Live: The Beatles’ Christmas Show, Astoria Cinema in Finsbury Park, London
Fredagen den 27 december blev The Beatles tredje kväll med föreställningen av The Beatles’ Christmas Show på Astoria Cinema i London.
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The Times: What Songs The Beatles Sang by William Mann
Samma dag kunde man i tidningen The Times läsa en numera mycket känd och intressant artikel av tidningens musikkritiker William Mann. Artikeln handlar om The Beatles musik under deras första period av Beatlemania.
Artikeln blev beryktad för sina referenser till musikaliska termer som pandiationiska kluster och eolisk kadens*) och blev ett inlägg som gjorde att detta blev tidpunkten då John Lennons och Paul McCartneys komponerande nästan började tas på seriöst allvar bland etablerade kritiker.
The outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the talented young musicians from Liverpool whose songs have been sweeping the country since last Christmas, whether performed by their own group, the Beatles, or by the numerous other teams of English troubadours that they also supply with songs.
I am not concerned here with the social phenomenon of Beatlemania, which finds expression in handbags, balloons and other articles bearing the likenesses of the loved ones, or in the hysterical screaming of young girls whenever the Beatle Quartet performs in public, but with the musical phenomenon. For several decades, in fact since the decline of the music-hall, England has taken her popular songs from the United States, either directly or by mimicry. But the songs of Lennon and McCartney are distinctly indigenous in character, the most imaginative and inventive examples of a style that has been developing on Merseyside during the past few years. And there is a nice, rather flattering irony in the news that the Beatles have now become prime favourites in America, too.
THREE OF THEM COMPOSE
The strength of character in pop songs seems, and quite understandably, to be determined usually by the number of composers involved; when three or four people are required to make the original tunesmith’s work publicly presentable it is unlikely to retain much individuality or to wear very well. The virtue of the Beatles’ repertory is that, apparently, they do it themselves; three of the four are composers, they are versatile instrumentalists, and when they do borrow a song from another repertory, their treatment is idiosyncratic – as when Paul McCartney sings ’Till There Was You’ from ’The Music Man’, a cool, easy, tasteful version of this ballad, quite without artificial sentimentality.
Their noisy items are the ones that arouse teenagers’ excitement. Glutinous crooning is generally out of fashion these days, and even a song about ’Misery’ sounds fundamentally quite cheerful; the slow, sad song about ’This Boy’, which features prominently in Beatle programmes, is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its chains of pandiationic clusters, and the sentiment is acceptable because voiced cleanly and crisply. But harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs, too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of ’Not A Second Time’ (the chord progression which ends Mahler’s ’Song of the Earth’).
Those submediant switches from C major into A flat major, and to a lesser extent mediant ones (eg the octave ascent in the famous ’I Want To Hold Your Hand’ are a trademark of Lennon-McCartney songs – they do not figure much in other pop repertories, or in the Beatles’ arrangements of borrowed material – and show signs of becoming a mannerism. The other trademark of their compositions is a firm and purposeful bass line with a musical life of its own; how Lennon and McCartney divide their creative responsibilites I have yet to discover, but it is perhaps significant that Paul is the bass guitarist of the group. It may also be significant that George Harrison’s song ’Don’t Bother Me’ is harmonically a good deal more primitive, though it is nicely enough presented.
WELCOME VARIETY
I suppose it is the sheer loudness of the music that appeals to Beatle admirers (there is something to be heard even through the squeals) and many parents must have cursed the electric guitar’s amplification this Christmas – how fresh and euphonious the ordinary guitars sound in the Beatles’ version of ’Till There Was You’ – but parents who are still managing to survive the decibels and, after copious repetition over several months, still deriving some musical pleasure from the overhearing, do so because there is a good deal of variety – oh, so welcome in pop music – about what they sing.
The autocratic but not by any means ungrammatical attitude to tonality (closer to, say, Peter Maxwell Davies’s carols in ’O Magnum Mysteriumthan’ to Gershwin or Loewe or even Lionel Bart); the exhilarating and often quasi-instrumental vocal duetting, sometimes in scat or in falsetto, behind the melodic line; the melismas with altered vowels (‘I saw her yesterday-ee-ay’) which have not quite become mannered, and the discreet, sometimes subtle, varieties of instrumentation – a suspicion of piano or organ, a few bars of mouth-organ obbligato, an excursion on the claves or maraccas; the translation of African Blues or American western idioms (in ’Baby It’s You’, the Magyar 8/8 metre, too) into tough, sensitive Merseyside.
These are some of the qualities that make one wonder with interest what the Beatles, and particularly Lennon and McCartney, will do next, and if America will spoil them or hold on to them, and if their next record will wear as well as the others. They have brought a distinctive and exhilarating flavour into a genre of music that was in danger of ceasing to be music at all.
/William Mann, The Times
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*) John Lennon själv, som skrev Not A Second Time berättade flera år senare att han ännu vid det tillfället inte hade en aning om vad Aeolian cadence (Eolisk harmoni) betydde. Han tyckte att det lät som exotiska fåglar.
Med avseende på avslutningen av Not A second Time så visar sig att samma ackordföljd som i den sista satsen av Gustav Mahlers Das Lied von der Erde.
Om man studerar Not A Second Time närmare finner man att dubbelversen har 14 takter och brygga och refräng hänger intimt ihop med totalt tio takter. I bryggan kan man märka av en svag färgning på det andra Am-ackordet i form av en sexa. Denna binder ihop ackordet med det följande ackordet som är ett lite oväntat Bm. De eoliska (moll-) kadenser som nämns om detta stycke är just på detta ställe. Via ett inskjutet D-ackord hamnar kadensen i E-moll istället för det väntade G:et. Men ackordet D har i E-moll även en s.k. dominantisk funktion, liksom B-moll som är en molldominant. Lennon använder sig av båda och han använder sig också i låten av s.k. färgningar; liten sjua, på slutet även en stor sjua (majsjua), stor och liten nia, sexa och susfyra.
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Granada Television visar denna dag en repris av The Beatles mycket komiska samtal med Ken Dodd, som spelades in den 25 november och sändes för första gången den 27 november 1963 i programmet Scene at 6.30.