Carnegie Hall

For the first time, Carnegie Hall turned to a figure outside the music world—Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and historian Robert A. Caro—for inspiration in creating a citywide festival. The’60s: The Years that Changed America was one of Carnegie Hall’s largest festivals, running 10 weeks, featuring more than 35 partner organizations, and presenting more than 50 concerts, films, panel discussions, and exhibitions in New York City. The festival recalled the turbulent decade and the issues that defined it: the struggle for social justice, fight for civil rights, resistance to the war in Vietnam, the empowerment of a younger generation, and the rise of a radical new aesthetic.

The Kronos Quartet opened the festival at Carnegie Hall with a program that celebrated American mavericks Terry Riley, John Cage, and Janis Joplin, as well as world premieres of works by Stacy Garrop and Zachary Watkins. There were other groundbreakers celebrated throughout the festival. The Matthew Shipp Trio and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell paid tribute to the seismic shift that shook the world of jazz in a concert devoted to The Free Jazz Movement; Icelandic group múm’s pop experimentalism put a contemporary stamp on ’60s era psychedelia; and the Philip Glass Ensemble returned to Carnegie Hall after more than a decade to perform the composer’s early masterpiece Music with Changing Parts.

Eclectic band Snarky Puppy was joined by ’60s icon David Crosby, vocalists Fatoumata Diawara and Laura Mvula, and mandolinist Chris Thile in a lively evening of protest music from and inspired by the ’60s. The rebellious spirit also rang out in Sounds of Change, a multimedia concert of folk songs, R&B classics, and popular hits of the period; A Time Like This: Music for Change, a stirring program performed by young performers from the Weill Music Institute and award-winning Broadway, blues, hip-hop, and Americana stars showcasing music’s power to bring people together to fight for change; and singer-songwriter Bhi Bhiman’s soulful pop-folk songs that combined the personal and the political. Politics, protest, and passion were also at the core of The Vietnam War: At Home and Abroad, historian John Monsky’s multimedia show that used live performances of pop and folk music from the 1960s coupled with photographs and film footage to capture the intense emotions surrounding the war. A performance by the Friction Quartet of George Crumb’s amplified string quartet Black Angels, a searing response to the conflict, opened the program.