The 1960s had plenty of bad news—the Cuban Missile Crisis; the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the KKK church bombing in Alabama; riots sparked by racial unrest in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit; the deaths of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding—but there were also glimmers of hope—the “I Have a Dream” speech; peace, love, and harmony in the hippie movement. The late 1960s were more troubling and less promising.
Italian-born composer Luciano Berio composed a work in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory, using only the syllables of King’s name as text. The piece was expanded into the second movement of Berio’s 1968 Sinfonia for Eight Voices and Orchestra. The main inspiration for the music of the third movement was the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. Many other musical sources generate some of the fragments that are overlaid with the Mahler, including significant twentieth-century composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Ravel, Debussy, and Ives. The main inspiration for the text is Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The Unnamable. Sinfonia is complex and full of layers of meaning.
The synthesizer was developed during the 1960s. Robert Moog was the technical developer, and Wendy Carlos had the first popular hits using the new equipment.
Miles Davis stepped up to fill the void left by the passing of John Coltrane. Working with some of the finest jazz rhythm musicians, he combined elements of jazz and rock, creating the hybrid style known as jazz fusion, or simply fusion.
Motown struggled in the late 1960s, with the Holland-Dozier-Holland composing team leaving Motown and suing Berry Gordy. When the ‘60s ended, Motown moved from Detroit to Los Angeles. Motown did have big hits with Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and with the Jackson 5’s 1969 debut album, which sold more than half a million copies.
Cream was known for its monumental instrumental improvisations, featuring guitarist Eric Clapton. The band was considered an influence on the nascent style of heavy metal, and certainly on hard rock. The group that Clapton had been with before Cream, The Yardbirds, morphed into Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin is credited with being an even stronger influence on the development of heavy metal. The band Steppenwolf gained recognition through appearances on the soundtracks of the films Candy and Easy Rider. Their song “Born to Be Wild” includes the lyrics “heavy-metal thunder” and is also thought to have been an influence on heavy metal.
Rock festivals received a boost when the D. A. Pennebaker film Monterey Pop, released in 1968, portrayed the festival in a positive light. Festivals multiplied all over the U.S. and Canada. The famous “Woodstock Music & Arts Fair”—the “Aquarian explosion” of “three days of peace and music,” as the organizers billed it, with an impressive musical lineup, drew a crowd of nearly half a million. The final act of the festival was Jimi Hendrix, whose solo version of “The Star- Spangled Banner” included trope-like interruptions representing the horrors of the Vietnam War. Hendrix’s performance is seen as a compendium of avant-garde guitar techniques.
In 1970 and 1971, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin all died of drug-related causes. The Beatles broke up in April 1970.