The music of 1968, the subject of our latest AllMusic Loves feature, captures the extreme conflict and rebelliousness — the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in the U.S. and Paris, the Prague Spring — in all its blazing beauty and abject horrors. In classical music, a number of important strides were made in terms of making avant-garde styles accessible to a large public it had never had before, which has to be addressed here rather than in our feature’s lists, as true CD re-releases do not exist for most of those albums. The big event in 1968 classical music was the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey and its two corresponding soundtrack albums on the long-defunct MGM Records label. In addition to the big tune by Richard Strauss and the Viennese waltz music used in the film, the masses were introduced for the first time to then way-out-there composers like György Ligeti and Anton Webern. CBS Masterworks’ knock-off on 2001 featured Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of the Strauss — and yes, some Ligeti — but added a suite from Karl Birger-Blöhmdahl’s “space opera” Aniara.

Electronic music, both in the pop and classical fields, came overground in 1968, with albums like Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, not to mention the band Silver Apples. The coming out party for minimalism was “Come Out” by Steve Reich, which first appeared on the Odyssey LP New Sounds in Electronic Music with “I of IV” by Pauline Oliveros and “Night Music” by ill-fated composer Richard Maxfield, who allegedly defenestrated himself during a bad acid trip the following year. These pieces are legally such separate entities in 2008 that the LP is unlikely to make a comeback on disc.

Even the Beatles chipped in with their imaginative collage, “Revolution 9,” on what is now called The White Album. Collage played an important role in a work that screams “1968″ perhaps louder than any other, Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia,” in which fragments of a Mahler symphony collide with the Swingle Singers chanting solfége syllables as a xylophone taps out “J-o-h-a-n-n S-e-b-a-s-t-i-a-n B-a-c-h” in Morse code. The piece also featured Berio’s chilling homage to Martin Luther King, “O King,” which was later revised and published separately; unhappy with “Sinfonia,” Berio withdrew it and ultimately published it in an eviscerated version — the original likely will never appear on CD.

MGM Records also brought us the blistering noise of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat and the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money, introducing Frank Zappa’s “take no prisoners” attitude towards the excesses of the counterculture. The Monkees’ movie Head did much the same for the vagaries of celebrity, but its soundtrack album contained the PreFab Four’s most serious and substantive musical statements. In New York Is Now, Ornette Coleman demonstrated a side of his work previously lacking — a sense of humor, which also permeates the crazy little set pieces sprinkled throughout Spanky & Our Gang’s Like to Get to Know You. In New Grass, Albert Ayler outed himself as a fan of R&B, much to the shock of his fans. In all, 1968 saw more weird, angry, freaked out, spaced out, and just plain “different” music coming through mainstream record companies than at any time, ever. About the only thing that doesn’t count is France Gall’s psychedelic pop masterpiece “1968,” and that’s because it was issued in 1967.