446 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE 1960s
On April 6, 1964, a composition for voice and three clarinets was premiered
whose symbolic importance far outweighs its length (barely ninety seconds).
Eleg y for J.F.K., composed by the eighty-one-year-old Igor Stravinsky, mourns the
assassination on November 22, 1963, of President John F. Kennedy. Stravinsky,
who died in 1971, fi lled a unique place in American musical life: an embodi-
ment of a musical age governed by axioms thought to be historically necessary.
Stravinsky’s embrace of serialism in the 1950s had raised it in some circles to
near-axiomatic status. And now the Russian-born master, long an American citi-
zen, was using his rarefi ed art to commemorate the nation’s fallen leader.
But th is moment of quiet homage was also marked by offstage r umbling s: the
start of a stylistic earthquake that would soon overwhelm the notion of historical
necessity in classical composition. To be sure, atonality and serialism were well
established. But so were diatonic approaches, as used by Samuel Barber, whose
Antony and Cleopatra opened New York’s new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966,
and William Schuman, who continued composing after assuming the presi-
dency of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1962. In April 1965 Charles
Ives’s Symphony no. 4, composed between 1910 and 1916, was heard in full for the
fi rst time. That event, suggesting links between Ives and other “experimental”
American composers, including Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison,
Conlon Nancarrow, and John Cage, raised new questions about this nation’s
dependence on the European past. And in 1964 Terry Riley composed In C,
whose obsessive repetition of simple diatonic fragments outlined another new
style that was soon labeled minimalist.
With only Igor Stravinsky left from a past when great composers were thought
to defi ne their era’s musical values, other kinds of music were also challenging the
classical sphere’s place atop the nation’s musical hierarchy. No longer certain of
classical music’s place in a larger musical culture, composers in the 1960s searched
for new means of expression that refl ected the music’s new cultural contexts.
The New York classical scene in the mid-1960s can be seen as having been
dominated by three distinct kinds of composers: the composer as intellectual,
the composer as experimentalist, and the composer as creator of works for the
concert hall. Intellectual composers dominated academia, and in those years
being an intellectual meant being a serialist. Composer Jacob Druckman later
claimed that “not being a serialist on the East Coast of the United States in the
sixties was like not being a Catholic in Rome in the thirteenth century.” Though
their audience was small, serialists dealt with artistic issues in a way that encour-
aged support for teaching and composing. Cage and his fellow experimenters,
though no less intellectual in their way than the serialists, were less concerned
with winning the respect of the academic establishment. Their music, which
challenged the very idea of an artwork, attracted patrons who also supported
modern dance and avant-garde painting. Finally, a number of composers,
including George Rochberg, George Crumb, Jacob Druckman, William Bolcom,
Lukas Foss, and David del Tredici, took an approach—sometimes called the New
Romanticism—that harked back to the European past. They, and more recently
Christopher Rouse, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, John Harbison, Joseph Schwantner, and
Joan Tower, among others, have benefi ted from the resources that orchestras
and opera houses can place at a composer’s disposal.serialist orthodoxySamuel Barber172028_18_440-467_r3_sd.indd 446 23/01/13 11:02 AM