An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 18 | ROCK IN THE 1960s 451

minimalism’s appeal to a nonspecialist audience, reversing a trend in much

twentieth-century classical composition. By reducing the amount of musical

material a listener had to digest, minimalist composers moved the focus of listen-

ing toward the experience of sound in the moment and change on an expanded

time scale. That scale invited a contemplative response that could connect with

spirituality, ritual, and an expanding consciousness. These features of the music,

along with the use of electrically amplifi ed instruments and voices, made com-

mon ground with the youthful counterculture of the 1960s and helped mold

the tastes of younger listeners. By incorporating into their work what they had

learned from non-Western and vernacular music, especially jazz, the minimal-

ists helped thaw barriers that seemed frozen into place, instilling a new spirit of

excitement into the classical music scene.

ROCK IN THE 1960s

W hereas popular music in the 1950s had consisted of a conservative mainstream,

represented by singers such as Frank Sinatra, and newer styles emerging on the

periphery of the music industry, such as R&B and rock and roll, developments

in popular music in the 1960s may be thought of as the intermingling of center

and periphery. In other words, mainstream songwriting and studio procedures

were adopted by rock and roll, country, and R&B musicians, and at the same time

the musical characteristics of those peripheral styles were increasingly heard in

mainstream popular songs. By the middle of the decade, in fact, rock and roll, now

generally referred to by the shorter label rock, was the mainstream. In short, the

history of rock, country, and R&B—which began to be referred to as soul music—

in the 1960s is the story of the adoption of mainstream means of production.

SONGWRITING TEAMS, PHIL SPECTOR,

AND THE BRILL BUILDING

That process of merging mainstream production methods with newer musical

styles had begun in the 1950s with the work of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a

songwriting team in the Tin Pan Alley mold. Leiber and Stoller’s new twist was

that they wrote for R&B artists such as Big Mama Thornton, whose 1952 record

Steve Reich on the Discovery of Phase Music

In their own words

I

put headphones on and noticed that the two

tape recorders were almost exactly in sync.

The effect of this aurally was that I heard the

sound jockeying back and forth in my head

between my left and right ear, as one machine or

the other drifted ahead. Instead of immediately

correcting that, I let it go.... what happened

was that one of the machines was going slightly

faster... because the left channel was moving

ahead of the right channel. I let it go further, and

it fi nally got precisely the relationship I wanted

to get to.... It was an accidental discovery.

Philip Glass

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