Michael Tippett's opera The Knot Garden has its premiere at Covent Garden

Indian sitar-player Ravi Shankar composes the first of his two concertos for sitar and orchestra

95-year-old Spanish cellist Pablo Casals conducts in New York his Hymn to the United Nations

Peter Maxwell Davies moves to the Orkneys, where he founds (in 1977) the St Magnus Festival

Ultimos Ritos ('Last Rites'), an oratorio by John Tavener, has its first performance in Haarlem in the Netherlands

Peter Maxwell Davies's opera Taverneris performed at Covent Garden

Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony alarms the Soviet authorities and is denied a Moscow premiere

Elvis Presley performs in Honolulu in the Aloha Concert, the first programme to be broadcast live round the world by satellite

A Little Night Music, with lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim, has its premiere in New York

The score of the film The Sting revives interest in Scott Joplin and ragtime

The career of virtuoso cellist Jacqueline du Pré's is cut short by multiple sclerosis

The Sydney Opera House opens with a performance by Australian Opera of Prokofiev's War and Peace

David Hockney begins a new career as a set designer, with The Rake's Progress by Stravinksky at Glyndebourne

The British group the Sex Pistols launch punk rock, with their first gig at St Martin's School of Art in London

Frederick Ashton creates a ballet based on Turgenev's play A Month in the Country, to music by Chopin

Polish composer Henryk Górecki completes his Third Symphony

Pierre Boulez establishes in Paris IRCAM, an advanced institute for research into the techniques of modern music

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt completes his choral work Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten

Elvis Presley dies, aged 42, at his home in Memphis, Tennessee

Hungarian composer György Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre has its premiere in Stockholm

Beatle John Lennon is murdered by a psychopath on the steps of his and Yoko Ono's apartment block in New York

War Music is the first instalment of Christopher Logue's version of the Iliad

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Thursday from Light, the first of a seven-part opera cycle, is performed in Milan

Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats, based on the Old Possum poems by T.S. Eliot, opens in London

Michael Jackson's releases the album Thriller, which goes on to sell 40 million copies in ten years