When Music Mattered - American Music in the Sixties

This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period''s socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period''s music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: ''Folk,'' ''Rock,'' ''Jazz,'' ''Avant-Garde,'' ''Classical.'' But the book''s real subject matter-treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between-is the Sixties'' tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.