An excerpt from
Tomorrow Never Knows:
Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s

On August 30, 1964, a Sunday, Manhattan lay swathed in the heat of a summer afternoon. In their air-conditioned luxury suite high above the intersection of Park Avenue and 59th Street, the Beatles could hear the faint screams of fans who had gathered reverently on the sidewalks around the Delmonico Hotel, hoping to catch a glimpse of Paul, George, John, or Ringo peering from behind a curtain. Those screams had rung in the Beatles' ears for seven months as the cresting wave of Beatlemania rose higher and higher with no end yet in sight. In April the top five places in Billboard Magazine's Top One Hundred chart were Beatles songs. On August 12, the film A Hard Day's Night had opened in more than 500 theaters nationwide, earning more than $1.3 million its first week and making Beatlemania a performance for millions of fans to watch and join vicariously. In late August, the Beatles had five singles on the American charts and were winding up a triumphal coast-to-coast concert tour of the United States. Now, as they rested from their performance at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium the night before, they talked to their guest, Bob Dylan, who had driven down from Woodstock to see them. Without fanfare, Dylan pulled a couple of joints from his pocket, put a match to the twisted end of one, and passed it over. For the first time ever, the Beatles were about to get high.
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  thanks to Robot Wisdom

A Composer's Century
by Philip Glass

Any discussion of today's new music must begin with a few observations about changes that took place in the music world in the latter part of the 20th century. The most important of these was a shift in the way composers were making and thinking about their music, and even its role in society as a whole. This shift was so fundamental and eventually so widespread that it has determined the basis of how composers work today, and it may continue to do so for some time to come. At the same time, the changes were also quite subtle, almost invisible — so much so that scarcely any music writers had the interest or capacity to document them. Perhaps it is not so surprising that this development was hardly noticed at all.
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