- Just about everyone I know who likes/enjoys/is-crazy-about the music of
the Beatles knows, without my having to tell them a damned thing, how
"great" their music is. It's not anything that needs "proving" or
"explanation."
- However, there are a number of dimensions to the music of the Beatles
that are more easily described, traced, and quantified. I dare say
that any element of musical composition that can be described with
reasonable objectivity and consistency from one example to the next
allows one to discover at an often surprising level of detail stylistic
preoccupations, predilections and patterns in the thought processes of
the composers. Over the long run, this allows one to describe with a
not unreasonable amount of precision the nature of trends and the
evolution of style.
- The concepts, vocabulary, and method used in the "Notes on" analyses of
Beatles songs will be familiar to anyone who has ever taken a substantive
course in music theory. I may sometimes be unintentionally inaccurate,
but overall, I'm hardly making it up as I go along :-). In fact, such
a detailed examination of the work of those who one admires also happens
to be a centuries-old, time-honored way in which to learn how to compose
music.
- I can appreciate how to the uninitiated, the very language in which the
discussion takes place appears on the surface to be self-importantly
erudite, perhaps even fatuous, but the technical words used do have
commonly accepted meanings, and some kind of objective set of descriptive
tools are critically necessary in such an analytical exercise lest the
whole thing degenerate into a delirious indulgence in fanciful metaphors;
just like this last sentence :-).
- I don't believe that the validity of the exercise is necessarily
invalidated by the fact that the composers may have not been capable
of reading music, or that they couldn't describe in precise terms exactly
what they thought they were doing in their compositions. No doubt, I
would imagine "even" Mozart might have ridiculed those of his
contemporaries who sought to analyze his work. But that doesn't
necessarily invalidate such an inquiry. Granted, if the artist asks
me to not look at his/her work in a certain way, I may be on one
level rudely disobeying that artists preference by what I'm doing,
but it does not mean that my taking a certain view of their work is by
definition, wrong or meaningless. And here, I promised myself
beforehand to not get defensive :-).
The series started in May 1989 with a short note on "We Can Work
It Out." To date there have been around 90 installments, varying
in frequency of appearance in a manner directly inverse to the pace
of my combined family and professional life.
During the first 28 installments, the songs were chosen in random
order (basically special favorites), and I would structure the
outline of each article around the unique attributes of the
respective songs.
Since issue 29 (July '91), I adopted an organizational template
for the Notes, and also decided to go back to the beginning of the
songbook and work my way patiently through in chronological order
instead of skipping around.
My hope is to eventually complete the full cycle of the songs
'officially' recorded by The Beatles. Then we'll figure out
what to do next :-)
- Doing the series was a way of indulging two very big hot buttons:
re-emerging Beatlemania on the threshold of middle age, and an
ingrained hunger for playing the part of the ol' professor. Beyond
that, it all started as a kind of double-dare from 'saki'.
- Just about everyone I know who likes/enjoys/is-crazy-about the music of
the Beatles knows, without my having to tell them a damned thing, how
"great" their music is. It's not anything that needs "proving" or
"explanation."
- However, there are a number of dimensions to the music of the Beatles
that are more easily described, traced, and quantified. I dare say
that any element of musical composition that can be described with
reasonable objectivity and consistency from one example to the next
allows one to discover at an often surprising level of detail stylistic
preoccupations, predilections and patterns in the thought processes of
the composers. Over the long run, this allows one to describe with a
not unreasonable amount of precision the nature of trends and the
evolution of style.
- The concepts, vocabulary, and method used in the "Notes on" analyses of
Beatles songs will be familiar to anyone who has ever taken a substantive
course in music theory. I may sometimes be unintentionally inaccurate,
but overall, I'm hardly making it up as I go along :-). In fact, such
a detailed examination of the work of those who one admires also happens
to be a centuries-old, time-honored way in which to learn how to compose
music.
- I can appreciate how to the uninitiated, the very language in which the
discussion takes place appears on the surface to be self-importantly
erudite, perhaps even fatuous, but the technical words used do have
commonly accepted meanings, and some kind of objective set of descriptive
tools are critically necessary in such an analytical exercise lest the
whole thing degenerate into a delirious indulgence in fanciful metaphors;
just like this last sentence :-).
- I don't believe that the validity of the exercise is necessarily
invalidated by the fact that the composers may have not been capable
of reading music, or that they couldn't describe in precise terms exactly
what they thought they were doing in their compositions. No doubt, I
would imagine "even" Mozart might have ridiculed those of his
contemporaries who sought to analyze his work. But that doesn't
necessarily invalidate such an inquiry. Granted, if the artist asks
me to not look at his/her work in a certain way, I may be on one
level rudely disobeying that artists preference by what I'm doing,
but it does not mean that my taking a certain view of their work is by
definition, wrong or meaningless. And here, I promised myself
beforehand to not get defensive :-).
The series is way too large for me to want to distribute it directly
to any and all takers. Bob Clements has been kind enough to maintain
an archive of the full "Notes on..." series on his "bobcat.bbn.com"
machine. If you have FTP connectivity to the Internet, here's
the instructions:
>FTP to bobcat.bbn.com (128.89.2.103).
>user anonymous
>pass
>cd beatles
>cd noteson
>get (whatever)
>
>Be patient. It's just a slow 4.77 MHz IBM PC.
Further info about this site and other rmb material archived
there is posted regularly as part of the 'Welcome' note to
this newsgroup.
- For those who may have wondered from time to time just who the 'flip'
I think I am in writing this series ("temper, temper"): ~awp has a PhD
in music theory and composition (University of Pennsylvania, '77),
and has taught these same subjects on the college level. For reasons
too personal and boringly complicated to go into here, he's been working
in the field of software engineering since 1978.
- Yes, it is one of the author's fondest wishes (guess what the other
one is) to publish the (God Willing) completed set of Notes in the
form of a Boook. This will, of course, take a while. I'm more than
happy to share the work with The Net as it emerges, but I will humbly
ask you all for your courtesy in honoring my copyright of the material.
Yes, it is one of the my fondnest wishes to publish the completed
set of Notes in the form of a Boook. This will, of course, take a
while, and I'm hardly thinking of quitting my day job in the
meanwhile. I'm more than happy to share the work with The Net
as it emerges, but I will humbly ask you all for your courtesy
in honoring my copyright of the material.
[email protected] is my email address at a currently stylish
public Unix site in Brookline Mass. I generally keep my work
email address and other personal contact points unlisted on
the net.
- During the first 28 installments, the songs were chosen in random
order (basically special favorites), and I would structure the
outline of each article around the unique attributes of the
respective songs.
- At that point, in order to establish a working vocabulary and set of
concepts for the articles, many of the earlier ones have side-bar
like tutorials or tangential points about the Beatles songbook overall.
As a result, the articles steadily grew in length, some of them near
the end becoming *quite* long.
- Since issue 29 (last July), I adopted an organizational template for
the Notes, and also decided to go back to the beginning of the
songbook and work my way patiently through in chronological order
instead of skipping around.
- The template provides a kind of consistency which allows me to
keep the individual articles shorter for the most part, while
enforcing upon me a certain rigorous breadth in the coverage
of each song. Ironically, some of the much longer articles
from the first half do not always cover some of the topics now
included in the template. For that reason, I ought to at some
point, revise and extend the older articles in keeping with
the template style, but for now, in order to keep moving, I'm
skipping over titles already covered earlier when I get up to
their place on the list.
Below is a complete index of the series in # order:
Click here to return.
Click here to return to AWP's index.
