also incorporated bells into his music, a response in part to the Russian Orthodox
Church’s use of them.
5. He set many Latin texts but as concert sacred music.
a. Pärt’s Tabula rasa (“Clean Slate”) is the longest work from this period and
represents his approach (“tintinnabular style”).
1) The work is a concerto grosso (Baroque) that uses mensuration canons
in proportional relation (Renaissance) without chromaticism (Medieval).
 2) The result is an evocation of stillness.
6. Each of the composers associated with radically reductive styles in the 1960s and ’70s
(except Andriesson) in the text either began with or found his way to religious belief. They each
regarded the musical and spiritual quests as dual manifestations of a single impulse.
a. For Young, Riley, and Glass, some form of Asian religion.
b. For Reich, Orthodox Judaism.
c. For John Tavener, an Englishman, Russian Orthodoxy.
7. Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony (1976) is similar to that of Pärt, but the composer
was unaware of Western minimalism at that time.
a. It saw a resurgence in 1992 with a new recording featuring Dawn Upshaw and
became one of the best-selling classical albums in history.
b. Modernists belittled this commercial success, but by that time Modernism was
in fact no longer a force in classical music.
8. The long nineteenth century gave way to a very short twentieth century. New
eclecticism emerged at its end, bringing us to where we are today.