LIFE OUTSIDE THE LINES

1900

Theater

Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre greets the new century. With Chekhov as house playwright, the Moscow Art Theatre by 1900 had become an influential source of new-style, unfussy, emotionally realistic acting. The Method led in America to Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg’s politically progressive Group Theatre in the 1930s and, later, Strasberg’s Actors Studio. Downside: not much training in diction or movement.

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1907

Art

Pablo Picasso, “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.” The history of 20th century art effectively begins with this radical painting, which opened the door to everything from abstraction to found-object art.

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1908

Music

Arnold Schoenberg writes his Second String Quartet. Its last movement, which includes a sung text for soprano about the spirit’s journey to ethereal realms, is the first instance of truly atonal music, breaking down barriers of harmony that had been the glue of music since the Middle Ages.

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1909

Dance

The Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev opens in Paris, introducing stars and repertory that remain legendary in 20th century ballet consciousness. Most important achievements include helping restore the importance of the male dancer in a field dominated by ballerinas, establishing the one-act ballet as the key artistic format of the age, incorporating the most daring designers and composers in the ballet experience and promoting the idea of the choreographer-as-star.

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1909

Architecture

Writer Filippo Tomaso Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto was first published in Paris’ Le Figaro as an open letter and a declaration of war by the children of the Machine Age against architecture that looks to the past instead of the future for inspiration. The manifesto took particular aim at a seemingly complacent bourgeoisie, launching the era of the avant-garde, a cultural elite obsessed with notions of speed, industrial techniques and everything that was new.

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1910

Architecture

The first publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s two-volume Wasmuth Portfolio, in Germany, introduced the American architect’s remarkable Oak Park, Ill., houses to the European avant-garde, once and for all liberating Western architecture from conventional box-like enclosures and rooms.

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1910

Dance

Rudolf von Laban founds a school in Munich, from which European dance-theater will emerge and which will propel him into the creation of the most detailed and widely used system of dance notation. Together with film and videotape, his Labanotation will make possible the preservation of dances beyond the life span of their creators and original performers, a goal sought in Western Europe since the 15th century.

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1913

Music

Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” causes a riot in a Paris theater. In it, rhythm supersedes harmony, furthering the revolution begun by Schoenberg. With this, Modernism, in the popular imagination, is born.

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Circa 1913

Art

The evolution of Abstract art. Arguments can be had over who made the first truly nonobjective work of art--Delaunay, Dove, Kupka, Kandinsky, Hilma af Klimt--but, by 1913, abstraction, especially in Russia, was revolutionizing painting and sculpture.

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1915

Theater

Provincetown (Mass.) Players founded. It introduces to the world the plays of Eugene O’Neill, America’s first major playwright. After relocation to what is now off-Broadway New York, it becomes part of the “Little Theater Movement,” an early alternative to the bottom line of Broadway.

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1915

Movies

D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” is released. Though the monumental 1914 Italian film “Cabiria” had previously ventured into epic territory, the nearly three-hour “Birth,” about the Civil War and Reconstruction (which came with an unheard-of $2 admission charge), gave final notice that movies could no longer be considered a silly nickelodeon diversion. President Woodrow Wilson came up with a killer blurb (“It’s like writing history with lightning”), but the film has been controversial from day one because of the virulence of its racist attitudes.

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1915

Dance

Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn open the first Denishawn school in Los Angeles, intended to teach dance from a global perspective (a groundbreaking concept) and ultimately succeeding in fusing enough forms to inspire the rich and very personal theatrical hybrids developed by its most celebrated students: Martha Graham, Jack Cole, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. You could say that American modern dance was born here.

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1917

Jazz

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” is released on RCA. Jazz groups had been active as early as the late 1890s, but this recording is generally considered to be the first jazz recording. Interestingly, the group earlier that year had recorded “Darktown Strutters Ball” and “Indiana” for Columbia, which refused to release the tunes.

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1917

Art

Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain.” The invention of installation art: The artist buys a porcelain urinal, tips it on its side, signs it and enters it into an unjuried exhibition of avant-garde art in New York--and the sculpture is promptly rejected. By century’s end, installation art is everywhere, representing art’s status quo.

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1917

Architecture

Le Corbusier’s arrival in Paris marks the emergence of one of the 20th century’s great--and most influential--talents. During subsequent decades, Le Corbusier would design many of the most important structures in the history of Modern architecture, refining a stripped-down aesthetic modeled on the smoothly functioning machines of the new Industrial Age. Houses would reflect the efficiency of the ocean liner. Cities would mirror the order of the industrial assembly line. Among the world’s great Modernist architects, only Frank Lloyd Wright would approach the scope of Le Corbusier’s vision.

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1918

Theater

The century’s first superstar director, Vsyevolod Meyerhold, stages “Mystery Bouffe,” Soviet theater’s major post-Revolution flourish, with scenes set in heaven, hell and the North Pole. Meyerhold began as a Chekhovian Moscow Art Theatre actor, but his use of the theater as a directorial and design playground (or nightmare) made people see the world in new ways. Until, that is, Stalin “disappeared” this Jewish anti-totalitarian genius.

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1919

Architecture

The founding of the Bauhaus marked the establishment of the world’s first Modernist architectural institution--first in Weimar, then in Dessau, Germany--erasing traditional boundaries separating art, craft and architecture in order to arrive at the Gesamtkunstwerk--the total work of art. In challenging the position of the Beaux Arts academy, the Bauhaus instantly became the most important architecture school of modern times.

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1919

Movies

United Artists, emphasis on “artists,” is formed by actors Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin and director D.W. Griffith. The founding of the company was the first shot in what proved to be an even more durable battle between studios intent on making money to the exclusion of everything else and creative individuals who were not averse to profit but felt control over their work was equally important.

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1924

Music

George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is premiered by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra at New York’s Aeolian Hall. The performance provides a kind of legitimization for jazz in the cultural community, and impacts the musical thinking of Ravel, Milhaud, Copland and other classical composers.

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1925-1928

Jazz

Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings produce a series of solos--”West End Blues,” ’Muggles,” “Weather Bird” among them--in which he virtually invents the idea of jazz soloing over a harmonic foundation. His vocals establish the relevance of a jazz-tinged approach to popular singing.

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1927

Pop Music

Searching for “hillbilly” musicians, New York record executive Ralph Peer finds a long line of hopefuls outside his Bristol, Tenn., hotel room door after he plants a story in a local paper announcing his visit. Among the artists in line: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, a former train brakeman who would become the father of modern country music. His blues-edged tales of wanderlust and longing have inspired everyone from Hank Williams and Merle Haggard to Bob Dylan and Beck. The two songs Rodgers recorded then became his first Victor single.

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1927

Movies

Al Jolson’s ad-libbed albeit ungrammatical “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” in “The Jazz Singer” signals the beginning of the movies’ sound era--and the end of glorious decades of silence.

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1927

Jazz

The Duke Ellington Orchestra records “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Creole Love Call” and begins working at the Cotton Club, an engagement that provides steady employment as well as the opportunity for Ellington to create an expansive catalog of music. One of the great innovative voices in jazz history finds its first opportunity for expressive growth. In the same year, the Fletcher Henderson band employs arrangements by Don Redman that establish the feel, sound and instrumentation of the big-band swing style that would dominate popular music in the ‘30s.

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1929

Art

The Museum of Modern Art is founded in New York. Though preceded by one in Ludz, Poland, MOMA became the century’s oxymoronic contribution to the 19th century museum-idea: a repository of present culture, rather than of the past. By the 1980s, every aspiring city wanted one.

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1930

Architecture

When, for the Palace of the Soviets Competition, Joseph Stalin chose bloated classicism as the official state architecture, he ended a period of remarkable creative freedom in the Soviet Union. The visionary avant-garde constructivists nevertheless continued to influence the course of contemporary architecture; in less than a decade, the era’s various movements encompassed works as disparate as the dynamic, expressionistic forms of Vladimir Tatlin and Constantin Melnikov, the linear cities of N.A. Milyutin and the gargantuan geometric abstractions of Ivan Leonidov.

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1931

Dance

The company that eventually becomes London’s Royal Ballet gives its first performance. Beyond serving as the choreographic incubator and showcase for Frederick Ashton, the institution ensured the survival of the great 19th century Franco-Russian classics in something close to authentic versions.

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1931

Music

Edgard Varese writes “Ionization,” the first important piece for an all-percussion ensemble, freeing music from not just the constraints of harmony and melody but pitch as well.

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1932

Art

The Museum of Modern Art presents the International Style show, curated by Philip Johnson, which is the first encyclopedic introduction of the Modernist movement in architecture to an American public. He presents Modernism largely in aesthetic terms, stripping the architect’s work of its original social content.

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1934

Movies

Hollywood begins to enforce its strict Production Code, leading to decades of movies in which married people never shared the same bed and profanity dared not speak its name.

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1934

Architecture

For a competition for the design of the national bank of the Third Reich, the Reichsbank, Adolf Hitler anointed abstracted classicism as the official state architecture, rejecting a scheme by Modernist master Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, then head of the Bauhaus. The competition marked the end of German Modernism, although Mies would return to Berlin to design the New National Gallery in 1965.

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1935

Pop Music

The Benny Goodman Orchestra, having trouble surviving in the crowded big-band field, performs at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles before an overflow crowd of rapturous teenage jitterbugs, unaware that the orchestra’s late-night radio broadcasts from the East Coast have created a powerful buzz about the group. As a result, the Goodman ensemble breaks out of the pack to become the most popular band in the country in the ‘30s Swing Era.

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1936

Architecture

With the completion of Fallingwater and the design of the Johnson Wax Administration Building, Frank Lloyd Wright reemerges as the most prolific and creative talent in American architectural history. Both buildings can lay claim to the title of this country’s greatest architectural masterpiece: Fallingwater, a composition of horizontal concrete planes perched over a stream, is a brilliant--if romantic--challenge to the European modernists that were then rising to prominence. The main office space of the Johnson Wax building, with its thin, mushroom-shaped columns and its glass-tube ceiling, is quite simply this country’s greatest public room.

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1936

Pop Music

Mississippi native Robert Johnson’s entire recording career covered only four days, but his singing, subject matter and guitar playing formed the blueprint for the blues, arguably the most durable component of contemporary pop music. Johnson’s dark, anguished tales live on not only in his own albums, but also in the work of such major artists as Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones. Of Johnson, Eric Clapton has said, “His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice.”

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1936

Dance

The British Broadcasting Corp. telecasts a dance performance (London’s Ballet Rambert), consummating the flirtation between dance and the camera that existed since the invention of photography. Both as a transcription of stage performances and an art form in itself, dance-for-camera will widen the dance audience and change the expectations audiences bring to all performances. The same year sees the release of “Swing Time,” with the most daring, sublime and best-filmed dances that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ever performed.

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1936

Jazz

Lester Young records “Lady Be Good,” creating a saxophone style with a supple melodic quality contrasting with the dark-toned harmonic style established a decade earlier by Coleman Hawkins. Young’s playing impacts Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz, and traces of Hawkins are in the work of Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson and Joe Lovano.

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1937

Dance

The professional folk dance company founded by Igor Moiseyev gives its first performance, in Moscow. Even if others preceded him with sporadic ventures, the long-term popularity of his company makes him the single biggest influence in this field. His innovations in the large-scale theatricalization of ethnic material remain controversial, but they created a new genre worldwide.

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1939

Art

Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde & Kitsch.” Fueled by a mix of American cultural insecurity and simmering wartime politics, the critic’s remarkably precocious debut essay established a colossal set of errors--privileging threatened European ideas of high art over vulgar American conceptions of popular culture, and specifically French culture (avant-garde) over German (kitsch)--mistakes that held fast for 40 years.

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1940

Dance

Katherine Dunham gives the first concert of her own choreography. An anthropologist, choreographer and star dancer, Dunham not only took seriously many different African traditions (African American, African Caribbean, etc.), but she also brilliantly packaged them for a mass audience in America and Europe, erasing distinctions between high and low art and promoting a sense of black culture as something accessible yet complex and deep.

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1941

Movies

RKO releases Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” co-written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, based loosely on the life of press baron William Randolph Hearst (who tried to squelch it). The consensus pick for the top American film and considered one of the best pictures ever made, “Kane” used fine acting (by Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane and, most notably, by Welles himself), Gregg Toland’s brilliant camera work and Bernard Herrmann’s music to create a sense of excitement on film that is still dazzling. “Kane” is significant not only because of its own qualities but also because it sums up the advances of the 1930s, arguably the golden age of American studio production.

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1942

Television

Call it Genesis en route to the Holy Grail of a 30 share. Six years before TV was initiated in the U.S. on a mass scale, the A.C. Nielsen Co. introduces Audimeters in an 800-home sample in the East. Although designed then to measure radio audiences, the Audimeter or “little black box” later would become the ratings standard for counting viewers and determining advertising rates in a commercial system that would shape the course of this nation’s TV through the rest of the century.

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1944

Jazz

Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker perform with a quintet at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street in New York in an engagement with far-reaching consequences. Bebop, which had been simmering beneath the surface of jazz the previous few years, becomes the music of choice for young jazzmen, and Parker ascends to icon status, still only 24 years old.

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1944

Art

Near World War II’s end, U.S. Congress passes the GI Bill. Higher education for the masses sends countless students to art school, changing forever the way American art is conceived, made and dispersed throughout the world, and making the Abstract Expressionist generation possible.

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1945

Music

A nervous American soldier in occupied Austria sees a flash of light, panics and kills Anton Webern as he steps outside to smoke a cigar at a country house near Vienna. Webern’s abstract miniatures, small jewels that take the implications of Schoenberg’s Serialism into new realms, are just becoming known to a new generation of avant-gardists (Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Cage, Babbitt) who, after World War II, will remove German Romanticism from music and create sound as gleamingly modern as space travel. Webern becomes the model--he’s no longer around to point out that in his heart, he was a secret German Romantic.

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1948

Dance

New York City Ballet debuts. Through the masterworks produced at that institution by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, the company became an instrument for the modernization of the classical tradition and vocabulary, the Americanization of the image of ballet dancers and the promotion of choreographic creativity (rather than star glamour) as the indispensable element of the ballet experience.

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1948

Television

Uncle Sam meets Uncle Miltie. You know him as Milton Berle, now age 91, who more than five decades ago, as host of Texaco Star Theater (“Oh, we’re the men of Texaco . . .”), became TV’s first superstar, a wildly costumed, cross-dressing, big-yuks comic whose tenacious hamminess became his trademark. His sight gags a perfect fit for this newborn visual medium, Berle swiftly became TV’s big, looping signature, selling it to the public the way “Amos ‘n’ Andy” had radio 20 years earlier.

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1949

Theater

After trotting the globe, juggling mistresses and generating plays, Bertolt Brecht (along with wife Helene Weigel) founds the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. The company proves an influential exercise in Brecht’s staging principles. Now, at the end of the century, after a California tour, the Ensemble has officially remade itself--to what end, the new century will reveal.

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1950

Pop Music

Berry Gordy gives up boxing. Gordy didn’t really start Motown Records until 1959, but he began working toward that dream after a grueling day in the gym that made him realize music was a whole lot more fun (and probably more profitable) than the bruising sport that was his first goal. Nurturing such artists as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Gordy’s company brought a new level of respect to black music and inspired generations of black entrepreneurs. By facilitating the enormous contributions of black musicians to contemporary pop, Gordy achieved a racial breakthrough that rivals Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in baseball.

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1950

TV & Movies

Its name was “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence on Radio and Television.” An offspring of a publication titled “Counterattack,” this handy guide to “Commies” cited as traitors 151 of Hollywood’s biggest, best and brightest. Along with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other demagogues of the time, “Red Channels” set the tone for a witch hunt that would destroy lives and careers and have a scarring impact on the way ideas were presented and business conducted in TV for years to come.

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1952

Music/Art

John Cage writes “4’33”,” which removes from music its last connection to intentional sound. What the audience hears is itself and its environment during the allotted time period. A monument in Conceptual Art, it further connects modern music with modern art and modern aesthetics in general, and it makes a first important connection between Buddhism and American art, later developed by visual artists, Beat writers and popular culture.

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1952

Theater

The birth of off-Broadway. Circle-in-the-Square stages a revival of “Summer and Smoke,” Tennessee Williams’ Broadway flop, successfully scaling down the drama. Four years later, O’Neill’s Broadway flop “The Iceman Cometh” comes alive as well.

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1953

Dance

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gives its first concert. Cunningham insisted on dance as an utterly independent art, overturned accepted concepts of collaboration, sequencing and the use of stage space, and along the way inspired a generation of choreographers to reinvent the art. Maybe the term “postmodern” should be “post-Cunningham.”

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1953

Theater

The world premiere in Paris of a key post-atomic work: Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” The 1956 American premiere, starring Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall, bewilders Florida tryout audiences, expecting to see “the laugh sensation of two continents!” instead of Beckett’s muted death cackle of a masterwork.

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1954

Pop Music

Elvis Presley unlocks the key to rock ‘n’ roll. After many frustrating nights where nothing seemed to go right in Memphis’ Sun Records studio, 19-year-old Presley started fooling around with an old blues tune he liked, Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right (Mama).” Only he didn’t play it the way Crudup did. Elvis added a touch of country lilt and a whole lot of youthful independence and spirit. Producer Sam Phillips recognized it immediately as something special, and in that record and Presley’s other revolutionary Sun recordings, rock ‘n’ roll was formally christened. Presley defined not only rock’s core sound, but also its look.

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1954

Pop Music

Frank Sinatra finds a partner. It was Sinatra’s idol, Bing Crosby, who popularized the crooning style, a contribution that led author Will Friedwald to declare that Crosby did for recording what D.W. Griffith did for the cinema. But Sinatra mastered the style in a series of albums he made for Capitol Records with arranger-conductor Nelson Riddle. Though the heart of pop music has shifted far from the mainstream pop Sinatra championed, he injected those recordings with such sophistication and style that they remain every bit as commanding and vital as anything rock, country, hip-hop or soul music has produced.

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1955-59

Jazz

Three saxophonists offer their alternatives to the Charlie Parker style. Sonny Rollins develops a gutsy, hard-swinging approach that comes to be described as hard bop. John Coltrane’s playing with its harmonically complex and technically virtuosic “sheets of sound”--augmented in the ‘60s by his horn-scouring, emotionally dense improvising--becomes the prime tenor approach for the next few decades. And, in 1959, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman opens at the Five Spot in New York City, kicking off a decade of avant-garde ferment in which jazz players examine every manner of structured and unstructured music.

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1955

Television

The debut of radio spinoff “Gunsmoke” on CBS begins an era of adult westerns (peaking three years later when 31 of these tumbleweeds rolled across prime time) whose heroes displayed an amazing array of weapons. The result, collectively, was a stunning elevation of TV violence in the late 1950s that would endure in varying degrees, resonating negatively with many Americans while creating an issue that would outlast even Matt Dillon.

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1957

Television

“Look out, Gracie!” George Burns proclaimed in an ad campaign. “With Zenith Space Command TV. I can change programs from across the room.” . . . And just like that, Couch Potatodom is born. Although small enough to fit into viewers’ palms, the remote control device offered a handful of powerful new options that were highly compatible with their TV-shortened attention spans. If they didn’t care for what was on--including the commercial--they could change it without getting off their butts.

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1958

Music

Leonard Bernstein is appointed first American music director of the New York Philharmonic (and also the youngest) at the same time as his “West Side Story” is running on Broadway--the two together marking the most significant breach of barriers between high and low culture to date, and a whole new sense of the importance and uniqueness of American music.

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1959

Jazz

Miles Davis records “Kind of Blue” with an all-star ensemble that includes saxophonists Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and John Coltrane and pianist Bill Evans. The album, which brings a modal approach to jazz improvisation, is enormously successful, eventually becoming the best-selling jazz recording of all time.

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1960

Theater

Peter Hall founds the Royal Shakespeare Company, thus putting institutionalized theater on a footing with Britain’s national museums and orchestras. The RSC (joined in 1963 by the National Theatre of Great Britain, headed by Laurence Olivier) popularizes Shakespeare for a new generation of playgoers.

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1960

Movies

Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” reaches French theaters. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a Galoise-smoking young punk who gets in over his head in crime despite the adoration of Jean Seberg’s naive young American in Paris. Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, home of Hollywood B-pictures, “A bout de souffle” is not the first film to come out of the group of cineastes who became known as the New Wave, the nouvelle vague, but it is the one that gets the most attention worldwide. It can be seen today as the precursor of a more personal style of filmmaking, centering on the director and his concerns, that has evolved into the dominant force in national cinemas around the world and the main rival for the more factory-oriented products of Hollywood.

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1961

Dance

Rudolf Nureyev defects from the Kirov Ballet in Paris. The consequences include the acceleration of male prominence in the dance world and an increase in Russian classics in the repertories of Western companies through re-stagings by Nureyev and the star defectors who followed him.

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1963

Television

It wasn’t produced by TV or for TV. But Jack Ruby gunning down President Kennedy’s accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters was on TV, a live-on-NBC, replayed-across-the-globe murder followed immediately by correspondent Tom Pettit crying out: “He’s been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot!” Even against the larger horror of Kennedy’s assassination, there was something especially jarring about this seminal moment in the evolution of TV.

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1963

Theater

America’s fledgling nonprofit regional theater movement acquires the cachet it needs when Irish director Tyrone Guthrie starts up a company bearing his name in Minneapolis. Crucial funding from the Ford and Rockerfeller foundations, among others, helps the growth of the resident theater movement, along with money (beginning in 1965) from a federal agency, the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservative attacks have all but gutted the NEA by century’s end.

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1964

Pop Music

The Beatles invade America. John, Paul, George and Ringo were already superstars in England when they made their first appearance on Ed Sullivan’s TV show, but making it in America was still essential to any real longevity and impact in rock ‘n’ roll--and the Beatles passed the audition with ease. An estimated 70 million people watched the show, and many were so enamored that they were ready to follow the Beatles anywhere. Few dreamed, however, just how magical that journey would be.

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1965

Pop Music

Bob Dylan plugs in. Dylan taught rock ‘n’ roll how to think, enabling the music to move beyond its initial teen base and address subjects with the same seriousness that books and films did. Besides a literary songwriting style that challenged even the Beatles to sharpen their craft, Dylan has followed an independent path that has served as a model of artistic integrity. Nothing mirrored his independence more than the Newport Folk Festival appearance when he performed three songs in an electric rock framework, signaling that his acoustic folk days were behind him.

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1967

Music

Leonard Bernstein’s N.Y. Philharmonic topples another cultural barrier by commissioning a work from Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. “November Steps” combines Japanese instruments (biwa and shakuhachi) with Western orchestra for the first time and demonstrates the multicultural possibilities for music, which gives rise to the whole notion of world music crossovers.

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1967

Pop Music

Aretha Franklin puts on the crown. Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and Al Green can all claim part of the King of Soul title, but Franklin is the undisputed Queen of Soul. Even after five decades of recording, she is still competitive with today’s most acclaimed R&B; and hip-hop newcomers. But it took a while for Franklin to master her blend of gospel and secular music. After attempts at everything from blues to cocktail jazz at Columbia Records, she switched to Atlantic and recorded the soul classics whose influence extends into rock and even country music.

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1967

Pop Music

Jimi Hendrix lights up the Monterey International Pop Festival. Two years before Woodstock, pop music’s new era was showcased at the Monterey Fairgrounds, where such substantial artists as Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, the Who, the Grateful Dead and Buffalo Springfield got major career boosts. But it was Hendrix’s electrifying performance--capped by his setting his guitar on fire--that may have been Monterey’s greatest legacy. In addition to his flamboyance, Hendrix did with the guitar what Dylan did with words, showing that instrumental prowess can be as expressive and thrilling as verbal skill.

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1967

Visual Arts

The Sony Portapak. Electronic media goes portable and becomes available to individuals (including artists), not just corporations, thus accelerating our epochal transformation from a lens-based visual culture to a digitally based one. Most immediate fallout: Photography, finally superseded by a newer medium, begins to get long-sought-after legitimacy as art.

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1968

Television

“60 Minutes” has been a pop cultural phenomenon for more than three decades, proving the once-unthinkable, that a news-based series that practiced serious journalism could have mass appeal. Mass mass appeal, given its perennial greatness in the Nielsens. Even greater, however, has been its impact on TV as a progenitor, reshaping much of prime time into a pantheon of newsmagazines--sometimes for better, other times for worse. The latter includes tolling the bell for long-form news documentaries on the major networks, whose viewers are now impatient with the older, more comprehensive ways, having gotten accustomed to “60 Minutes” and its many little ones producing mini-docs that run just 15 minutes.

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1971

Architecture

Alvin Boyarsky takes the helm of London’s Architectural Assn., launching the careers of many of the great architects of the second half of the century, including radical Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Koolhaas’ former student Zaha Hadid and other cutting-edge figures such as Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi. Together, these architects have advanced a new modern architectural language influenced by the radical student uprisings of 1968 and rooted in the surreal, the psychological and the urban scale.

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1971

Dance

The formation of Pilobolus Dance Theatre, a vehicle for the proposition that any movement vocabulary can be construed as dance. The possibilities for virtuosity changed and choreographers from the ballet and modern dance worlds were so quick to cannibalize the company’s effects that much of Euro-American dance became Pilobolized with a decade.

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1971-75

Jazz

The emergence of Weather Report, led by Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul, and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever set the standard for the jazz-rock genre of the next two decades. At the same time, alto saxophonist David Sanborn devises a blues-based style (influenced by Hank Crawford and David Newman) that positions his playing as the first major post-Parker influence upon young alto saxophonists.

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1974

Art

Pierre Boulez founds IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a French government-funded research laboratory that explores the acoustical possibilities in electronic music, once more seeking to expand music into undiscovered realms.

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1975

Movies

Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” keeps moviegoers out of the water and enables studios to see the light. Despite numerous problems during shooting, including a mechanical shark nicknamed Bruce that refused to function, “Jaws” proved to be a monster once it hit dry land. As the first major studio release to open in a wide release nationwide and make a lot of money doing it, “Jaws” set the pattern for today’s blockbuster release patterns and encouraged Hollywood to make the kind of lowest-common-denominator films that could best be distributed this way.

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1975

Television

It converts the TV signal into an electric current, which travels through the wire coils of small electromagnets called heads. And the introduction of the videocassette recorder to U.S. consumers nearly 25 years ago was revolutionary, freeing viewers at least partially from the tyranny of TV schedules by allowing them to tape programs at their convenience. And when replaying them, to fast-forward through commercials. Reason enough to hail the VCR.

*

1976

Opera

Robert Wilson and Philip Glass create “Einstein on the Beach,” inventing a new kind of American opera that is not bound to conventional text or singing, let alone to traditional plot or psychology, but rather extends performance art into an opera of images. Its huge success has the effect of mainstreaming Minimalist music and setting both Glass and Wilson off into major international opera careers.

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1980

Movies

John Sayles directs “Return of the Secaucus Seven.” If the modern American independent movement, which spawned everything from Sundance to Miramax, had a first step, this $40,000 gem was it.

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1980

Television

Cable technology had years of relatively obscure life as a means of improving reception in isolated areas when the first cable network, HBO, was created in 1972. It was the forerunner of an explosion that, along with the birth of Fox, the WB and UPN, would deliver to viewers an ever-expanding Rolodex of program options. The most important of these surfaced 19 years ago when that exotic visionary Ted Turner launched CNN, a 24-hour news network that became a precursor of the 24-hour news cycle that presently drives much U.S. media.

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1980s and 90s

Mass Media

The boardrooms, they are changing. As mergers and buyouts proliferate in the great biosphere of communications, the milieu’s elite are shrinking in number as their empires become vaster and ever more incestuously interwoven. Recent cross-pollinating--from the Walt Disney Co. acquiring Capital Cities/ABC to Time Warner Inc. absorbing Turner Broadcasting--has centered communications power in fewer hands. And now comes the proposed monster of all mergers, Viacom Inc.’s recently announced planned takeover of CBS Corp. This big-bloc fervor in communications signals expanded homogeneity instead of diversity for the new century. Not a healthy prospect.

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1984

Opera

Next-generation Minimalist opera composer John Adams writes “Nixon in China” in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman. Unlike the less narrative work of Glass and Wilson, Adams and Sellars demonstrate how American opera can also mythologize the moment, creating “CNN opera,” which will help revitalize the form and connect it with the popular imagination.

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1980s

Art

Internationalism. The return to prominence of European art, led by German artists, and the consolidation of Los Angeles as a second production center for American art, signal the beginning of the end of a monolithic art scene dominated first by Paris, then by New York.

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1987

Jazz

Wynton Marsalis co-founds the Lincoln Center Jazz Program. His insistence upon reexamining the history of jazz triggers a neoclassical period through most of the ‘90s, in which a generation of young lions--Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove, Marcus Roberts among many others--emerges. In addition, his pioneering work in positioning jazz within the cultural stream influences the creation of similar programs in Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

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1989

Pop Music

N.W.A ups the stakes in rap. Though Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC and Public Enemy played invaluable roles in establishing rap, N.W.A shaped the music’s future with its raw, explosive commentary, which was sometimes illuminating and sometimes ugly. The group--which included one of the genre’s most effective rappers (Ice Cube) and one of its most accomplished producers (Dr. Dre)--laid a foundation for rap to become the first sound in 40 years to replace rock as the music of choice of young America.

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1993

Movies

“Jurassic Park” proves computer-generated imagery is here to stay. While James Cameron was a pioneer in the use of CGI effects in films like “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2,” those films were not as dependent on effects as this Steven Spielberg dinosaur epic. Those visuals were the sole reason the film grossed hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, making CGI irresistible to filmmakers, from Cameron in “Titanic” to Atom Egoyan, who used them to sink a school bus in “The Sweet Hereafter.”

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1997

Art & Architecture

Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is one of the great buildings of the century and, perhaps more important, a work that has renewed the public’s faith in architecture’s potential to transform a city’s culture. The building’s euphoric, sensual forms are the culmination of Gehry’s search for a truly populist architecture, while the structure’s deep connection to its tough, industrial site reaffirms the architect’s desire to root his work in the postindustrial landscape. The building sums up architecture’s ultimate liberation from Modernist dogma as the century comes to a close.

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1998-99

Opera

Peter Sellars creates an updated “Peony Pavilion,” while Lincoln Center stages the whole Chinese enchilada in a manner resembling but not dutiful toward the original. Together these versions of the 400-year-old classic kunju opera demonstrate new possibilities for a new century that surely will be multicultural in ways we can’t even imagine.

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1999

Movies

After struggling for decades to achieve financial parity with directors and actors, Hollywood’s underappreciated screenwriters make a historic agreement with Sony Pictures. The pact grants gross points (a percentage of a film’s pre-expense revenues--which no more than 10 screenwriters had gotten in all of Hollywood history) to three broad classes of writers in exchange for script commitments from a group of 30. Though it’s too early to say how this agreement will play out, it has all the earmarks of a breakthrough.