PULSE: American Music and Poetry from 1950 to 1970

This is a two-hour single session designed to discuss the parallel relationships between the American music and poetry from the 1950s to 70s.

By the early fifties, as part of the postwar development of consumer society, a strange pulse had set in the music scene to bring about muzak or elevator music. As if to reflect this new trend, poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman started to write, almost on the same pulse, quasi-sonnet sequences.

In the late sixties, a more experimental type of pulse music was invented by such composers as Terry Riley and Steve Reich to be later labeled as minimalism. Again, the poetry caught up due to the efforts of John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons who wrote deliberately monotonous and distinctly open-ended sequences.

Some excerpts of poems will be read, some parts of music heard.