Read on to discover what happened when a respected UK journalist compared The Beatles to Mahler...
Sending shockwaves across the country... comparing The Beatles to Mahler
It was possibly the most famous (or infamous) newspaper article written about the Fab Four. Published in late December 1963, when ‘Beatlemania’ was at its zenith, the article was written by William Mann, then The Times’s chief music critic.
Bill was far from being a stuffy old fogey. To be invited to lunch at his house was to be plied with all sorts of temptations: culinary, alcoholic and chemical. But he was undoubtedly a formidable authority on musical matters. So, when he declared, in his opening sentence, that ‘John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the talented young musicians from Liverpool’ were ‘the outstanding English composers of 1963’, a shock-wave must have swept across breakfast tables around the country.
Remember that in 1963 the likes of Britten, Tippett and Walton were in their prime. And Mann wasn’t finished with his provocations. Praising The Beatles’ songs for their ‘pandiatonic clusters’, ‘flat submediant key switches’ and ‘Aeolian cadences’, he went on to make comparisons with technical devices used by a romantic genius (Mahler) and a modernist maverick (Peter Maxwell Davies).
A new culture war... how dare a critic take pop music seriously?
More than 60 years on, it’s hard to appreciate the intensity of the culture war that followed Mann’s piece and lasted even longer than the Beatles did. Mann was mocked for applying pretentious musicological jargon to the apparently simple pop songs that Lennon and McCartney were writing in 1963 (though I can imagine him mischievously using a word such as pandiatonic precisely because it would baffle his editor and most readers).
But he was also castigated for taking pop music seriously at all. Remember, it wasn’t until the late-1960s that broadsheet newspapers deigned to employ specialist writers about rock and pop. And the debate over whether ‘mere’ pop stars could be regarded as creating art would rage on through the decade, especially after The Beatles brought out the far more revolutionary Sgt. Pepper album in 1967.
Comparing the Beatles to Mahler... would pop threaten the future of classical music?
Oddly, the spectacular rise of pop culture in the 1960s puzzled and irritated left-wing critics and sociologists as much as right-wing commentators. Those on the left lamented that the working-classes hadn’t been educated well enough to appreciate more intellectual artforms and music. Those on the right felt that the prestige and even the existence of their cherished genres of music – operas, oratorios, string quartets, symphonies – were being threatened by the sheer commercial power of pop. And that, quite simply, the world was going mad. Watching a crowd of screaming fans at a 1965 Beatles concert, Noël Coward observed that, ‘We are whirling more swiftly into extinction than we know’.
Such apocalyptic worries now seem quaint, if not absurd. Somehow, civilisation managed to stagger on – just as it survived punk rock, stage nudity and limited-overs cricket, all regarded as portents of doom when they arrived.
Yet even today you still find traces of the culture war between (to put it crudely) populists and intellectuals. The big difference since the 1960s is the shift in power between the two sides. It’s now the populists who control the vast majority of media outlets and cultural institutions. If a respected newspaper music critic declared today that, say, Taylor Swift was the greatest songwriter since Schubert, nobody would bat an eyelid, and very few commentators would even dare to disagree, for risk of sounding elitist or out of touch.
Classical music and pop... there's now more willingness to learn from each other
Within the music industry, however, I do think that today there’s more willingness, on all sides, to learn from other genres. That has to be a positive development. Just as a pop musician such as Jonny Greenwood has developed his orchestral and film-scoring skills to great effect, so many younger composers trained in the classical tradition are infusing their music with ideas and techniques borrowed from pop genres. Few successful composers ‘stay in their lane’ now, and their music is richer for it.
That’s as it should be. We are fortunate to live in a technological age where every sort of music of every era is instantly available to us, usually at very little cost. Why waste time debating whether my favourite genre speaks more profoundly to me than yours does to you? What matters is discouraging young people from thinking that only one sort of music is suitable for them. In that respect we still have a mountain to climb.
