Few years in modern history have been so sentimentally fetishized as 1968. The year of revolutions - most of them lacking any sort of ideological seriousness or consistency - the year of assassinations, the year of The White Album; Khe Sanh, the Tet offensive, My Lai . . . and back home in America, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Second Wave Feminism at the Miss World pageant, Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae encyclical against birth control and the ‘post-pill paradise' of John Updike's Couples, while in Iraq, that anomalous creation of the Western powers, Saddam Hussein staged his coup and - a forty years perspective lends those twelve months a strange and ironic cast. But was 1968 the epoch that those who experienced it, either in optimistic youth, or more vicariously, have subsequently claimed? Did the world sit any differently on its axis at year's end?
The politics and culture of the 1960s have had powerful proponents - Arthur Marwick in the UK, Morris Dickstein more subtly and sceptically in the US - but a rising tide of revisionist history has started to set the key moments in the post-modern evolution a little further back in time. To some degree, this is mere book-making, the kind of comfortable regress that allows scholars - eager to notch up another bibliographic citation - to demonstrate that every cultural advance has a pre-history. There have been, however, more significant efforts to show that the 1950s, far from being a decade of bland prosperity, sleepy consensus and lack of adventure in the arts, were the real crucible of political experiment and creative endeavour. In his fine book Deliberate Speed, W. T. Lhamon jr suggests that the Eisenhower years witnessed not just the birth of the civil rights movement - along with feminism later, the only real engine of objective change in American life since the Progressive Era - but also the beginning of a period of artistic experiment which ran in parallel with political developments. Some of Lhamon's attempted connections may seem a little strained. It is hard to think of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations operating in the same intellectual universe as rock and roll, for instance, but for the most part the case is securely made. The music of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the early fiction of Thomas Pynchon (some might argue that all that followed was hyper-extended footnotes), the gestural paintings of Jackson Pollock, and critically the advent of cheap hi-fi, the portable tape recorder and television. There are gaps in Lhamon's survey. He no more than glances in the direction of John Cage, omits Sun Ra and Stockhausen altogether, and having shown the impact of new and accessible technologies makes nothing of electronic music. But then, this is a very American account and ignores much that is non-native in origin or in spirit. The other overwhelming reality of the 1950s is that globalisation and the internationalisation of culture were becoming realities. The Global Village of the 1960s had arrived a decade before, when the hippies were still in grade school.
It answers nothing more than narrative convenience to pick a single year as historically representative or exceptionally significant, but since 1968 is considered to be a cusp, why not look again at 1958, which happens to be the point de mire of the 2008 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. At first glance, it doesn't look in any way to be a year of soaring confidence. In 1958, a sharp global recession hit the United States with unexpected severity. America's powerful post-war trade boom faltered and stalled. Prices rose. Nevertheless, as George Katona reported in his 1960 book The Powerful Consumer, public confidence remained high despite ‘cumulative adverse expectations'. Wonderful phrase! Americans had money to spend; they simply elected not to for the moment.
The balance of trade was not the only thing to fall. With the year only four days old, Sputnik I - the ‘second moon' celebrated in an early song by Dick Raaymakers, working as ‘Kid Baltan' - fell back to earth. This was only a Soviet failure in a symbolic sense, since the satellite was subject to a strict gravitational equation, but it lifted American spirits. The alien bleeps from overhead - the CIA was convinced the Russians were broadcasting coded passages from Das Kapital; in fact, the little metal ball was merely playing out its call sign, over and over - had been silence for the moment and at the end of January America launched her own artificial satellite, Explorer I, followed in March by Vanguard I. In the year that saw the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) America had momentarily taken a lead over the Soviet Union. One of her most bizarre Cold Warriors, 14 year old Bobby Fischer won the national chess championship. It seemed only a matter of time before he was ready to take on the mighty Russians at what had become their own game. One young American had already done that, when in April 1958, Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. The cultural battle had already been taken to the Russians.
For a curious, poised moment the balance between New World and Old held and then shifted subtly. Elvis Presley was inducted into the US Army and sent to Europe. What a wealth of symbolism in that moment! Middle America was quietly relieved that a priapic boy with Native American cheekbones had been shorn and tamed, his Cherokee whoop momentarily silenced. A ‘Red Indian' who sang and played ‘Negro' music had been sent over the ocean to make the world safe for democracy, and at the very moment when influential voices in the Old World seemed ungrateful for the gift of arms. Bertrand Russell only merits a fleeting reference in Deliberate Speed, but he fits Lhamon's argument every bit as well as his friend Wittgenstein. In 1958, Russell helped found the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Aldermaston marches began, under a banner which bore Gerald Holtom's crusading device, a combination of the semaphore positions for N and D, not copyrighted and now known universally as the ‘peace symbol'.
The cultural energy was momentarily with Europe as well. The Brussels Expo, opened by King Baudouin, was to witness the extraordinary utopics created by Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse in the Philips Pavilion. Pierre Boulez had just completed Doubles, his first major orchestral work after the lost symphony of 1947. Karlheinz Stockhausen had just seen Gruppen for three orchestras receive its premiere and was working on the electronic material for Kontakte. Olivier Messiaen had completed the Catalogue d'oiseaux and narrowed the distance between the first singers and human performance. Where else was music as primal and as powerful being made?
If American culture is somehow divided between ‘Redskin' and ‘Paleface' tendencies, as Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, then the sidelining of Presley and with him symbolically the new rock and roll might mean that older forms and configurations of music might enjoy fresh prominence for a time. But a new spirit was abroad and had acquired a new kind of confidence. The idea of a ‘retrospective' of ‘avant-garde' music seems on the face of it absurd, but that is what Emile d'Antonio, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, acting together as ‘Impresarios Inc', intended to put on at Town Hall in New York. The Twenty-Five Year Retrospective was an opportunity to revisit the work of John Cage, going back to the Six Short Inventions of 1933, taking in Imaginary Landscape, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, and coming right up to date with the premiere of Concert for Piano and Orchestra [[PLEASE NOTE - NOT CONCERTO]]. The event has been likened to the premier of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, though generally more supportive. The organisers hadn't planned a claque for Cage, but the audience contained enough sympathetic painters, dancers and other artists to guarantee that the sceptics wouldn't shout it down. Cage was at the same time, of course, preparing his lecture Indeterminacy for the World's Fair in Brussels, another example of textual utopics that played with the concept of duration and form in narrative. If there are moments of Zeitgeist, this was surely one of them.
The Retrospective was recorded by the distinguished engineer/producer George Avakian, who is perhaps best known for his work in jazz. And it is a jazz record, albeit most emphatically not one of Avakian's, that best sums up this remarkable moment in cultural history. Herman Sonny Blount, known as Sun Ra, had been making long-playing records for five years when he created the extraordinary Jazz in Silhouette. The music caught him and his Arkestra mid-way between the Fletcher Henderson-style swing arrangements of his earlier years (and to which he would return later) and the space-obsessed avant-gardism of the 1960s. It is music that is at once intellectual and visceral, still based on themes-and-solos but also the work of a collective in which individuality mattered less than common purpose. Sun Ra's personal mythography was, if you like, the opposite of Karlheinz Stockhausen's, though they seemed to move along similar vectors. The German composer, whose country had effectively started the space programme and then seen it colonised by the United States (Werner von Braun was behind both the V2 and the early American manned flights), saw it as human destiny to move beyond that new coinage ‘aerospace' and into the cosmos. It was a new version of Manifest Destiny, again reimported into the Old World. By contrast, Sun Ra's personal mythology - he claimed to have been born on Saturn - was the expression of a black man in a hostile white culture: he might as well come from Saturn, so little did he fit in. Cumulative adverse expectation led inevitably to dreams of exotic escape, but in the process connected Sun Ra directly back into the old Nilotic narratives, where gods and men live side by side, where the stars are neither abstract nor unimaginably distant, but part of the cycle of the days and the months.
Extraordinary things were afoot in 1958 - contradictory, perverse, geographically diverse (the above takes no account of what was happening in China, Brazil, Australia, South Africa), resistant to straightforward readings - but it seems a time that speaks to us very directly. The most powerful impression one takes from Jazz in Silhouette is its timelessness. Like much of what happened in that year, it was conceived in the now and destined for the ages.

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