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I would love to hear the mini essay about the Beatles success through the lens of music theory if you’re up to it sometime! Your rec post was delightful and I’d happily read more of your Beatles thoughts :)

YOU WILL REGRET THIIIIIS

OKAY SO

Cultural Background

I mentioned this briefly in that other post, but a lot of Western musical genres birthed around the early 20th century have this in common: cover songs. It would be decades before every household had a record player. Gramophones were expensive. Most people heard music in dance halls, or maybe on the wireless, but the wireless mostly played classical music. So, live bands in music halls had to be able to play anything the audience requested, because that was how people got to listen to their fave songs

(Quick side note - jazz as a genre can still do this to this day. Put two jazz musicians who've never met into a room and ask them to play a jazz song that doesn't belong to either, and 99% of the time they can. It's still a popular convention to create jazz covers of contemporary hits. A very cool element of the genre.)

As baby teenagers, the Beatles formed (as the Quarrymen, among other names) in the late 1950s, and they trained in music halls in Hamburg, Germany in 1960, at a point George Harrison was still too young to legally be there (he lied about his age to immigration). They learned their trade by playing 7 to 8 hour sets in which they therefore had to play EVERYTHING. R&B, jazz, ballads, rock and roll, music hall, vaudeville, pop, musical theatre... all of it. This meant two things:

They learned an absolute kaleidoscope of genres that they later drew from when composing their own music; none of them had any formal training, it all came from this time; and

This was where they first learned that they could alter cover versions to create their own sound (e.g. changing the chords, adding solos, etc), which let them work out how to be influenced by, rather than copying or taking.

And this sets the stage for the defining trait of the Beatles as musicians: they were experimental, and intuitive, and fascinated by other musical traditions and philosophies, and they loved to combine these threads into creating incredibly varied songs that were still theirs. You can see this in a lot of their later work: Your Mother Should Know is a pure music hall song, and Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite is vaudeville with Victorian funfair organs and circus ring drums; and yet, both sound like Beatles songs, still.

BUT ALSO let's take a quick look at the absolute bullshit classical music was pulling during this time

A Brief Musical Interlude

So lets talk keys and chords.

A defining trait of Western musical construction is the complexity and versatility of its harmonies - keys and chords. Chords are basically colour palettes of notes that go together well without clashing, which Western music likes to place beneath a melody to change the feel of the piece and to drive it along. A "discord" is literally a note that doesn't fit in the chord, like a clashing colour

But, chords like to self-group into patterns that we all instinctively recognise; when does the music sound happy? Sad? Triumphant, intense, relaxed? Western composers have been using these tricks for centuries, and that brings us nicely to the last piece that will fill in the frame of this jigsaw so we can focus on what you all REALLY came for, which is to hear me wax lyrical about Tomorrow Never Knows at the end of this post: and that piece is "classical music in the early 20th century."

Because, up until this point, most Westerners were familiar with two very broad genres: classical music, played by orchestras and on the wireless and still very much in dance halls and theatres and the like; and the relatively new "popular" music, still nascent, still ill-defined, influenced by other less recognisable (to a white audience) forms but still very simple.

And at this point, particularly in the 40s and 50s, classical composers suddenly decide that chords are BORING, guys, even BEETHOVEN AND THAT were using them AGES ago, we should REDEFINE MUSIC and start on a project to dismantle the chord system. Anything can be music, they say! Let's push the boundaries! Let's make something new!

(I can only assume this was the influence of the War.)

After a while, composers even started claiming that literally any sound could therefore be defined as music, and started scraping sandpaper together and throwing ping pong balls at piano strings and that. All very artsy, to be sure, but not exactly a pleasant listen. Anyway, audiences in their droves went "Well that's disgusting," and suddenly an ENORMOUS rift opened up between musicians and music lovers.

And what was waiting in the wings to gather these lost listeners unto its burgeoning and chord-loving bosom?

Pop music.

Enter: the Beatles. On Chords.

Now pop was aggressively on the other side of this debate. Pop LOVED chords. Pop, in particular, loved about four chords, and by god was it faithful to those four chords. This, in fact, is still largely true even to this day, and this is a gift to those of us who like mash-ups.

And the Beatles were initially no exception!

They crashed into public consciousness in 1963 with the album Please Please Me. Let's take a look at the best song on the album, I Saw Her Standing There.

(Shout out to the artist who colourised that video, damn good job).

This song is such a good example of the trendiest of trendy music at that time. Absolute classic 1960s rock and roll banger. Catchy, perfect rock and roll beat, excellent hook. And, it contains the tidy four chords of everyone else! Nicely done, no issue. (Though, in the interests of fairness, some of the songs on Please Please Me were already showing signs of what was to come. From Me To You is another very solid rock and roll song, but its middle section was already showing more interesting chording than most contempories).

It is not, however, a particularly revolutionary song. But, as mentioned, the Beatles were incredibly experimental musicians. I Saw Her Standing There, with its catchy four chords and rock and roll beat and concept, was created in 1963.

Four years later, in 1967, they released I Am the Walrus. So! Let's play this as a game!

How many chords do you think I Am the Walrus contains?

If you want to play on hard mode, guess now; if you want a hint, here's the song:

...

Have you guessed?

The answer is 16. The intro before John Lennon's vocals begin contain eight alone. That's four times the number of most pop songs even now, sixty years on.

And it suits the song! Those chords are not just stuffed in like a weird aural piñata. It's a typical piece of Lennon songwriting at this time, actually - the melody is quite simple, but the chording is complex as fuck to create this shifting, unstable sort of landscape for a song that was deliberately written to be confusing and weird. It's an Alice in Wonderland type of song, and while the melody is fairly solid, the chords under your feet are a mudslide, never quite letting you get your bearings. They drive the song on, and they produce the psychedelic effect that the Beatles were heavily experimenting with at this time.

And, this is very much the defining trait of later Beatles stuff; even mid-era stuff, actually. Once they got their feet under them and realised what they could do with chord complexity, they did not look back.

But! That's just Lots Of Chords. Lennon liked putting lots in. He was a big fan of the Lots of Chords approach. But there are other things you can do with chords; the more advanced settings, as it were, and this is where Paul McCartney specialised.

Chords: Advanced Settings

Modulation

So, I talked about how chords are basically pretty colour palettes of notes to choose from. But, chords themselves can also form palettes, and also have a relationship to one another.

The fun thing with chords is that they sort of self-group into patterns, and we're all very familiar with this even if we've had zero training in musical theory. I mentioned above, we can all recognise happy, sad, angry etc music. Sometimes! Sometimes you hear a chord! And you just KNOW it's kind of incomplete in the song. It inherently feels like the penultimate chord. If the song finished on it, you'd be like "What the fuck is that, where's the ending. Illegal. Resolve that right now." It's the closest non-synaesthetes come to experiencing synaesthesia I think.

So LET'S TALK MODULATION

Take a chord like F major. Its available colour palette contains seven possible notes: F, G, A, B flat, C, D and E. You can pick any number of these, and they'll sound good together, but chords in pop music are normally three notes, so here you can pick F and two others. Let's say, F, A and C. (Try this on a virtual online piano for maximum effect)

It's a nice chord! Sounds pretty.

Now, add in an E flat.

OOOOOOH! Instant unsettling weirdness, right?!?? It's wobbly! It's unfinished!! This, my friends, is modulation - the chord has been modulated! This is the chord known as F7 and it is Weird!! It feels like it's begging to have another chord come along and resolve it to make it feel like it's finished!! And that's because it is.

Next, play a B flat chord. F major as a palette shares a B flat, so they "speak" to each other. You can choose between B♭, C, D, E♭, F, G, and A; pick B♭, plus any other two.

And now play them one after the other. F7, then B♭. And relax. Crisis over. The chord is no longer wobbling. It is resolved. That is your glimpse on the world of synaesthesia. Imagine feeling like that with fucking book titles. Welcome to my world.

Anyway let's see an example of exactly these chords being used by the Beatles in the iconic Hey Jude (song starts at 55 seconds; at 1:40 is the bit we're focusing on):

We're going to examine the transition of the first verse to the chorus. On the line "Then you begin/ to make it better", on the word "better" they use F major.

They then take it to F7 just as they move into the chorus, on the last beat before the line "But any time you feel the". WOBBLY. UNCERTAIN. DO NOT LIKE.

And then it resolves to B flat on "pain".

This is a song for a young boy whose parents were divorcing so his adulterous father could marry someone else, who was struggling with the emotions of it all; McCartney was a vital influence on young Julian Lennon at that time. But that chord modulation really supports the meaning of the lyrics there. F7 is a lost child's pain; but B flat is its resolution, a soothing lullaby that everything will be alright in the end. Absolutely beautiful use of the tactic.

Now, famous composers do this all the time - think Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture, and that famous swell of the violins slamming up into their triumphant, cresting wave (in the linked video, it's at 13 minutes - listen to that 20 seconds and you'll see what I mean). It almost feels cheesy by now, actually, and that's because culturally it now sort of is - it's been heavily used in romance films at the moment of the leads finally kissing or whatever for decades, so it feels old-fashioned to us.

It's therefore rarer in pop, including in the 60s. So, the most skilled composers hide their modulations, so you don't notice them. McCartney became a master of this, and here is his best example of the work:

Penny Lane is a song about a man nostalgically going on a journey through a place he left long ago, but is still home. It's a wistful, optimistic sort of song.

Let's play again! How many modulated key changes do you think this song contains?

...

THAT'S RIGHT KIDS it's seven. SEVEN.

Every transition from verse to chorus has his voice go up - so far so normal. But in counterpoint, the key modulates down. That gives the chorus a wistful feel, rather than a relaxed, chill feel; but the key change is hidden! We do not notice! Back into each verse it then modulates back up, so the verse feels like an optimistic new day after the chorus. And then, the final chorus modulates up with the vocal instead of down, giving it that joyful, triumphant feel. And I bet for most of you the only one you noticed was that last chorus.

(It also features a baroque piccolo solo, inspired by Bach. The Beatles actually did do a lot to influence contemporary classical music into returning to using chords and that, and this is part of why/how.)

Keys vs Modes

Anyway we've put it off long enough. Let's talk about Eleanor Rigby.

I actually mentioned this briefly on that other post, but the beautiful, sinister, haunting feel of Eleanor Rigby is down to the fact that, rather than using major or minor key, it's not actually in a key at all. Instead, McCartney used a much older tradition from Western music, going all the way back to Ancient Greece, called a mode.

Modes are super old - keys were introduced around the Renaissance, but before that, we used modes. They're similar, and if you want to look into them and their technical differences more you can; but here, I'll just say that the important thing is that the 6th note in the palette is raised by a semitone.

You actually might be familiar with another famous song in the Dorian mode. The most common mode used in Anglo-Celtic folk music was the Dorian mode, and this is what gives us the song Scarborough Fair, and its haunting feel. Eleanor Rigby uses a combination of Dorian and Aeolian modes, and that's what creates its atmosphere.

But, there's another trick Eleanor Rigby uses - its final chords.

Cadences

Also known poetically as a "dying fall", a cadence is essentially how you finish and close off a song. The final two chords played to signal to the hind brain that the song is finished. As with everything else, there are commonly used methods; the most common, even today and across many genres, is the "perfect cadence", where the chord goes from fifth to first, first being the "tonic" - the root note in a chord's colour palette (e.g. the F in the F major options listed above. That's what we call the tonic). It gives a clear sense of finality to the song.

Eleanor Rigby, however, uses something that was at the time - and largely still is - unheard of in pop, classical, or pretty much any other contemporary genre. It drops from second to first. This was last popular among composers in the 14th century. The effect is that mournful, almost unfinished feeling - perfect for a song about loneliness, and a man whose life's work failed.

Other songs also get some unusual cadences. Yesterday, She's Leaving Home and And I Love Her all finish on a plagal cadence - a drop from fourth to first. You may recognise this cadence from Christian hymns - it's the cadence used to sing "amen" at the end of a hymn. It is otherwise basically absent from pop music.

(I don't think any of these were the result, btw, of McCartney going "today I am going to write a song in the Dorian mode with a plagal cadence to end." As I say: he's an intuitive musician, and he drew from a LOT of influences. Apparently that included hymns.)

India and the Culture Shift

So, the band, like most young people in the 60s, had dabbled a lot with drugs - LSD in particular. I'll come back to that at the end, but the long and short of it is: Lennon and Harrison were big into the stuff and had a hardcore psychedelia phase, Ringo had a go, but McCartney was very against it. It was one point of tension among many, the others being ego, child abandonment, and Yoko Ono getting cameos.

But a big driver of it was that they were, ultimately, four kids when they were suddenly catapulted into a kind of mega-stardom that the world had never seen before. None of them handled it well, if we're all being very honest with ourselves and each other. The obvious impact was to John Lennon's relationship with his first wife and son (though, side note: he'd started mellowing and making a lot of amends in the 70s, before he was tragically murdered); but none of them exactly behaved very well.

And so, like a lot of people in that sort of situation, initially they turned to drugs (particularly in the 60s). But when it wasn't giving them the meaning they craved, they turned elsewhere, and this brings us nicely to the big contribution made by George Harrison: the replacement of LSD with Hindu spirituality and Indian music.

George's interest began in 1965, and that was when he started learning sitar from Ravi Shankar - he played it on Norwegian Wood, in fact. But in 1967, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the inventor of transcendental meditation, held a seminar in Bangor, Wales, and the Beatles, led by George, attended. It had such a profound effect on them that they went to Rishikesh to do a training course in it in 1968. When asked why, Harrison was quoted as saying "We have all the money you could ever dream of. We have all the fame you could ever wish for. But, it isn't love. It isn't health. It isn't peace inside, is it?"

(George also became a Western spokesperson for transcendental meditation, and would often appear on TV with the Maharishi to tell people about its benefits. This made a lot of white Christian English men Big Mad and they would also go on television and yell at him a lot.)

BUT THE POINT IS this was a big turning point in the Beatles music. They were all fascinated by the spiritual teachings. They started using more Indian instruments in their music - Within You Without You was inspired by classical Hindustani music, and Harrison got Indian musicians to play the rest of the instruments on it (sitar, tabla, dilruba and tambura); in fact, he was the only Beatle on the track. But, for as much as he was the main devotee, Harrison wasn't the only one.

I mentioned earlier that John Lennon's work, for a long time, was characterised by simple melodies and complex chording. The Indian influence was what changed this. During Rishikesh, he wrote a song called Child of Nature; it was never released as a Beatles song, but years later it resurfaced as the song Jealous Guy on his solo album, and you can really hear the melodic Indian influence on the tune. This is because, as is very commonly characteristic in traditional Asian music, it's pentatonic - put simply, it's the black notes on the piano.

They wrote songs like demons in that retreat, often when they should have been meditating (except George, who was very strict; even so, he wrote about six songs in that time). Most made it onto the White Album. But that fusion of Indian and Western music was ahead of its time - and, it was an early foray that helped smooth the way a little for the development and rise of bhangra in the UK in the 70s.

But all this is basically prelude to the most innovative song they ever created.

Tomorrow Never Knows

Now LISTEN. I am not here to say this is the best song of all time. Personally I do not think this is even the best Beatles song of all time. It's not even the best in its genre.

But Tomorrow Never Knows is a song for which you can make a dazzlingly strong argument that it revolutionised modern music as we know it. Take my hand, I shall explain

So: this song crops up on Revolver, in 1966, and several important elements come together for it:

For the album Rubber Soul, the Beatles had made it big enough that they could do whatever they wanted in their own studio. They could ignore the recording conventions of the day; what they wanted, went. Total creative control.

For Rubber Soul, they also started thinking of the whole album as a unit of art in its own right, rather than a collection of individual songs.

For Revolver, which followed Rubber Soul and utilised these same concepts, they took their time. Every song was recorded and re-recorded and played with, and in several cases the final version was not the one they went into the studio with. Rubber Soul took fewer than 80 hours to record. Revolver took 220.

The thing to know about Ringo Starr - he was not the world's greatest drummer. He really wasn't. Lennon once famously said Ringo wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. But, he had one talent on the drums, at which he was absolutely unbeatable: his sense of time. Lennon also said of him that he was more accurate than a drum machine; and this was 100% true.

George Harrison had introduced them to Indian music, and the first stirrings of Hindu spirituality. He had learned sitar by this point.

Paul McCartney had started hanging out with avant-garde classical composers, who, as mentioned, were playing with some widely-considered-dogshit techniques at the time. From them, he learned the practice of tape loops - recording a single sound onto a strip of tape, cutting and gluing it into a loop, and then playing it to repeat itself

John Lennon wanted to create, in a song, an art installation - a soundscape that would replicate how it felt to have an acid trip.

And so. The stage is set.

Firstly, this was unknown territory. No one had done this soundscape idea with commercial music before. The technology was partially invented by this song. I mean that sincerely - some of the tricks used did not exist before this song. Most notably, the vocal modulation effect. These days, you'd press a button on a mixing desk; at that point, the tech didn't exist. So, they fed Lennon's vocal through the revolving speakers in a Leslie cabinet, designed for use with a Hammond organ. One of the sound engineers invented automatic double tracking for the song, to layer the vocals.

Secondly, this was therefore a project of unprecedented creation. This is the song they took the longest on, that changed the most from start to finish. And, if you're going to be experimental on this level, with three talented musicians working intuitively to channel pure invention...

Well, you're going to need an extremely accurate drummer to keep them tied together, aren't you? Someone who won't go off-piste no matter what the others do. Someone more accurate than a drum machine.

Thirdly, McCartney's tape loops, brought from the classical world, were key. They discovered that, while the classical guys would just play these as sounds in their own right (remember, this was the era of rubbing sandpaper together and declaring that it, too, was music, before dodging the tomatoes of a booing crowd), they could run these loops and layer them up to create the soundscape they wanted; something never before created. Some of the loops were so long they extended out of the control room and down the corridor. They also realised you got yet another sound playing them backwards, which Harrison made great use of by deliberately playing in such a way that it would produce the desired reversed sound.

Fourth, Harrison and Lennon - they created both the simulation of an acid trip, and the concept of spiritual enlightenment on top. With Harrison's guidance, Lennon wrote lyrics based on the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Guru Timothy Leary.

Fifth - Harrison chose to add, not chords, but a sitar drone. A drone is a single note, played as a backing to a melody - commonly used outside of Western music, such as in India. This was, I believe, the first drone recorded as used in Western music since the Middle Ages.

And the final result was this:

It's hard to overstate the impact this song had on listeners, on the industry... Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Remember the start of this post? Remember I Saw Her Standing There? Compare the two. This is an aural kaleidoscope, a soundscape effect never heard before. We can't imagine it now, because these are now techniques that have become standard in the industry. But imagine going from I Saw Her Standing There, with its catchy melody, four chords, three guitars and a drum set, to this. Where's that gif of Rapunzel remembering in Tangled. Where the camera goes in her eye and she staggers. That was the entire nation when Revolver was released, and it finished on a three minute art installation producing sounds no human ears had ever before heard.

Concluding Points

I do want to stress, mind, that most of this was not unique to the Beatles. I do think insufferable fans - in the same vein as insufferable fans in every single fandom ever - have overstated the value of the Beatles as being, like, the One True Band, and claiming they invented from whole cloth every single thing they ever did; and I hope this post made it very clear that that is simply not true. Like all human innovators, their innovations were built on previous inventions and discoveries and innovations from other art forms, including other musical genres. This is just a quick overview, really, to outline what they were specifically doing with their music to make it stand out so much; and it did, of course, have enormous influence. But that's not the same thing as "absolutely no one else was doing any of this."

They were also, like many young folks in the 60s, very happy to blur traditional societal lines in pursuit of broadening their musical horizons (and in line with the general hippie movement). They socialised and worked with a LOT of artists from a lot of different genres and even media. There are plentiful records of them doing jam sessions with artists of different genres, races, genders, nationalities, all sorts, many of whom became friends, and had an influence on the band's music (and later solo songs). This means some elements were things that were being done in genres traditionally created/dominated by artists of colour, but a lot of insufferable fans attribute these things directly to the Beatles, and that's not fair. Like every other artist ever, they built on a pre-existing foundation by those who preceded them. The band themselves, at least, acknowledged it, even if the fans won't.

But, on the whole, this was a band defined by its experimentalism, its intuitive grasp of music, and its incredibly diverse genre background that nonetheless was drawn in to create something that sounds like them. Some of it, where cohesion was disintegrating and the experimentalism went A Bit Far, sucks tremendous penis, I'm not going to lie (the White Album has my whole heart but Jesus fucking Christ, John, what the fuck were you thinking with Revolution 9). But without the incredible bombs, you don't get gut-wrenching emotional ballads like While My Guitar Gently Weeps, or the Fool on the Hill. You don't get tongue-in-cheek anti-capitalist songs like Piggies. You don't get the spiritual psychedelia of Within You Without You or Strawberry Fields Forever, or the fun children's songs like Octopus' Garden or Yellow Submarine, or the human portraits of working class struggle in Lady Madonna or Eleanor Rigby, or a host of the most covered songs of all time like Yesterday and Get Back and Come Together, or the anthem of Hey Jude.

Anyway. I highly recommend you try Piggies. Very Tumblr-friendly lyrics. Well done, George.

Final Fun Bit

And it wouldn't be worth doing a post like this without adding these: