± The early 1960s was a time of optimism and idealism, particularly in the U.S. The Kennedy administration helped fuel this optimism and helped direct society’s focus on youth culture.
± Television played an increasingly significant role in society and in disseminating music.
± The 1950s had seen substantial developments in classical music, jazz, and the birth of a new genre, rock and roll. Many musicians were comfortable building on the recent developments, but some were more interested in innovation.
± Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was a groundbreaking work incorporating graphical and proportional notation as well as unorthodox playing techniques.
± As the 1950s ended, there were many different streams of jazz, including a number of innovations from the year 1959. John Coltrane’s album Giant Steps expanded the technical limits of jazz and featured increasing harmonic complexity. Miles Davis’ album Kind of Blue was one of the most important jazz albums of all time and popularized the technique of creating modal jazz compositions, emphasizing creativity and musicality over technical ability. Ornette Coleman’s innovation of free jazz was one of the biggest developments of 1959. Harmonic, metrical, tempo, and even pitch boundaries were shattered.
± One of the main ways of disseminating popular music was AM radio, which by 1960 was dominated by a “Top 40” format. Payola scandals showed that sometimes money and bribes outweighed actual talent.
± The rock music of 1960 seemed simply to be an extension of 1950s music. There was very little new. There were some glimmers of future developments in popular music. Berry Gordy was organizing a recording company in Detroit that would eventually become Motown.
± Film music was on the edge of big changes. Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho epitomized the new style, incorporating many of the new compositional techniques developed in classical music.
± Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is one of the great choral works of the twentieth century. Britten juxtaposes liturgical texts with anti-war poems by Wilfrid Owen and uses different combinations of instruments and voices for the two types of text to emphasize the dichotomy.
± In the early 1960s, jazz was struggling for an audience share. Jazz musicians tried different ways of reaching audiences. John Coltrane chose to improvise over recent popular music. Some musicians adopted a hard bop style that combined serious improvisation with simpler rhythms and harmonies resembling the newly popular rock style.
± In the early 1960s, FM radio came to be associated with rock and roll, permitting artists to break free from the tightly controlled top 40 format of AM radio. Other technological developments from this time include the cassette tape and the Marshall amplifier.
± Another new musical style in the early 1960s emanated from California. Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys were some of the first to pursue the “surfing” style.
± In 1961, Bob Dylan moved from Minnesota to New York to meet Woody Guthrie. Dylan’s lyrics that urged political consciousness were in stark contrast to the love songs and surfing songs that dominated the airwaves.
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± The Beatles developed slowly between 1957, when they first became involved in bands, and 1962, when they made their first recordings with their eventual personnel. From that point on, however, The Beatles’ rise was nearly meteoric. |