![]() ![]() You didn’t need to go to school, you didn’t need to take lessons from the maestro to join them as a certain kind of co-equal participant in the development of an “advanced” musical language. There were plenty of precursors, of course (I think immediately of Charlie Parker’s brilliant interpolation of Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” into his solos on “Koko”), but a series of interlocking transformations-including the massive expansion of public education in the US and the UK, the perfection of vinyl as a medium and the transistor as a technology, the rapidly increasing bloat of the entertainment industries, the decolonization process in Africa and Asia, and the new social movements in what used to be called the First World-undermined the authority and permanence of those masters of the written score. If I were to point to the specialness of the late 1960s, it would not be to suggest that earlier moments of phonographic history-such as the global flood of proletarian and rural musics that rose up and swirled endlessly on wax in the years after 1925-were any less significant to the experience of the twentieth century, but rather simply to notice the cultivation of a new kind of listening, one that moved across the field of genre with relative ease and enthusiasm, and that-most importantly-put that stereo jockey into a new kind of relation to the “fine art” music that might find its way onto the platter: collegiality, equality, criticism. Everyone knows that phonography changed everything.
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