The Music of the Beatles will track the musical development of the band, starting from the earliest days in Liverpool and Hamburg, moving through the excitement of Beatlemania, the rush of psychedelia, and the maturity of Abbey Road. While the focus will be on the music, we will also consider how recording techniques, the music business, the music of other artists, and the culture of the 1960s affected John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they created the Beatles repertory. There is probably no band or artist that has had more written about their music than the Beatles. There are many good books on the band's biography, several insider accounts offering glimpses behind the scenes, books that interpret the meaning of the songs, and even books that catalog dates and people regarding the band. This course will try to synthesize much of that information into an account of the Beatles' development as musicians and songwriters.
From Craftsmen to Artists
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来自 University of Rochester 的课程
披头士乐队的音乐
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从本节课中
Pop Maturity
Increased experimentation, still mostly within the context of the pop single. The increasingly important role of the recording studio and recording techniques and innovations. Help!, Rubber Soul, and singles from this period.
与讲师见面
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
Well, I've mentioned this a couple of
times, leading up le, leading up leading up
to a discussion of their music and that is this idea of from craftsmen to
artists and I wanted to take just this video to just delve into that a
little bit more and kind of give you a sense of what I mean by that.
Let's first start with the idea of authenticity as it ap, as it ap applies to
popular music. We have, in, in rock
music really ever since about this time when all of this is
starting to formulate, an idea of what authenticity means.
If you're authentic as a musician, it means that you write your own songs.
Your songs are really about who you are, you're not putting something on, or, or,
or trying to be somebody that you're not. There's a, there's a sense of sincerity.
And honestness and sharing and self-reflection and
philosophical perhaps kind of awareness that goes on.
And so you're thought of as authentic if you do your own music.
Now, remember, this is in a, in a music business that up to this point was
basically geared around people being songwriters, and other
people being performers, and other people being studio musicians,
you know.
And so the people who played on the records had one job, the people
who sang on the records and performed the songs on stage had another job.
People who wrote the songs had yet a third job.
Now we're talking about authenticity being the same
person being involved in all of those things.
Playing their own accompaniment, their own, their own
guitars their own drums not using studio musicians.
You know, singing their own music and writing their own
songs and in many ways the Beatles and Bob Dylan
really helped to establish this idea of authenticity in rock music.
And again, we've talked about the Dylan influence on the Beatles here.
It's interesting, because already by 1966, when The Monkees came along as
the kind of American answer to the Beatles of A Hard Day's
Night, they were really severely taken to task, because they didn't write
their own songs, although Mike Nesmith the guitarist in the group had
songs, and actually ended up having a hit song with another artist.
But they didn't write their own songs.
They were written by professional songwriters in Brill Broden tradition.
The music was all played by studio musicians, and they were seen as
inauthentic, or kind of constructed and phony,
because they didn't really do it themselves.
It's funny, because just a year earlier, two years earlier it was
actually standard practice for that to be the way all rock musicians operated.
The Beatles were something of an exception, though not the only one.
You think about the L.A. scene Los Angeles scene in the
60s and the, there's a fantastic documentary out about the Wrecking Crew.
The whole story about the Wrecking Crew was that
you had a bunch of studio musicians who played
on all of these records and songwriters who did
a lot of the songwriting and then the musicians.
In fact the first Beat, the first Byrds hit,
Mr. Tambourine Man was played almost entirely by studio
musicians except for Roger McGuinn on the electric 12-string.
Yet this auth, this idea of authenticity has already taken hold enough, by
1966, by the fall of 1966 into 1967 that the, the Monkees can
be taken to task for being inauthentic, because they were basically doing what
most pop musicians in LA had done been doing for years without any complaint.
So that's why, you know, it's important to see where this idea of authenticity
really starts up, and I think it starts to happen in 65 with the Beatles and Dylan.
Together really sort of pushing the idea inspiring one another.
Eric Clapton got lot, got a lot of his sense of respect in
the eyes of a lot of fans, not only because he's a fantastic guitarist,
songwriter, and singer and all that kind of thing, but because when he was
with the Yardbirds he actually walked out of a session and refused to play,
because they were doing a song by
a professional song writer using studio musicians.
And he walked out and said that I don't want to do this anymore, this is too
pop, and he went, went on to play in
the John Mayall band where they basically did blues.
And the whole idea was that Clapton stood
up for this notion of musical authenticity in
the pop world and was willing to forego
millions of dollars in stardom to, to be authentic.
Of course he later formed Cream and had millions of dollars
of stardom but that's another story.
He, he, he definitely his, this idea of authenticity is very strong and this
is happening in 1965 with The Beatles who are at the forefront of it.
When I say artists versus craftsmen.
Or, craftsperson generally, but since we've got
four male Beatles, they are definitely craftsmen.
What I mean is that a craftsman is happy
to repeat to repeat the same construction principle over and
over again.
There's nothing that seems more absurd than somebody
who builds, say, tables for a living saying
oh well, I have built a beautiful, well-constructed
table, couldn't possibly build that table a second time.
I'd just be repeating myself.
No, once you figure out a good way to build a quality t, table or whatever
it is, woodworking, whatever, you repeat that, because
it assures a certain sort of consistency of quality.
That's, there's an element of craft there.
And being able to promise that quality and
provide it is the mark of a good craftsman.
In fact, that's the way most popular music was, was, was thought of, you know?
It was, as, as kind of a craft.
It wasn't artsy and, and and high folutant like that.
You, you try to put out a good pop product that you hoped people would buy.
And if you have success doing it one way,
you just kept doing it until people stopped buying it.
On the other hand, you have the idea of an artist.
In classical music study, the worst thing you can say about a classical composer
is, oh, that composer is just writing the same piece over and over again.
It means that that person is so lacking in originality and creativity that they're,
they, they just keep doing this, going back to the same formulas again and again.
It's a sign of weakness, it's may, maybe even
a kind of hint of a certain lack of competency.
So an artist always wants to be pushing forward,
always trying something new.
Well, you can see that these are, these are very opposed kinds of approaches.
The craftsman finds the best way to do something and repeats it, the artist
does something and then doesn't want to
repeat that, if they're going to go back to
it, a similar kind of artistic problem, they need to solve it in a different
way, or, or do it in a way so they're not repeating a past success.
And so this idea of moving from the craft model,
which is where the Beatles were 63 into 64, into the
art model, which is the more 65, 66,
67 model, is exactly what we're watching happen here.
Where we find individual solutions to musical problems,
to songwriting problems, and topics these kinds of things.
And I'll be picking these out as we go through the music.
You'll also see the Beatles pushing
the envelope, using other styles, instrumentation,
this kind of thing, all to create something that, that is seemingly new
every time you get it.
During this period, you know, when you got Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper.
It seemed like you were getting a, an album where the Beatles
were doing an entirely different kinds of things than what they've done before.
Now looking back in retrospect, we can see the continuity but at the time.
It seemed like they were really going in all kinds of crazy directions.
I mean, if you look at an album like Sergeant Pepper, that's
an album that never, according to industry wisdom, would never have been released,
because one of the, sort of, basic laws of, of pop music
at the time was every, every band has to have a trademark sound.
But on Sergeant Pepper it sounds like a different band on every track.
That's exactly what you don't want to do,
but that's exactly what The Beatles were doing.
So we're on the road to that kind of thing, and on
the artist going, moving from the craftsperson model to the artist model.
One thing I'll come back to time again is
whenever The Beatles need a hit single, there are a couple places where, in
their career where they need to come back, and they need to top the charts.
They know how to plug in that craft model again, and
crank out, you know, a big hit when they need it.
And what you'll find is that they often go back to the AABA forms, and
some of the stuff from earlier in their career to be able to make that happen.
So now having talked a bit about this idea of
the move, movement from craftsman to artist and this idea
of rock and pop authenticity.
Let's move on to the music itself and discuss the album Help.
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