MUSIC PACKAGE: Beck: Artist of the Year By Keith Moerer Classical Music's Golden Years By Paul Festa The Last Jazz Giant: Ella Fitzgerald By Milo Miles + + + BEST OF 1996 LISTS: Stephanie Zacharek Charles Taylor Michael Ross Joyce Millman Gavin McNett Lori Leibovich Cynthia Joyce Andrew Gilbert David Fenton Hans Eisenbeis Mark Athitakis

summing up the year in music always requires a tricky sort of double vision. Critics have to employ the wide-angle lens and the extreme close up, have to rely on hindsight, yet keep an eye on the future (will their choices stand the test of time?). But taking a snapshot of 1996 seemed to require even more of the long view/short view technique than usual. We asked three of our critics to write a few words about what mattered most in pop, jazz and classical music this year and they all chose to focus on a single artist who, for them, defined not just the moment but went a long way toward explaining the past and suggesting the future of their fields. For Keith Moerer, it was Beck, the eccentric genius whose album "Odelay" slices and dices the past four decades of pop music, from c&w to rock to rap and everything in between, and reassembles it into a "one-man melting pot" — the only possible, logical soundtrack to life in our polyglot society at the end of the century. For Milo Miles, the year in jazz was overshadowed by one sad and pivotal event: the passing of Ella Fitzgerald, "the last jazz giant" to be "influenced by all phases of the music first hand." Paul Festa celebrates the golden anniversary of the Juilliard String Quartet, an event which comes, ironically, in a year of uncertainty and pessimism about the future of classical music in America. We also asked our Salon music review contributors for their annotated Top Tens of 1996, resulting in a mixture of albums, songs, performances and whateverelses that was absolutely fitting in a year when musical genres and attitudes intermingled like never before. Classical performers went pop, alt-rock performers went classical, hip-hop groups covered '70s adult contemporary, Los Lobos headlined a Deadhead festival, Johnny Cash covered Soundgarden — you name it, somebody tried it in 1996. After years of fragmentation and pigeonholing, pop music moved toward common ground this year. And towering above it all was Beck, wearing a cowboy hat and a disco suit, juggling two turntables and a microphone, shouting, "Odelay, odelay" — some Esperanto cross between an Appalachian yodel and the Spanish colloquial for "Hurry up." The end of a century of popular music is drawing near and we're caught between the impulse to burrow into familiar sounds of the past and the insatiable curiosity to pursue the unheard wonders that lie just ahead. — Joyce Millman and Cynthia Joyce