Song in America |
Politics & Culture
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Politics |
 |
Culture |
Civil Rights (1960 - 1979) |
| 1960 | 1960
- Birth control pill approved
- First performance of Henze's The Prince of Homburg
- Bernard Herrmann composes the score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
- Musicals include Camelot, The Fantasticks, Bye Bye Birdie, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown
- Pierre Boulez: Pli Selon Pli
- Benjamin Britten: The Midsummer Night's Dream
- Krzysztof Penderecki: Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
- Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
- Singers Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Jennifer Larmore and Dawn Upshaw born
- Zora Neale Hurston dies
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| 1961 | 1961
- John F. Kennedy inaugurated
- Peace Corps created
- Bay of Pigs invasion
- Freedom Rides challenge segregation
- Communists start building Berlin Wall
- Grace Bumbry is the first black artist to sing at Bayreuth
- Benjamin Britten: War Requiem
- John Cage: Silence
- Joseph Heller: Catch-22
- J. D. Salinger: Franny and Zooey
- Wynton Marsalis born
- Ernest Hemingway dies
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| 1962 | 1962
- Cuban Missile Crisis
- Samuel Barber writes his Piano Concerto, which wins Pulitzer prize
- William Schuman becomes president of Lincoln Center
- Andy Warhol shows Campbell's Soup Cans, which become Pop-Art icons
- Audio cassettes are born
- Stephen Sondheim: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
- Edward Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
- William Faulkner dies
- Robinson Jeffers dies
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| 1963 | 1963
- March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King declares, "I have a dream"
- Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
- President Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon Johnson becomes president
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Cat's Cradle
- Anne Sophie Mutter born
- Georges Braque dies
- Jean Cocteau dies
- Francis Poulenc dies
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| 1964 | 1964
- Civil Rights Act
- Martin Luther King awarded Nobel Peace Prize
- Aaron Copland receives Presidential Medal of Freedom
- The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show
- Film: Dr. Strangelove
- Musicals include Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl, and Anyone Can Whistle
- New York World's Fair is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding"
- Augusta Read Thomas born
- Rachel Carson dies
- Colin McPhee dies
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| 1965 | 1965
- Malcolm X assassinated
- Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches
- American combat troops sent to Vietnam
- Voting Rights Act
- Watts riots
- Winston Churchill dies
- Leonard Bernstein: Chichester Psalms
- Philip Glass collaborates with sitarist Ravi Shankar
- 8-track tapes
- Ned Rorem: Miss Julie (opera)
- T. S. Eliot dies
- Edgar Varèse dies
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| 1966 | 1966
- Founding of Black Panther Party
- "Cultural Revolution" begins in China
- Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center opens with Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber
- Luciano Berio: Sequenza III
- Truman Capote: In Cold Blood
- André Breton dies
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| 1967 | 1967
- 50,000 march on the Pentagon to protest Vietnam War
- Thurgood Marshall becomes first African American on Supreme Court
- Six-Day War between Israel and Arab countries
- The term "minimalism" starts being applied to music
- Movies: The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
- Musicals: You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Hair
- Joshua Bell born
- Edward Hopper dies
- Dorothy Parker dies
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| 1968 | 1968
- Martin Luther King assassinated
- May protests in France; student protests in many other countries including SDS "Ten Days of Resistance"
- Robert F. Kennedy assassinated
- Walter Carlos's album Switched on Bach features the Moog synthesizer
- Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In debuts
- Karlheinz Stockhausen: Aus den Sieben Tagen
- Neal Cassidy dies
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| 1969 | 1969
- Richard Nixon inaugurated
- Men walk on moon
- First Concorde flight
- Woodstock Festival
- Peter Maxwell Davies: Eight Songs for a Mad King (musical theater work)
- Judy Garland dies
- Jack Kerouac dies
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1970- Howard Hanson sets Whitman's "The Mystic Trumpeter" for speaker, chorus, and orchestra
- Re-issue of Wa-Wan Press publications
- Roger Sessions sets Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" for soloists, chorus, and orchestra
- Vincent Persichetti: A Net of Fireflies, Op. 115 (song cycle with English translations of Japanese poems)
- Dorothy Chang born
- Louise Bogan dies
- George Frederick McKay dies
| 1970
- Four students shot to death at Kent State University during protest of invasion of Cambodia
- Simon and Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water
- Sondheim and Prince: Company
- E. M. Forester dies
- Mark Rothko dies
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| 1971 | 1971
- United States blockade of North Vietnam
- Voting age in United States lowered to 18
- Premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass opens the Kennedy Center
- Dominick Argento: Postcard from Morocco
- The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers album
- The Ed Sullivan Show goes off the air
- Musicals include Jesus Christ, Superstar (U. S. Premiere), Godspell, and Follies
- Pierre Boulez appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic
- Louis Armstrong dies
- Igor Stravinsky dies
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| 1972 | 1972
- Watergate break-in
- Nixon goes to China
- Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha premieres, 62 years after it was written
- Leonard Bernstein: Mass
- Ira Levin: The Stepford Wives
- John Berryman dies
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| 1973 | 1973
- Paris peace agreement provides for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam
- Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigns
- Roe v. Wade case legalizes abortion
- Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice
- Stephen Sondheim: A Little Night Music
- Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
- Pablo Picasso dies
- J. R. R. Tolkien dies
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| 1974 | 1974
- Richard Nixon resigns and Gerald Ford becomes President
- Centennial of Charles Ives' birth celebrated
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| 1975 | 1975
- Fall of Saigon and end of Vietnam War
- New World Records is founded, "dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies"
- Sony BetaMax is the first videocassette
- Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach
- Musicals include A Chorus Line and Chicago
- John Ashbery: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
- Dmitri Shostakovich dies
- Thornton Wilder dies
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1976- Jack Beeson: From a Watchtower (song cycle setting the poetry of four English poets)
- Harold Farberman: War Cry on a Prayer Feather (song cycle for soprano, baritone, and orchestra setting the poetry of the Taos Pueblo Indians of New Mexico)
- Leo Smit: At the Corner of the Sky (choral work setting the text of North American Indians)
| 1976
- VHS videocassettes introduced
- Musicals include Bernstein and Lerner's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the U.S. premiere of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
- William Schuman: Casey at the Bat: A Baseball Cantata
- Alex Haley: Roots
- Benjamin Britten dies
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| 1977 | 1977
- Jimmy Carter inaugurated
- Gian Carlo Menotti starts American version of Spoleto Festival in South Carolina
- Sony Walkman cassette player
- Laser videodiscs
- IRCAM opens in Paris
- Morton Feldman: Neither (monodrama)
- Thea Musgrave: Mary, Queen of Scots (opera)
- Musicals include Annie
- The first film in the Star Wars series is released
- Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
- Maria Callas dies
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| 1978 | 1978
- Jimmy Carter mediates Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt
- American Composers Alliance creates American Composers Orchestra
- Musicals include Fats Waller's Ain't Misbehavin'
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| 1979 | 1979
- Near-disaster at Three Mile Island
- Margaret Thatcher is Britain's first female Prime Minister
- Stephen Sondheim: Sweeney Todd
- Joseph Schwantner: Sparrows (for soprano and chamber ensemble)
- William Styron: Sophie's Choice wins the National Book Award
- Nadia Boulanger dies
- Richard Rogers dies
- Alan Tate dies
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