In just ten years, The Beatles changed the face of Western popular culture.
Their songs have never lost their relevance, speaking to young and old from the heart in sounds and words with which we all connect.
I was born in 1955, and it was not until 1963 that I really became aware of the group. This was first through their song ‘Love Me Do’ and the impact on us all was immediate. My sister and I fought over who would have the pictures from The Beatles magazines or their picture on the cover of the TV Times. Our parents were irritated by these four witty, sometimes irreverent, energetic and brilliant young people with inappropriately long hair, who really felt to us that they were changing the world.
I can remember playing my father ‘Nowhere Man’ from Rubber Soul and also ‘Barbara Ann’ from another great group of the time, The Beach Boys, in an attempt to show him that they could sing in harmony, like a choir. My father made me switch the record player off.
We listened, transfixed
From 1964, I was a chorister in the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and our musical experience there was not only dominated by the music of William Byrd, Herbert Howells, Charles Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams, but also by the next Beatles hit to arrive. In 1966, we sang three concerts in Sweden, and in the home in Stockholm where I and another friend stayed for the duration of the trip, the son of the family had the new Beatles album, Revolver. We listened to it endlessly, transfixed by the string orchestra in ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and the asymmetric melody of ‘Good Day Sunshine’. We loved it.
A year later Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band turned up at school and we played it constantly, marvelling at the harp and strings scoring of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and the orchestral crescendo in ‘A Day in the Life’. Unconsciously, perhaps, the daily round of singing music from the English choral tradition made us aware of how sophisticated The Beatles’ music was, how harmonically adventurous and how it was scored and constructed so brilliantly.
Making classical arrangements of The Beatles' sophisticated songs
Years later, when I was a member of the vocal group the King’s Singers, we were asked by the Japanese Victor Company to make an album of Beatles songs, in new a cappella arrangements (The Beatles Connection, 1986). I, along with a few other arranger colleagues, was asked to bring four or five Beatles songs to life in the King’s Singers style. It turned out to be a difficult prospect, as it became clear how well the songs were thought out and constructed in their original form, and conceived not only through their melodic and lyric construction but also through their soundworld, which was so multi-layered, coloured, personal and complete.
Chocolate cake with George Martin
Towards the end of my time in the King’s Singers, we gave a concert in Quebec City in Canada with a band and symphony orchestra which was conducted by George Martin, The Beatles’ producer. I ended up making arrangements that we as a group could sing with the players based on the original orchestrations, and I can remember driving to George’s house in Gloucestershire one June afternoon to pick up scores.
I rang the bell and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in front of the television with him and his wife Judy, watching Wimbledon, drinking tea and eating chocolate cake. A little later, I left the house, armed with George’s orchestral scores for ‘Because’, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Golden Slumbers’.
The concert was marvellous, and the memory that remains was when George Martin arrived on stage, the audience burst into applause and this did not stop for more than 15 minutes. After the concert, people stood in line to have their Beatles singles and albums signed by George, and he signed every one of them and graciously spoke to every person who approached him.
One of the greatest creative outpourings in all of music
Remarkable things that happen in life can be the result of many circumstances: serendipity, the right things at the right time, and perhaps a combination of coincidences and good fortune. Perhaps for The Beatles, from a musical point of view, one of the great pieces of good fortune was their connection with George, a classically trained pianist and oboe player who studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London.
He worked for EMI Records, ultimately heading the Parlophone label, which produced music and comedy records. He signed The Beatles to the Parlophone label and through his mentorship, his inventiveness and perhaps his ultimate gift of musical empathy, as a producer he helped to enable and nurture one of the greatest outpourings of creativity and musical energy that the world of popular music has ever seen.
Even though John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the main force behind the songwriting, the group was essentially a true ensemble, unlike many other bands at the time who were focused on a lead singer and backing players. Their group skill was evident not only in their playing but also in their vocal harmony, which was sung with superb intonation and phrasing. Their vocal style was really brought into focus on Rubber Soul, with quite complex harmony on songs such as ‘Drive My Car’, ‘Girl’, ‘Michelle’ and ‘In My Life’. In those days, there was no autotune to rely on in the studio.
Visionary experiments in the studio
This was also a time when studio recording was moving forward and bringing new possibilities to recorded music. There was the possibility to record on more than one track, to double track a voice, to pan voices so that they could appear to come from different directions.
Perhaps, too, the album Pet Sounds made by The Beach Boys in 1966, which was a brilliant example of an album pushing the boundaries in the recording studio, fuelled The Beatles’ creativity. Even though recording in the studio was done on four-track machines up until 1968's The Beatles (better known as the White Album), which was recorded on eight track, their recorded output knew no bounds when it came to scoring, shape and sound perspective.
It is known that they were familiar with the work of the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and particularly his electronic work Gesang der Jünglinge, written in the late 1950s. Inspired by this work, Paul McCartney made tape loops that were used in the track ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ from the album Revolver, and they used similar techniques for ‘Revolution 9’ which appeared on the White Album. It is said that to get otherworldly fairground carousel sounds in ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ on Sgt. Pepper, they used pre-recorded sounds, cut the recorded tape up, threw the pieces onto the studio floor and then taped them randomly back together again.
They changed the musical landscape for us all
The Beatles' catalogue of recorded songs, in so many styles and genres, used a myriad of instrumental scorings including strings, harp, brass, full orchestra, sitar and harpsichord, most times with and sometimes without guitars and drums.
The piano featured as a lead instrument much later, in songs like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ and ‘The Fool on the Hill’, along with flutes and recorders on ‘Martha My Dear’ and ‘Let It Be’. Somehow at this point, the piano had not found its place as a lead instrument in pop culture. I can remember in 1970, when I was at secondary school, my friend brought in an album by a new artist called Elton John and we loved hearing the prominent piano as if for the first time, both lyrical and percussive in the song we played again and again: ‘Border Song’.
The musical references and influences in the songs of The Beatles are so diverse and there are elements of classical music that have found their way into them, either through instrumentation or particular musical atmospheres. What is clear, though, is that the songs were conceived in a compositional way, through the marrying of often quite complex harmonic patterns with connective melodic lines, as the classical music critic William Mann wrote in The Times in 1963: ‘One gets the impression that they simultaneously think of harmony and melody.’
What is perhaps more pertinent, however, is that The Beatles, in just ten years, through their music and through their ability to communicate worldwide in such a profound way, changed the musical landscape for us all.
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