The 1960s were a period of intense questioning of virtually every cultural assumption. What is art? What is music? What authority do governments have to send young men to war? Why are wars really fought - for legitimate principles or economic interests? Why "should" men have shorter hair than women? Why should people wear clothes? Why should they wait until marriage to have sex? Why shouldn't people relieve the monotony of their existence with psychedelic drugs? No assumption, it seemed, was so basic that the young people of the '60s couldn't call it into question. To some extent, the explosion was a reaction to the overwhelming conformity of the post-War era, an era in which stabilization and restoration of economic growth had been paramount priorities. President Eisenhower, a five-star general who commanded the U.S. forces in Europe during World War II, had represented the uniformity of military discipline; John Kennedy (served 1961-63), at 43 the youngest man ever elected U.S. President, seemed to usher in an era of youth and new possibilities.

The immense spectrum of answers opened up by the question "What is art?" makes the '60s an especially difficult decade to summarize. Anything you could imagine being presented as a work of art was presented as such, along with many more things almost no one could imagine. The conventions of musical performance were overhauled. One of the more radical gestures was a series of "pieces" called Listen (1966-68), in which composer Max Neuhaus took an audience, each person with the word "LISTEN" stamped on his or her hand, through found sound environments such as power plants and subway stations. In another "piece," Homage to John Cage, Nam June Paik poured shampoo on Cage's head and cut off his tie. One 1969 piece by Phillip Corner has yet to be performed: "One anti-personnel type-CBU bomb will be thrown into the audience." Annea Lockwood burned pianos amplified by asbestos-covered microphones, and followed one such performance in 1968 with a seance at which Beethoven's spirit was allegedly aroused. We can only wonder what he thought of the milieu he found.

Notation did not loom large in the conceptualist world, and the reader will note the dearth of musical examples in this chapter. Partly as a consequence of the ephemerality and non-documentability of many conceptualist works, it seems likely that less music will survive in performance from the '60s than from any other decade of the century, because to the question, "Hey, can this be art?", the answer is frequently, "Yeah, you can call it art, but so what?" Yet the decade was a fascinating learning experience, yielding an enormous supply of musical anecdotes if nothing else. Spurred on by Cage, it cleared the stage of the last vestiges of European high-art obligations, and freed composers to start again from zero.

It also initiated a radical split in American music's self-image. In 1961 in Manhattan, an Asian-American pianist named Yoko Ono - at first the wife of the Cage-influenced composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, later famous for her marriage to the rock star John Lennon - began a new trend by opening up her Downtown loft for performances of experimental music. Before this time, music in New York had been presented almost exclusively at Uptown concert halls, but Ono's move, and the concert series curated at her loft by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield, initiated a Downtown tradition of presenting new music informally in rough, unconventional spaces. This geographic dislocation resulted in an entire new body of work, so-called "Downtown music," though in many respects it continued the experimental tradition inherited from Ives, Cowell, Partch, and Cage. In 1979, Downtown music - mostly conceptualist and minimalist - made its first public collective splash at New York's experimental arts space The Kitchen in a widely-attended festival called New Music New York. From this moment, the music that traced its inheritance back to Cage's 4'33" had a new, informal, overly vague but widely used name: New Music.

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