Click here to return to AWP's index.
- The confluence of a number of factors triggered the first installment of the "Notes on ..." series over the Memorial Day weekend of May 1989:
- Rediscovery of the Beatles albums on CD, after not having been giving them much thought for a period of some 20 years. The experience was equal parts nostalgic (who and where was I when I first heard this music?) and mind-expanding (in terms of noticing many levels of sophisticated detail and form that I hadn't noticed before.)
- The suggestion and proof-by-existance that the Beatles were a worthy subject of "formal scholarship" provided by the examples of Lewisohn's _Recording Sessions_ book current at the time, and the best of what could be found then in rec.music.beatles; the postings of saki, Jim Kendall, and Doug Sulpy, in particular.
- The slow realization that even the most scholarly treatments of the wealth of of Beatle bootleg material to-date were focused almost entirely on issues of discography and provenance, while largely missing out on the the profound musicological significance of the material in terms of the light it shed on the Beatles' compositional processes.
- Inspiration and opportunity to "publish" in serial form provided by the relatively new-fangled medium of a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to the Beatles.
- A mid-life crisis-driven fire in the belly to do "something," some how, some way, with my training and experience in music theory, which at the time was on a streak of more than 10 years worth of virtually complete un-utilization.
- The possibility of doing all the songs, or at least an open-ended series covering "many" of them, was under consideration from the very first article.
- I was nervously waiting to see how the first Notes would go down. No one in r.m.b. had ever touched the music on my level of detail. And historically, guys like Wilifred Mellers had put quite the kaibosh on mating musicology with the Beatles. It wasn't so much a matter of whether or not to do the full series, per se; rather deciding whether or not pushing each article to the Internet as it was completed would be a good idea or not, all things considered.
- I could have been done in as little as ~2 years if I were working full time in musical academia or just plain filthy rich like Mr. McCartney, Senior.
- My actual pace in the beginning was very close to one article per week, which would have come out to ~4 years for a series of ~200 articles.
- Real life, meaning a full time job in the software industry, two young children, and a spouse with her own career, made it impossible for me to sustain the initial pace. On some irregular but not infrequent basis I found myself sometimes going a month or longer without working on the project at all.
- Somewhere about the second or third year in, when I started to take my desire and intention to do the whole thing more seriously, it was time for a reality check; taking the average elapsed time per article to-date and extrapolating outward for the rest of the series. That calculation came out to be much longer than even the 10 years, 8 months that it eventually has taken.
- Following a period of panic and frustration whose duration I'm reluctant to document, I surprised myself by eventually achieving what Holden Caulfield's English teacher, Mr. Antonlini, described as the maturity to live humbly by a cause. I started enjoying what I was doing much more the moment that I ceased to care (as much) about when the job would be finished.
- In the first 28 pieces I was insisting on working from a unique angle or point of departure for each song. This became a difficult burden to sustain over the long run, especially if I was going to cover every song, some of which (a surprisingly few, actually) would not bear such an individualized approach.
- I eventually resorted to a template, inspired by Unix man pages, to facilitate the process of starting each new article, and to insure more consistent coverage of each song.
- The first 28 ironically contained more sidebar-like depth in some areas, but contained many blindspots in others.
- Any song that contained one or more of the following anomalies:
1. A form that could not be easily pigeonholed into
the standard pop designs.
2. Chord progressions that relied on voice leading rather than
root movement.
3. Uneven phrase lengths or meter changes.
- If I have to pick just one, it's the Intro to "If I Fell."
- At the high level, I was amazed very early on at how often you'd find examples of the three "anomalistic" categories in even the very early songs. People in general have tended to under rate the first half of the catalog in this respect.
- I don't know how to quantify "biggest." I like to think the series provided a fairly regular stream of "aha" experiences of whatever size. Personally, I would get an enormous rush sometimes out of relatively microscopic discoveries. Some examples:
- The successive shortening of the phrase lengths in the "Day Tripper" bridge.
- Unravelling the two part counterpoint in the "Thank You Girl" bridge to discover a type of canon effect.
- Discovering how Ringo drops the ultra syncopated drumming pattern for the second half of "Ticket to Ride."
- Treating "Drive My Car" as if the home key were G. No contest.
- You, Ian, might rightfully choose my article on "Revolution 9" for categorically dismissing the possibility of its containing the level of detailed compositional control you've suggested in your own essay on the track. On the other hand, I'm still not 100% sure I agree with you there :-)
- IMHO, the overall success of the series rests on the extent to which my toolset for the project is a not-too-doctrinaire personal synthesis of a number of music theory "schools," further adapted to the particular challenges of the material under study.
- The downside of this approach is that it allows my work to potentially "fall between two stools;" i.e. my lay readership finds the tech talk inscrutable such as it is, while my academic colleagues resent that this same tech talk is not cast in terms of a more rigorous and easily identifiable doctrine.
- Using ASCII text to approximate musical examples that would have been much easier to grok using staff notation.
- I'd learn enough about playing the guitar to understand its basic techniques.
- I've got enough keyboard technique to appreciate how difficult it would be to fully understand the piano music of, say, Chopin or Debussy, without that knowledge. So I'm sensitive to the likelihood that I've missed some important guitar-related stuff when it comes to the Beatles.
- Evolution of response to the series has been curiously orthogonal to changes in the newsgroups themselves.
- Response to the series has very gradually but steadily grown over the years. Availability of the full series on the Web has helped this.
- I've always had a steady (but thankfully small minority) of negative responses ranging from the gently teasing ("You don't get out much, do you?") to the disturbingly nasty ("Dude, you are one of the most pretentious bullshitters I have ever come across.")
- On the flip side, the series has received no small amount of gratifying and unsolicited critical acclaim in recent years.
- The newsgroups themselves have changed in ways no different, really, from the rest of the Internet. I seem to recall that while there were plenty of flame wars in the early days, they were much less ad-hominem, and (generally) more focused on the facts and opinions under discussion. Perhaps I look back through rose-colored glasses.
- I do believe there's been an unfortunate precipitous drop in the signal-to-noise ratio in the newsgroup postings. But that's the inevitable price of the democratization of technology for which there is no refund nor turning back of the clock.
- Three different venus in different formats:
- And what if I said, "yes?"
- Not as often as you'd think. I've developed a life-long facility for obsessively memorizing vast portions favorite movies whose content I believed provided an apt quote for every one of life's moments. This goes all the way back to the time I watched "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on TV 9 times in 7 days on "Million Dollar Movie" back in the late 50s. Who needed a VCR?
- No, actually, we're just good friends.
- I've always liked that question.
- Gee, what a question to ask a fella!
- Yes, I'm humbly "proud" to contribute something hopefully lasting to the study of the Beatles' songs. I've barely scratched the surface, though I believe my series provides both a worthy guide for the listener, as well a trail already blazed for the more serious scholar who would wish to explore more deeply than I have.
- Above all I truly thank God for providing me with the mental faculties, not to mention the inspiration and support of worthy teachers, loving family, and so many friendly netizens essential in order to complete such a project.
Regards,
Alan ([email protected])
---
"I'd like to keep Britain tidy." 021300#196
---
Copyright (c) 2000 by Alan W. Pollack
All Rights Reserved
Click here to return.
Click here to return to AWP's index.