Overview
Includes analysis of contemporary reviews and criticism of Sixties music.
Examines the cultural and socio-political contradictions of the period.
Explores the relationship between the arts and culture
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period’s socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period’s music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: ’Folk,’ ‘Rock,’ ‘Jazz,’ ‘Avant-Garde,’ ‘Classical.’ But the book’s real subject matter—treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between—is the Sixties’ tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.
Reviews
"This serious and timely study compels reflection and—for those of us who remember—self-reflection.”
—Joseph Horowitz, author of Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
“An ingenious and engaging exploration of the era’s music and social history. Drawing from his expertise in music journalism and thorough scholarship, Wierzbicki captures Beats, hippies, rockers, serialists, folkniks, and jazzmen in vivid detail that springs off the page. It is essential reading on the music and culture of the period, including its contradictory impulses and lasting effects.”
—Kate McQuiston, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. USA
“Wierzbicki again proves himself a virtuoso of insight in this meticulously sourced, beautifully imagined, and crisply written tour through the shifting landscapes of American music in the 1960s. I can't imagine a more exhilarating scholarly road trip.”
—Michael Hicks, author of Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
James Wierzbicki lives in the Australian town of Coober Pedy. For twenty year, he was the classical music critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other American newspapers, and for another twenty years a professor at the University of California-Irvine, the University of Michigan, and the University of Sydney.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: When Music Mattered
Book Subtitle: American Music in the Sixties
Authors: James Wierzbicki
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96694-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-96693-5Published: 28 April 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-96696-6Published: 29 April 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-96694-2Published: 27 April 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XLII, 265
Topics: US History, Modern History, Cultural History, Social History, Music