"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
