- Pulitzer Prizes are given to works by a number of composers from academic environments, including Leslie Bassett's Variations for Orchestra, Leon Kirchner's String Quartet No. 3, George Crumb's Echoes of Time and the River and Karel Hausa's String Quartet No. 3.
- Light comedies featuring popular music performers become a major part of American television programming, most prominently including The Monkees, The Partridge Family and The Archies.[126]
- Some composers begin working with music that draws on older European styles, a field called New Romanticism; these include Lukas Foss, George Rochberg, George Crumb, Jacob Druckman, William Bolcom and David del Tredici.[301]
- Alex Bradford emerges at the forefront of modern gospel, one of a number of influential singer-songwriters to emerge at this time.[302]
- The Pinewoods Morris Men, based out of Pinewoods Camp near Plymouth, Massachusetts, performs in the streets of Cambridge. This is followed by a number of similar public performances in the region.[303]
- Rock bands begin incorporating more sophisticated and complex elements of music into their album-oriented music, creating progressive rock. This is primarily a British phenomenon, but has American practitioners and fans, and will become more well established in North America in the next decade.[33]
- Several Native American ethnomusicologists begin to publish works on the musics of the indigenous peoples of the Southeast United States, including Edwin Schupman's study of Creek music, David Draper on Choctaw music, and Marcia Herndon and Charlotte Heth on Cherokee music.[304]
- Clubs catering to African-American gay men in New York City begin to play an uninterrupted stream of Latin, soul and funk music; this is the origin of disco music.[305]
- Mariachi grows in popularity among Mexican-Americans, buoyed by the institution of school programs in Texas, Arizona and California, and the pioneering of the first nightclub where mariachi is "presented on stage as a dinner show" in Los Angeles.[113]
- Carlos Santana begins recording, quickly becoming the first major innovator in the field of Latin rock.[113]
- A resurgence in popularity for the conjunto begins among Tejanos.[92]
- The Haitian community in New York is large enough to support a significant music industry based around small dances and small bands called mini-djaz, known for a mixture of Haitian, American and Latino musics.[306]
- The British Invasion leads to the prominence of British bands like The Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who throughout the United States.[307]
- W. A. Mathieu begins working with the Dances of Universal Peace, creating new compositions for mixed chorus and instrumental ensembles for that movement.[261]
- The Black Power movement inspires a wave of research centers and performance ensembles dedicated to African-American music, among the most influential being Dominique René de Lerma's Black Music Center at Indiana University.[240]
- A number of bands begin producing music with feminist- or lesbian-oriented lyrics, including the New Harmony Sisterhood Band, Miss Saffman's Ladies Sewing Circle and the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band.[308]
- A number of geographers begin investigating the relationship between music, place and space, largely drawing upon the idea of the cultural hearth - a homeland from which a particular aspect of culture diffuses – first described by Carl Sauer and Berkeley School of cultural geography.[309]
- Rock comes to be seen as distinct from pop music, and is felt by many to be more authentic due to its roots in American folk music, more artistic and to better express the feelings of its audience.[310]
- Death becomes a common subject for popular music, drawing on recent hits like The Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" and songs in tribute to stars that had died. Many popular songs from this period and beyond begin using an aeolian chordal progression, which is otherwise most commonly associated with classical requiems, such as "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix - this technique, which gives a recording a morbid or spooky theme, had been used since at least 1949, with Vaughn Monroe's "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky".[246]
- The hippie cultural movement, which includes music as an integral part, reaches its peak of popularity and influence.[311]
- Rock albums begins to be released with fold-out posters, stickers and lyric sheets, rather than simple album covers.[312]
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