Introduction: Not Necessarily "English Music" Britain's Second "Golden Age"

In the early 1960s, Britain--its empire in tatters, its economy listing heavily--moved into a position of musical leadership not experienced since the Golden Age of Byrd and Purcell 4 centuries earlier. Alongside Spam and chewing gum, American GIs had bequeathed a legacy of jazz and blues records that were obsessively studied, learned note by note by young British musicians. When the flow of vinyl finally reversed, the "British Invasion" hit the U.S.A. like a bomb. Britain's cultural shift from the "small, brown, sad paintings" that artist Joe Tilson described as the art flavor of the 1950s [1] to the shiny electric guitars that symbolized the 1960s also triggered an extraordinary outburst of quirky, inventive, thoughtful experimental music. From Profumo to Thatcher, new music in the U.K. flourished in an atmosphere of inspired inclusivity and utter disregard for the niceties of critical success, popular acclaim or the historical record. Merseybeat [2] provided musicians with fame and wealth (and musicologists with handy dissertation topics), but this other "English Music" has remained strangely unacknowledged and under-documented.

Back when Chuck Berry was in jail, Little Richard back in church and Buddy Holly in heaven, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were needed to re-introduce Americans to their own music--American musicians imitated British musicians imitating American blues. British Pop bands revived the tradition of the songwriter/singer that had gotten lost between the cotton fields of Mississippi and the corridors of the Brill Building [3]. The best of the British bands offered a perfect balance of interpretation and innovation, juxtaposing a respect for diverse musical traditions with bursts of true originality (e.g. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band--a record that could only have been put together by a band that once played "Bésame Mucho" and "Twist and Shout" in the same set).

The British experimental music that emerged in the mid-1960s owed as much to this new Pop sensibility as to the dominant European modernist style--as David Toop writes, "after all the rigorous, radical and exclusionist music theories that slugged it out during the twentieth century, English music allowed things to happen" [4]. Composers got up on stage to play, rejecting the classical distinction between creator and interpreter; they drew on musical material and ideas outside the high-art canon, including Pop and "World" music; they appealed to ears raised on Pop because they made use of Pop instruments and Pop sounds, rather than confining themselves to the acoustic orchestra; their rhythms were often closer to Bo Diddley than to Boulez; and while Pop hooked you with guitar riffs, this music was built on "brain riffs," clever ideas that held your attention in a way a tone row never could.

In Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, composer and critic Michael Nyman presents British music in the context of parallel American and European activity, and points out the influence of John Cage and Christian Wolff in particular [5]. But British music displayed idiosyncrasies that separated it from these other, better-documented movements. This music abounds with seemingly paradoxical juxtapositions: composition and improvisation; professionals and amateurs; Maoism and Merchant Ivory [6]; bloodless systems and halcyon sentimentality. In the essays presented here a handful of names keep cropping up, sometimes as "composers," sometimes as "players," sometimes as "organizers," sometimes as "critics"--musical functions shifted fluidly in a relatively non-hierarchical musical society. Few of these composers demonstrated the stylistic tenacity of, say, LaMonte Young--radical changes of tack seem commonplace. To quote Toop again, "this willingness to abandon a fixed sense of place or identity within the cultural map is a legacy that remains with us today" [7].

Imaginative and witty, this second "Golden Age" was nonetheless patently uncommercial. It could not compete with Pop for shock value, and was overshadowed (in the American press at least) by the easier-to-catch wave of American Minimalists such as Philip Glass and Steve...