The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and "the Sixties" across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation,
participatory "events," performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the "Third World," delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts.
Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.
Industry Reviews
"This book encapsulates how and why popular music engages with politics and it is an illuminating read ... [an] original, enjoyable and very readable book." -- Guy Osborn, Times Higher Education
"a wide-ranging survey, and a valuable one...Deftly editied by Robert Adlington...throws a revealing light on a movement with too many manifestos in 'a decade that saw some of its most singular and provocative manifestations'" -- Michael Quinn, Classical Music
"Recounting little-known tales...confirms Sound Commitments value, in tracing avant-garde sounds' movement from the academy to the streets. More volumes of this quality about those times would be welcome." --Jazz Word
"In popular discourse, that cantankerous and forward-looking decade the 1960s has been far too much smoothed over, redrawn as a climax of fatuous idealism that ultimately produced only new wrinkles in fashion. Adlington's bracingly revealing volume of internationally-chosen case studies in avant-garde music restores that brave era to us as we lived it, with quotations from protagonists on all sides that remind us how much was at stake - and how much we need a
resurgence of that idealism today."--Kyle Gann
"Sound Commitments illuminates a decade that challenged prejudice, defeatism, dogma, and victorianism. Adlington's contributors don't smooth over the fault lines, but cover an ambitious variety of nations, styles, media, and agendas. We are left with a sense of failed idealism, but early 21st-century readers are left to ask, ruefully: isn't that better than no idealism whatsoever?"--Arved Ashby, Ohio State University, editor of The Pleasure of
Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology
"Makes a convincing case for the continued vigor of the musical avant-garde in the post-World War II period. The essays are impressive both for their individual depth and for their collective geographical and conceptual range."--Jonathan Bernard, University of Washington
