Howard Goodall's Twentieth Century Greats - Lennon & McCartney

oh well...he set up boulez and stockhausen as the 'bad guys' - but why isn't getting rid of harmony altogether an interesting thing to pursue (at that time anyway; also many of those composers did have a problem with it and set off in numerous 'third way' paths (kagel, ligeti, the list goes on and on...)) - or why couldn't we do both?
Saying sandpaper could produce sound that could be called music isn't ok one minute but making music out of tapes, looping or processing them (and these composers didn't just loop them as he implied!) is fine as long as there's a song behind it - doesn't he see its the same kind of thinking taking place here, taking liberties with sound and calling processed tapes of anything, music? (and what about revolution no9 - was that an aberration?). What is wrong with that 'musical performance' he recreated? and he pretty much left it to imply this wz the sum of avant garde activity taking place at that time.

Also I don't think he got behind the reasons of the beatles success - yeah the songs were there and the arrangements were fab but the reasoning i.e. look at those chords whoa! doesn't quite work just on its own...and when you factor in what else was popular in the 60s (from hendrix doing feddback etc etc) - besides much of this amounted to just straight emotional manipulation - minor chords = sad! music should do certain things, make you feel certain, concrete things.

(to be fair I liked his prog on wagner that wz shown last year - but then again I don't know too much abt classical music before the 1920s)

I was listening very hard to Goodall's accent to see if I could discern any Norwegian in there. In terms of a monumental arse-licking job this has scarcely been bettered, to be frank I don't know how any of us ever had the nerve to even attempt to make music after Paul McCartney's Beatles had perfected every last aspect of it!

Am looking forward to the rest of the series: Kenny Ball, Geoff Love, Frank Ifield...

I quite liked the 'schools' aspect of it - but it had problems - so a 'modulation' (as used by Tchaikovsky) is attached to a couple kissing with the city lights as background. I think the cage comment kind of ties in with schoenberg's 'inventor of genius' actually. Cage wasn't a 'proper' composer and that was the point. that's why much of music can register with people from diff musical background maybe - but he presented such a black and white pic!

Cage and his associates (nam june paik) did work with other media (which is where those videos of the beatles come in - he again implied they came up with it but they may have introduced it first to pop but whatever).

(actually not sure what my feelings are re: certain chords to evoke certain feelings - I do like music where the feeling you get from it isn't obvious)

that works, too!

The Beatles were pretty good at minor-chord things from time to time, Julio--I think "I'll Be Back" is actually a pretty great song and that has interesting major/minor stuff. I've really come to believe that "Hard Day's Night" is the greatest Beatles album anyway. As far as harmonic ambiguity goes, they did seem to display a real talent for this as well, as on many middle-period tune and "Not a Second Time" as well as on "Abbey Road." But if Goodall's saying that the Beatles were more pop, concise and fun than Stockhausen and Cage and Feldman, then that's like Robert Hughes telling us that Warhol was more pop than Pollock or Ernst, then he's stating the obvious, inn't he?

The main arg was that the classical avant-garde has lost touch with the people and that the beatles, by re-engaging with western tonality, had somehow begun a process of regeneration (and he cited the minimalists like reich and tavener to back up this claim). It was the 'beatles are the mozart of its time' thing and yes, it did remind me of geir (sundar's thread on mozart from a few days ago actually counters this line of thinking quite well).

Despite all of that I liked the way he looked at the beatles in terms of chords etc. but I love early beatles (which funnily enough isn't them at the highest levels of musical sophistication and don't like much of the sgt pepper material I've heard).

also -- what about 'two virgins'? I know its lennon being 'corrupted' by yoko but has anyone heard that?

There's other John & Yoko stuff where they mix these techniques with the compatible parts of rock music, and it's way superior. "Cambridge 1969" (from "2V" follow-up "Life With The Lions") is a feedback-and-yowls piece which has some merit, and pretty much the whole of the LP "Yoko Ono / Plastic Ono Band" is unique and brilliant.

HG made a valid case for *why* the beatles had such an enormous effect on everything that followed, and his enthusiasm was infectious. no, it wasn't particularly in-depth, but what do you want from yer pre-pub telly on a sat'day neet: blood?

(of course, it helps that i agree with him completely, but hey.)

are there "many" of these people now though? it might have been more challenging to argue the opposite now. I didnt see the programme.

(btw, I haven't heard 'two virgins' but I love 'fly' and 'plastic ono band')

Grimly of course it was just a show and I did point out what I liked about it. But there was a lot of things that were just plain wrong from factual POV and that undermines his main arg.

1. Lennon & McCartney (NOT "The Beatles")

2. Cole Porter

3. Bernard Herrman

and errrrrrrrrrr,

4. Leonard Bernstein

I'm imagine that Channel 4 nixed Howard's plan to make films on early Genesis and Barclay James Harvest.

1. Lennon & McCartney (NOT "The Beatles")

2. Cole Porter

3. Bernard Herrman

and errrrrrrrrrr,

4. Leonard Bernstein

I imagine that Channel 4 nixed Howard's plan to make films on early Genesis and Barclay James Harvest.

: (

And drawing a line from classical music and proving why McCartney is the biggest classical composer of the 20th century, that is just sooo obviously correct. Although, it must be said, that while his harmony things were really new and exciting in popular music, they had certainly been done before in other musical forms, not least classical music.

Goodall's other selections seem to suggest he regards western harmony and melody as the highest form. Stravinsky's use of rhythm is as radical (for western classical) as his use of dissonance.
Can't believe he's not in there, or Duke Ellington, whose harmonic and melodic sophistication is second to none.

this also seemed all about mccartney than anyone else in the group.

now, be fair, he didn't quite say that. he said something about how eventually a similar coupling of tones and beats would be popularised as bhangra, rather than actually claiming the beatles *invented* it.

there are some very valid points up-thread, but i still think people are being unfair about a programme that never claimed to offer any great insight and was, after all, one man's opinion. i know absolutely sod all about musical theory, and so it was about my level.

and, without wishing to fan the flames even more, goodall has a point: the beatles *have* had far more of an impact upon what followed than anyone else, perhaps because (like elvis?) they acted as a filter and made otherwise societally unpalatable musical ideas acceptable to a stuffy western audience. this *is* the west and we do like our harmony and melodies a certain way: all goodall was doing, i think, was reflecting the tastes of his target audience.

i'm bitterly, bitterly disappointed by the rest of his "greats", though. i mean: no iron maiden?

;)

dont get me wrong, i did like the programme. i love music-ed shows like this.

elvis and the beatles did make R&B palatable but many others at the time made sophisticated pop alongisde the beatles, and competition acted as a driving force (as stew says). But goddall is thinking about 'impact' in relation to classical music and not pop.

'Got to give Goodall props for some of his earlier docs - the Wagner one was fascinating and pretty complex (much reference to Schopenauer).'

I also liked how he spent sometime examing his personal feelings over wagner and the nazis.

I liked the doc on mozart too.

When it comes to showing how The Beatles are just as worth listening to as Mozart, Brahms or Bach, I guess that argument would be rather uninteresting. As I understand, the main point was to show how The Beatles were good at the exact same things the old classical legends were good at.

except they weren't as good at it. they weren't even trying to do the same things. there's not exactly any development in Beatles music as far as I can see--it's rock and roll. As an episode in the history of revivalism (pop style, which means one revives things that are ten or five years old instead of 50 or 100, although we're getting there these days as the form grows older), the Beatles, or if you prefer, The Beatles, were doing the same thing pop artists had been doing since the mid-'50s. Or for that matter, what Ellington was doing in the '40s. I don't understand why this guy, Howard Goodall, doesn't talk about that instead of bringing Stockhausen into it, because I think Stockhausen or Ravi Shankar is totally peripheral to the Beatles' story myself. It's fucking rock and roll out of Goffin and King, the Everly Brothers and various girl groups and '50s performers. I see no need to legitimize it in any way. They were scared of being boring and so added various things to the basics along the way, which is what any rocker does. As far as "making unpalatable music acceptable," yeah I guess but what about all those people pre-Beatles listening to r&b, soul and jazz? They were the first rock group as rock group whom people took somewhat seriously is all. They wrote nice songs, they had the means to take their time in the studio, they were witty and they had their own private club. That's plenty in and of itself.

Doo-woop was also mainly three chord based to a much larger extent than The Beatles. The Four Freshmen were somewhat more complex, but I wouldn't classify them as doo-wop.

What the Beach Boys did was invent a subject matter--surfing, cars, California, and whether or not pre-'63 they dressed it up in anything overly fancy harmonically, you got to consider the total sound of those recordings, the words. That's listening to rock and roll as itself, and the Beatles added something very cool to that. They had the ability to bend genre exercises into something different, because they were so frightened of appearing clichéd, which I respect them for. But to this listener, the actual result over the long haul just ain't as intresting as tropicalía, the Byrds, or that other little innovation in harmonic motion that happened about five years before '63, bossa nova.

Anyway, basing a song on a pre-decided set of chords is hardly the most exciting harmonic thing you could possibly too. The Beatles were not mainly revolutionary by putting a seven on top of a chord (that had been done even by rock'n'rollers in the 50s), but more because of surprising modulations and unexpected chord changes.

No idea about Jobin btw.

Who's the guy who wrote the Beatles bio "Shout"? He perceived that Jobim and Lennon/McC had affinities. And no, you can listen to a lot of '50s rock and you'll never hear anyone using minor sevenths like the Beatles did; it's nearly all straight blues progressions--Elvis, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Everlys, none of them did this. As I said Geir, the Beatles got this from Goffin and King.

The thing is, Geir, bossa nova appeared around '58--the year Jobim and João Gilberto recorded stuff like "Chega De Saudade" and "Desafinado," the latter which was conceived as a joke about singers who were off-key and composers who used "wrong" chords. Gilberto's guitar and vocal style was every bit as revolutionary--in Brazil, but so what, we live in a much more aware world these days, in part thanks to your beloved Mozart, I mean Beatles--as what the Beatles did five years later. Bossa was middle-class samba; Beatles was middle-class rock and roll. Quite similar. The world marches on and that music had zip to do with Mozart; it was based on late-19th-century impressionist stuff, also from your beloved Europe. So I just don't get where you're coming from. As usual.

Inspired by this ridiculous thread, I went back and listened to the Beatles last night--even put three listenable Beatles songs on a CD I made from my old Parlophone LPs: "Ticket to Ride," "What You're Doing," and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party." The overriding impression was just one of carelessness, in the conception and the playing, meritriciousness in the general musical idea-cluster. IT SOUNDS FUNNY these days--the singing is still good, of course. But even when Macca lets loose on the "I'll be waiting here for you" in "What You're Doing," they sound so damned constricted somewhat, so schmaltzy...the oft-noted dryness of the approach just isn't there any more, somehow. In short, it sounds like a big mess. I have to say, Ringo did some nice stuff as did George, but they sound clunky to me--they drag the whole thing down. And where the fuck does anyone hear Mozart and Beethoven in all this farrago?

Mighty odd, Geir.