Bernstein was a popular figure, in the conventional sense of garnering attention and admiration from a great many people, but his relationship to popular music was hardly straightforward. Bernstein expressed scepticism about much of popular music from the 1960s on and his personal taste hewed to the musics of his youth, such as swing-era jazz, blues, and the Golden-era of Broadway and popular song, while occasionally expanding to include rock’n’roll. However, Bernstein also viewed popular music as a kind of wellspring that composers could draw from, whether it was Mozart’s Magic Flute or his own West Side Story. Not only could borrowing from popular music revitalize tonal classical music for the twentieth century, as opposed to twelve-tone serialism and other mid-century modernist trends, but Bernstein also firmly believed that popular musics, particularly jazz, were the key to creating a uniquely American musical style.

“Cultural Revolutions” examines the politicization of culture around 1968. From Surrealist and Situationist attempts to redefine art as a utopian-socialist enterprise, to the public scandals created by subversive avant-gardes like the Dutch Provos, to the development of popular culture into a new field of youth radicalism centered on rock‘n’roll and new styles of dress and behavior, the chapter shows that the new politics of the 1960s were inseparable from cultural innovations. This synergistic relationship frequently involved attempts to remake the self by reshaping the face of daily life, a goal central both to new aesthetic forms like the Happening and the growth of nonconformist subcultures and countercultures aimed at erasing the distinction between the personal and the political. The creation of local underground “scenes” in which much of the political-cultural work of the 1960s was accomplished was a key expression of this tendency, while the prominence of alternative media practices in and around those scenes highlights the importance around 1968 of efforts to create alternative sources of knowledge outside the mainstream.