[Finale] Re: OT: Alan Pollack's Beatles Page

[Rodney Waterman]

I get a little uneasy when scholars strip music to the bone and claim to 
have pigeon-holed it. For me, its the same with all music. I used to get 
furious back in the old days at the music faculty (Melbourne) when my 
professor stripped Mozart down bar by bar, note by note, chord by chord and 
smugly told us what it all meant - it was control freak stuff. I have never 
been excited by Expositions, Developments and Recapitulations - but its 
nice know they are there!
Intuition, bold risk taking and inexplicable bursts of inspiration barely 
rated a mention.

At the same time I enjoy as much as anyone having a critical technical and 
social understanding of a piece of music. For instance, I love to show 
people the wonderful passage early in the Beatles' (Lennon's) Strawberry 
Fields Forever (I play it in G) where the melody goes F-G-Ab ("Noth-ing is 
real") over an E major chord - it's wonderfully deadpan and obtuse, and 
yes, it is definable as a harmonic and melodic sequence. But it is also 
just 'right' and needs no justification. If you listen to the original Take 
(cassette home recording) of this song (Voice and Guitar) on the Beatles' 
Anthology, Lennon is tired and ascerbic and it breaks down with him 
bemoaning -"I can't go on, I can't go on .....". Perhaps the F-G-Ab 
sequence was born in this 'tired', desparate personal context.

One of the most illuminating books I ever read about the Beatles - and it 
tells me more about the Beatles music than any technical analysis -  is 
Mark Lewisohn's 'The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions' (Hamlyn/EMI, 
1988). This is a fantastic detailed account of virtually every recording 
session the Beatles ever did at Abbey Road studios - a must read!

Cheers
Rodney
At 12:00 PM 16/06/2003 -0500, John wrote:
A musicologist would be much more interested in the Beatles'
influence on their culture and vice versa, and there's probably a
dissertation waiting to be written on the unexpected longevity of
their work and the question of quality that implies.  Musicologists
tend to be interested in music as it fits into its particular
culture, theorists in music as isolated artifacts.  And yes, both
kinds of scholar tend to find things in music that the composers
might not have thought about at all, but they're still there.  You
can easily create structures that have all kinds of inner and outer
relationships even if you don't know the terminology to name them.
Country songwriters do it all the time.
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