Odd Sounds of the Sixties

For me there are three main strands in 1960s music:

1. immensely popular guitar-driven pop songs by bands which now enjoy immense wealth and mythical status
2. a much larger body of 'mundane' (although actually probably more interesting than #1) works which saw great contemporary success (think Cliff Richard, The Monkees, Englebert Humperdinck, etc)
3. An influential and underappreciated avant-garde whose work was, in some cases, appropriated and watered-down by group 1

I'm not saying that bands like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were not important, or that their work did not contain elements of originality. But in this blog post I want to restore the balance a bit, and give some attention to a small selection of some of the truly radical musical works that were produced in the 1960s.

The Zodiac : Cosmic Sounds (1967)
What is it?: 1967 proto-prog concept album based around the signs of the Zodiac
Impact factor: not much
Obscurity rating: so obscure that nobody is quite sure whether the album is called Cosmic Sounds and the band is called The Zodiac, or vice versa

Free music - Virgo - The Perpetual Perfectionist

György Ligeti, Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes (1962)
What is it?: an 'event-score' by the Hungarian modernist composer György Ligeti in which 100 metronomes are left to tick to a halt
Impact factor: more than you might expect. Ligeti's compositions were used in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey, and his work is still admired and performed
Obscurity rating: as a well-known encyclopedia reports, the piece has only been performed a limited number of times 'due to the obvious difficulty of procuring such a large quantity of machines'



The Velvet Underground, Sister Ray (1968)
What is it?: 17m27s jam session which closes the album White Light/White Heat, foreshadowing the more egregious parts of Lou Reed's solo work
Impact factor: at the time almost none, but now an important part of the repertoire of a very important band
Obscurity rating: as above

Free music - Sister Ray

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kontakte (premiered 1960)
What is it?: extended electronic composition, developed at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in 1958-60 by the composer of the Helicopter String Quartet.
Impact factor: substantial
Obscurity rating: often presented as the archetypal piece of dense avant-garde music, but nonetheless appreciated by a significant minority of Radio 3 listeners

Available here