In the 1950s, New Music essentially meant one thing: maximum complexity and maximum remoteness from the audience. That changed radically at the end of the 1960s, when a group of freaks completely rewrote the rules of the musical avant-garde and achieved one of the last great breakthroughs in 20th-century art music.

Composers like Steve Reich freed classical music from the dogmas of serialism and created a new sound aesthetic with psychedelic pull, shaped by the rhythms of the Indonesian gamelan, the coolness of free jazz and the energy of rock music. They challenged the excessive intellectualism of European contemporary music with a new kind of performance culture: the lofts and clubs of the New York art scene became the new hot spots of the avant-garde, making Darmstadt and Donaueschingen look like forsaken temples of a long-since-abandoned religion.