The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Although it is possible that the Fair lost money, many knowledgeable people are inclined to doubt that the loss was anywhere near the one and a half million dollars Woodstock Ventures is claiming. The corporation should open its books to the public. The thousands of ticket-holders who were turned away from the site because of traffic jams (while other thousands of contributors to the traffic jams got in free) deserve some consideration. So far, the management has said nothing about refunds, and there has been talk of setting up a group suit to demand the money. One complication is that since no tickets were collected there is no way of distinguishing those who made it from those who didn’t, but rumor has it that the state may sidestep this problem by suing the producers on the ground that they had no serious intention of taking tickets at the fairgrounds.

  If the festival succeeded in spite of the gross ineptitude of its masterminds, it was mostly because three hundred thousand or more young people were determined to have a good time no matter what. The accounts of the peacefulness and generosity of the participants are all true, but they have tended to miss the point. The cooperative spirit did not stem from solidarity in an emergency—the “we all forgot our differences and helped each other” phenomenon that attends power blackouts and hurricanes—so much as from a general refusal to adopt any sort of emergency psychology. The widespread conviction that the Lord (or the Hog Farm, or the people of Monticello, or someone) would provide removed any incentive to fight or to hoard food, and the pilgrims simply proceeded to do what they had come to do: dig the music and the woods, make friends, reaffirm their life style in freedom from hostile straights and cops, swim naked, and get high. Drug dealing was completely open; kids stood on Hurd Road, the main thoroughfare of the festival site, hawking mescaline and acid. But the most exhilarating intoxicants were the warmth and fellow-feeling that allowed us to abandon our chronic defenses against other people. As for the music, though rock was the only thing that could have drawn such a crowd, it was not the focal point of the festival but, rather, a pleasant background to the mass presence of the hip community. Few of us got close enough to see anything, and as the music continued for seventeen hours at a stretch our adrenalin output naturally decreased. (On Sunday, a boy who had driven in from California commented, “Wow, I can’t believe all the groups here, and I’m not even listening to them.” “It’s not the music,” said another. “It’s—all this!”) The sound system was excellent, and thousands listened from camps in the woods, dozing and waking while the music went on till dawn. Everyone was so quiet you felt almost alone in the dark, but you couldn’t move very far without stepping on someone’s hand or brushing against a leg.

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  The festival site was like the eye of a storm—virtually undisturbed by the frantic activity behind the scenes. Once the nuisance of getting there was over with (I eventually got a ride in a performers’ police-escorted caravan) and the Lord had provided (I just happened to bump into some friends with a leakproof tent and plenty of food), I found the inconveniences trivial compared to the pleasures. But then I did not have to sleep out in the mud for two nights, and by Sunday I couldn’t help suspecting that some of the beautiful, transcendent acceptance going around was just plain old passivity. It was a bit creepy that there was such a total lack of resentment at the Fair’s mismanagement, especially among those who had paid from seven to eighteen dollars. People either made excuses for Woodstock Ventures (“They couldn’t help it, man; it was just too big for them”) or thought of the festival as a noble social experiment to which crass concepts like responsible planning were irrelevant. For the most part, they took for granted not only the discomforts but the tremendous efforts made by the state, the local communities, and unpaid volunteers to distribute cheap or free food and establish minimum standards of health and safety. No one seemed to comprehend what the tasks of mobilizing and transporting emergency food, water, and medical personnel, clearing the roads, and removing garbage meant in terms of labor and money. Ecstatic heads even proclaimed that the festival proved the viability of a new culture in which no one worked and everything was free. And in the aftermath anyone who has dared to complain has been put down as a crank. It should be possible to admit that the people created a memorable gathering without embracing those who botched things up. (A letter writer in the Village Voice went as far as to say, “Woodstock Ventures should be congratulated and not chastised for giving us smiles, peace, music, and good vibrations.” All those paying customers might disagree about being “given” music; personally, I don’t see why Woodstock Ventures should get credit for my smiles.) But maybe it isn’t. And maybe there is a lesson here about the political significance of youth culture. From the start, the cultural-revolutionary wing of the radical movement saw Woodstock as a political issue. The underground papers made a lot of noise about businessmen profiting from music that belonged to the community, and some movement people demanded and received money to bring political groups to the festival and set up an enclave called Movement City as a center for radical activity. If the festival staff had been foolish enough to try to restrict the audience to paid admissions, the movement might have had something to do. As it was, Movement City was both physically and spiritually isolated from the bulk of the crowd. It was not the activists but a hundred-odd members of the Hog Farm, a Santa Fe–based pacifistic commune, who were the most visible community presence, operating a free kitchen, helping people recover from bad acid trips, and setting up a rudimentary communication system of oral and written survival bulletins. A few radicals talked hopefully of liberating the concessions or the stage area. Abbie Hoffman interrupted the Who’s set on Saturday night to berate the crowd for listening to music when John Sinclair, a Michigan activist, had just been sentenced to a long prison term for giving some marijuana to a cop. Peter Townshend hit Hoffman with his guitar, and that is more of a commentary on the relation of rock to politics than all of Rat’s fuzzy moralizing.

  What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of blues. It is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power. Its rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be—and has been—criminal, Fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary. Nor is the hip life style inherently radical. It can simply be a more pleasurable way of surviving within the system, which is what the Pop sensibility has always been about. Certainly that was what Woodstock was about: ignore the bad, groove on the good, hang loose, and let things happen. The truth is that there can’t be a revolutionary culture until there is a revolution. In the meantime, we should at least insist that the capitalists who produce rock concerts charge reasonable prices for reasonable service.

  WINTHROP SARGEANT

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1968

  AS A DEMONSTRATION of the bankruptcy of the musical avant-garde, the concert given in Carnegie Hall by Lukas Foss and the Buffalo Philharmonic on Wednesday evening of last week was pretty convincing. It started off with a piece called “Re-ak” for Large Orchestra, by the Korean serialist composer Isang Yun, which contained a few moderately interesting sound effects but nothing more. Then came Charles Ives’ “Calcium Light Night,” which, of course, has nothing to do with the avant-garde, and is one of those compositions in which Ives sought to convey the impression of several bands or orchestras playing at the same time. It is, however, very short and, to my mind, does not exemplify Ives at his best. After that, we had Mr. Foss’s own “Baroque Variations”—an example of his Mona Lisa’s–mustache music, in which a movement from Handel’s Concerto Grosso No. 12, Scarlatti’s Sonata No. 23, and the prelude to Bach’s Partita in E for Solo Violin were subjected to various distortions, including slowing down, speeding up, making the music come in and out of focus, a lot of soundless bowing by violins, and the interpolation of some wrong n
otes and sounds from bells and cymbals. The Bach item had been heard here before, though Mr. Foss had added some things to it—some of that soundless bowing, for one thing. If all this was supposed to be funny, I think it missed its mark. (The revived Bach item sounded like a stale joke.) I am happy to report that many in the audience booed loudly, though some applauded. I suspect that the applauders were applauding the discernible fragments of Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach, rather than what Mr. Foss had done to them. After the intermission came something terribly tedious called “Correspondences for Strings and Tape,” by the Princeton mathematician and musicologian Milton Babbitt. This was written for string orchestra plus electronic sounds recorded on tape. I could find nothing of the slightest interest in it. Mr. Babbitt has recently become famous for an article entitled “Who Cares If You Listen?” I, for one, don’t—at least as far as Mr. Babbitt’s music is concerned. The evening closed with a Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra by the Pole Krzysztof Penderecki. I can say that the violin part, played expertly by Paul Zukofsky, was well conceived for that instrument. Otherwise, I found the work a total bore.

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  It was a pleasure on the previous evening (Tuesday) to attend a concert of music by the California composer Harry Partch at the Whitney Museum. Mr. Partch, as is pretty well known, is a complete individualist, who not only creates his own kind of music but also builds the instruments it is played on. I arrived at the Museum to find a long line of hopeful auditors waiting to get in (most of them didn’t), and it was only by explaining that I was a critic and had to get in that I gained admittance. Inside the room allotted to this concert there were already hundreds of people sitting on the floor or standing at the back. I took up my position among the latter. A lot of tuning was going on. Mr. Partch is very particular about pitch, which is something that the serialists, with their inaccurate, piano-keyboard ears, have long since forgotten. Mr. Partch is, in fact, so particular about pitch that he has divided the octave into forty-three intervals, as opposed to the twelve intervals of the keyboard. This arrangement enables him to attain a purity of intonation that one is seldom privileged to hear. He does not, of course, use all forty-three intervals at once. Most of his music is diatonic. The forty-three are there just to provide the possibility of an exact sort of intonation that derives from the theories of the great Greek mathematician and musical theoretician Pythagoras.

  The instruments on which Mr. Partch’s music is played look rather bizarre at first glance. There are a couple of organs specially tuned to the forty-three intervals. There are a number of xylophone- or gamelan-like instruments made of bottles, light bulbs, and redwood planks, some of the last-named emitting very low tones. There are various instruments of the zither type, a system of glass bells made from old laboratory equipment, and many other things. The sounds drawn from these instruments by Mr. Partch and a group of six or eight disciples are somewhat Oriental in character. The first number on the program, “Olympos’ Pentatonic,” was, in fact, based on a scale—C, D, E flat, G, A flat—that is rather common in Japanese music today, as it was among the ancient Greeks. There was a great variety of timbre, or instrumental color, ranging from low thumps to tinkles; the music was melodious as well as colorful, and everywhere it was evocative and charming. It is a pity that the size and fragility of Mr. Partch’s instruments prevent them from being transported easily. It is also a pity, in a way, that his art is absolutely unique. Unlike more traditional forms of music, it will probably die with its creator, never to be heard again.

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  Ravi Shankar, whose first name is Sanskrit for “The Sun,” had been shining most of the week at Philharmonic Hall, and I went to bask in his particular variety of Indian music on Thursday night. A fair-sized audience, made up mostly of young people, was present, and the greater part of the program, which was participated in by thirteen musicians besides Mr. Shankar, was quite delightful. Mr. Shankar himself is, of course, a prodigious virtuoso on the sitar, and to me the most memorable event of the evening was a gath performed by him, with tabla (drum) accompaniment by Alla Rakha—this even though he broke off his alap (or rhythmless introductory section) in order to bow to applause before beginning the gath proper, which is something that would not happen in India. There were, as a matter of fact, a number of things on this program that would not have happened in India, among them a gath for the combination of sitar and sarod—instruments that were played either in unison or alternately, in an arrangement that made one doubt whether pure improvisation was taking place. And the program ended, rather monstrously, with a nine-piece big-band ensemble, which Mr. Shankar conducted as if he were Zubin Mehta. This was something so foreign to the spirit of Indian music that it aroused doubts as to whether or not Shankar the showman was taking precedence over Shankar the musician. However, there were many moments of pleasure—some agile singing by Lakshmi Shankar, and a percussion duet (almost a duel) between Alla Rakha, who played the banya and the tabla, and Palghat Raghu, who played the mridangam. This was Indian rhythm at its purest, and the mathematical complexity of syncopation with which Mr. Rakha and Mr. Raghu assaulted each other made one reflect that it was not for nothing that the Indians invented both the concept of zero and the algebraic x.

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  The occurrences of the week—all of them rather out of the ordinary—made me give a thought or two to the current state of music. It is obvious that the grand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of symphonic music is in its death throes, and that it has been succeeded by a rather foolish school of modern composition whose exponents would be more at home as mathematicians than as musicians. It is also obvious that the music of India, through such musicians as Mr. Shankar, is becoming more and more influential in the West. What has the immediate future got in store for us? In my opinion, new musical traditions do not descend from above through the ideas of educated composers. They are more apt to rise from below—from the music of the people. I need not present the well-known historical precedents for this theory. The music of the people is now rock. I confess that though I originally found rock merely annoying, I have since come to find it an exceedingly interesting type of music—or perhaps “interesting” is not the word; “hypnotic” is better. Forget the enormous loudness that its youthful followers seem to regard as its most important characteristic. Loudness—or softness, for that matter—is not integral to the structure of music, and any music worthy of the name exerts a hypnotic spell. Rock, in the wide spectrum of style that reaches from the Beatles to its wilder manifestations, includes an enormous variety of musical language, reaching back even to baroque and Renaissance idioms. It has preserved the regular pulse (usually referred to as “beat”) that underlies nearly all great music from the Gregorian chant on and has been left out only in some music of our century. It is more “integrated”—that is to say, slightly less “African”—than jazz, and much freer in matters of rhythm. Its chord structure, which is agreeably simple, is of the do-mi-sol variety, and hence is in the mainstream of music. Most important, it is capable of inducing a wider range of emotional responses than jazz. I could never imagine a jazz Tristan and Isolde (if you don’t like Tristan, pick your own great myth), but I can imagine a rock Tristan. To be sure, what I am writing about is at present regarded as a kind of folk music. But I think that it sometimes approaches art music. Perhaps this is where the future of music lies.

  DWIGHT MACDONALD

  JANUARY 19, 1963 (MICHAEL HARRINGTON’S THE OTHER AMERICA)