The Bacharach Sound of the 1960s: A Revolution in American Pop Music

Before the 1960s, American pop music had, as it still has, many different types and styles. But in the 1960s a new voice came forward with a revolutionary sound that defied any kind of previous artificial categorization. The sound was so powerful that its echoes still reverberate throughout the pop-music world. It was the musically rich, sophisticated, decade-dominating Bacharach sound.

Burt Bacharach, unlike most pop-song composers, studied music with some of the world's greatest classical composers, including Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. When Bacharach turned to composing pop songs, he brought with him a musical knowledge and technique rarely encountered in commercial music.

An early sign of what he could do was his title song, with lyrics by Mack David, for the movie The Blob (1958). Their work was not credited on the screen, but the song, one of the first movie title songs in a rock idiom, contained the stylistic seeds of Bacharach's 1960s masterpieces.

Bacharach absorbed elements of bop, rock, soul, progressive jazz, Tin Pan Alley, Latin American music, modern classical music, and other styles. But his music never sounds like a pastiche. Incredibly, he synthesized these vast resources into a unique, consistent Bacharach sound. His music has that rare artistic quality of genuine, instantly recognizable indivdiuality.

Characteristic features of the Bacharach sound include complex rhythms and unusual accents, boldly original harmonic progressions, unconventional but memorable melodic patterns that often leap about with a naturalness and sense of inevitability that only an exceptionally gifted melodist can achieve, and flexible phrasing, in which phrase lengths often vary from the traditional four or eight measures.

The Bacharach sound generated a long list of great songs throughout the 1960s. With lyricist Hal David, Mack David's brother, Bacharach turned out hits as independent songs, as film songs, and as theater songs.