Music has long been famed for its power to emblematize human experience. Western writers from Plato onward have pondered this phenomenon and most of us, whether we have read the philosophers or not, have witnessed how even a short passage of music can encapsulate a moment in time, or the texture of an era, or even in special cases the soul of an epoch.

Examples of this power were plentiful 50 years ago, in Europe, America, and elsewhere, too, at a time when Western society was being ripped apart by social revolution. The revolution pitted the so-called “establishment” against a “counter-culture generation” that raged against racial inequality, overly narrow social structures, corporate greed, and “immoral” wars like the one in Vietnam. The anger of the younger generation was most often expressed through music, in part because the main types of popular music in this age – rock and rock and roll – happened to align themselves against the establishment.

For specific examples, one could identify many songs that embody the spirit of the era – Barry McGuire's “Eve of Destruction”, perhaps, or any one of several Bob Dylan songs, or one that for me at least perfectly condensed the rage of youthful protesters: Neil Young's “Four Dead in Ohio”. In the end, though, I choose Richie Havens’ “Freedom”, which he improvised on the spot at the very beginning of the Woodstock festival. We also know now that the festival attained legendary status almost immediately, because everything associated with it – the timing (1969), the difficulty of launching the event, the national and international pilgrimage it created, the sheer size and scale of the event, its peacefulness, and naturally its music – effectively turned it into a counter-cultural shrine. Havens’ song – and particularly his performance of the song, marked by the wild abandonment of his guitar strumming and his primal screams of “freedom” – stood out as a venting of the counter-culture's collective spleen and thus became perhaps Woodstock's most powerful anthem.

Freedom

Watershed moments like this one, with music linked symbiotically to culture, happened in earlier times, too. Perhaps the most powerful example occurred in the early nineteenth century, when the era's greatest composer, Beethoven, and his most revolutionary work, the Symphony No. 3, were joined together with the most profound social revolution of the modern age.