Bach and The Beatles
“Roll over, Beethoven!”
“Roll over, Beethoven!” was sung by Chuck Berry and The Beatles in the early 1960s, in the sense of: “Make way, Beethoven!” The song title was “a rejection of Western civilization.”¹ However, it was not “Roll over, Bach!” In his book Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie explains that The Beatles had a different relationship to Bach’s music than to other classical music. “Bach was always one of our favourite composers,” Paul McCartney once said in an interview in 1993². If so, then it would be interesting to see if traces of this esteem can be discovered in The Beatles’ work. This article is a quest for such traces.
“The Beatles didn’t hate Bach,” wrote Elie. “Beethoven was rolled over, but Bach was left standing. The counterculture had no wish to counter Bach; the most forward-looking figures of the sixties put the music of Bach in play here, there, and everywhere.”³ Leonard Bernstein, in one of his Young People’s Concerts in 1969 (“Bach Transmogrified”) summarized: “Suddenly, everyone who enjoys music loves Bach.”
And he listed, among others, the Swingle Singers, Switched-on Bach, Play Bach, and rock groups like the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble.⁴ Bernstein saw the reason for this Bach renaissance, though surprising in this context, in the “inexhaustible spiritual vitality” of Bach’s music.
The Beatles and Classical Music in General
The Beatles are considered “the most successful and original, as well as perhaps the most influential and capable pop music performers of the 1960s.”⁵ In the only authorized biography of The Beatles as a group, Hunter Davies writes of the folklore roots of their music, “Not that Paul’s tunes meant much, nor John’s. They were very simple and derivative.”⁶ Of the years 1966–67, he writes, “But their songs were simpler in those days. The Beatles were simpler lads, writing songs to play to screaming fans on one-night stands and wanting a simple and immediate reaction.”⁷ He continues, “Nobody knows either how tunes come into their heads in the first place. They don’t know, or can’t remember, how and why they did something.”⁸ He writes of “inspiration of some kind,”⁹ including, of course, outside influences: “They are said to have been influenced by everything, from Negro blues to Magyar dances.”¹⁰ The primary influence upon them was certainly contemporary rock ’n’ roll.¹¹ But they absorbed different styles from all around and from musical history like sponges — similar to Johann Sebastian Bach, who carefully studied different musical styles of France and Italy and made them his own, but they still sounded like Bach. The British composer Howard Goodall, in the 2005 BBC program “The Beatles: A Musical Appreciation and Analysis” concluded, “The Beatles, like Bach, borrowed here and there with unabashed enthusiasm and made it all their own…. It always sounded like The Beatles.”¹²
As boys, Paul and John sang in the church choirs of St. Peter and St. Barnabas in Liverpool and may have encountered Bach’s music there — for example, Bach’s “Toccata in D-Minor” (for organ) or his aria “Sheep May Safely Graze” (BWV 208), which are both well known in English-language church choirs, as well as his figured chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (BWV 147). However, The Beatles do not mention these works anywhere.
The first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier seemed to be familiar to The Beatles: In the documentary film “Get Back!” (2021) on the rehearsals for their last public performance Paul referred to “that Ave Maria thing” when he suggested an arpeggio accompaniment for one of the songs. At least the Gounod version of the C-major prelude seems to have be known to all of them; he did not add any explanation.
John attended Sunday-school regularly until he was 15.¹³ However, none of The Beatles had training in classical music and/or on an instrument. John taught himself to play the harmonica, but refused his aunt’s offer of violin or piano lessons.¹⁴ Paul learned to play the guitar and the piano “by ear,” but could not read music. He considered writing down the notes for a Beatles song to always be the “boring” phase:¹⁵ He sang it aloud, and someone else wrote it down. However, his father taught him the basic theories of harmony, such as: “’This tune is the harmony to that tune‘, so I learned very early how to sing harmony, which was one of my big roles in The Beatles.”¹⁶ Even as the composer of longer works such as Standing Stone (1997) or Liverpool Oratorio (1991), Paul sang the individual voices or played them on the piano or computer, and someone else wrote them down.¹⁷
The Beatles had a varied relationship with Beethoven. Besides covering the Chuck Berry song, they made fun of Beethoven and the tradition he represented. Ringo said of Beethoven, “I love him. Especially his poems.”¹⁸ John said of Beethoven and Co.: “Beethoven is a con, just like we are now. He was just knocking out a bit of work, that was all. The thing is, do Beethoven and these sort of people realize they’re a con? Or do they really think they’re important?”¹⁹ This was to change markedly. Presumably under the influence of Yoko Ono, who contributed a completely different cultural breadth to the relationship, John came to consider Beethoven to be the “supreme composer” — he even felt a certain affinity with him. “By 1969, he was no longer trying to be the artistic equal of Elvis or the Rolling Stones, but of Picasso, Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas and Beethoven.”²⁰
Lennon’s song “Because” (on Abbey Road), which is one of the most beautiful of The Beatles’ songs and the favorite of Paul and George, was composed expressly in reference to the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”²¹ This first movement (“Adagio”), with its melancholic atmosphere and its broken C#-minor chords, probably formed the basis. However, besides the arpeggios, no melodic or harmonic relationship can be discerned. Sometimes, when The Beatles sat relaxed together in the evening, they listened to Beethoven or another “interesting piece of music.”²² Significantly, their own records were not included here: “They never play their own records…. ‘When it’s finished, it doesn’t matter anymore.’(John)”²³
John was apparently only used to pieces 2–3 minutes long. As George Martin, mentor and producer of The Beatles from 1963, once played him a longer piece by Ravel, he commented at the end, “Quite nice. But at the end I had forgotten how it started.”²⁴
At the height of The Beatles’ success, “somebody compared them to Schubert, which sounds a bit pretentious.”²⁵ One of the greatest compliments that their producer George Martins made them was:
I’m not saying that the results were the equivalent of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, but at least they were creative, they weren’t sterile, they weren’t reproductions of anything that had been done before.²⁶
In 1963, Paul and John were named by the classical music critic of The Times, William Mann, as “the year’s outstanding composers.”²⁷ The Sunday Times of December 29, 1963 even named them “the greatest composers since Beethoven.”²⁸ George Martin was much more reserved: “They were the Cole Porters and George Gershwins of their generation…”²⁹ In the late 1960s, during a broadcast for young listeners in a radio program of the German station NWDR, the song “Yesterday” was mentioned in association with Monteverdi.
The Beatles themselves gave little thought about their place in the history of music — except maybe John Lennon (see above).
But whether they are the greatest songwriters in the world today, as some have said, or even better than Schubert, doesn’t interest them. They never discuss or try to evaluate or appreciate their music.³⁰
Paul, whom George Martin considered had the “most all-round musical talent” of the group,³¹ had a pronounced interest in experimental, modern music like that of John Cage, Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen (in the use of electronic effects, for example³²). When George Martin, with his training in classical music, refused to rank Cage and Berio up with Mozart and Brahms, Paul criticized him as too “old-fashioned.”³³ It was especially Barry Miles, who wrote the most important biography of Paul, who interested Paul in modern and experimental music: in addition to those already mentioned, Edgar Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, and Ferruccio Busoni.³⁴ However, of all the modern composers of this time, it was John Cage who had the greatest influence upon McCartney.³⁵
A hobby of Paul’s was making a large number of super-8 films, to which he often added music — usually from Modern Jazz Quartet or by Johann Sebastian Bach.³⁶ However, it is not known which pieces he chose for these films.
A decisive influence upon Paul’s relationship to classical music was played by the family of Jane Asher, his first fiancée. Jane’s mother was a trained oboe teacher and taught Paul to play the recorder (cf. “Fool on the Hill”). Paul lived three years with the Ashers. Jane repeatedly went with Paul to the theater, the opera, and to classical concerts. For example, she introduced him to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” One result was that after the successful instrumentation of “Yesterday” with strings (more below), he again wished it for “Eleanor Rigby” — only “more dramatic,” like Vivaldi.³⁷ It ended up as a double quartett. George Martin, The Beatles’ producer and mentor, urged them around 1969 (during the formation of Abbey Road), to write their music in the form of symphonies and movements,³⁸ or to at least arrange their shorter pieces together in the style of a classical suite.³⁹ In the beginning of their work together (1963), it was Martin who usually arranged the pieces: in the early pieces, he often played the piano or advised them on the instrumentation. Later, he tried to keep in the background musically, when they recorded their songs. In 1969 he said, “They have now grown so sure of themselves as composers, and even as arrangers, that they make jokes about Big George.”⁴⁰ However, whatever influences which classical music — and especially Bach’s — had upon them can be accredited to George Martin.
George Martin, the “fifth Beatle”
George Martin, a generation older than The Beatles, had the training in classical music which they lacked.⁴¹ At the Guildhall of Music in London he had taken “composition and all that goes with it — conducting and orchestration, musical theory, harmony, counterpoint and so on”⁴² — but, it seems, little or no music history. This became obvious in two striking examples in his autobiographical book All You Need is Ears.
At one place he wrote, “Rachmaninov turned Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition into a piano piece, and it’s now a famous part of the repertoire.”⁴³ The fact is, Mussorgsky originally wrote this piece for the piano in 1874 and it was Maurice Ravel who later re-wrote it for large orchestra in 1922. Rachmaninov had nothing to do with it.
In the same book at a different place, Martin imagines the following scene in Bach’s life: “The duke” [apparently Bach’s employer, in Weimar or Köthen-Anhalt] “would say: ‘I need a cantata for Sunday week because it’s the wife’s aunt’s birthday.’” Bach, with a deadline to meet, knew what to do, thinking: “There was a good little tune in that string quartet I wrote three months back. I can take that out and give it to the sopranos. (…) He’ll never know I wrote it before.”⁴⁴
Here Martin describes Bach’s parody method, e.g. the sacral re-use of an originally secular composition. However, Bach did not write any string quartets, and used the parody technique only for cantatas and oratories with a text. The only piece that might resemble a string quartet that was conceived by Bach for a string orchestra was the “Air” from the Orchestral Suite №3 (BWV 1068).
Before he worked with The Beatles (from 1963), Martin worked at the German firm Parlophone (later a branch of EMI) as a producer of classic and baroque records. Classical music was his “first love.”⁴⁵
Martin wrote about the beginnings of his work with The Beatles:
At first, they needed me enormously. They knew nothing and they relied on me to produce their sound, the deafening sound they’d produced in the Cavern [the music club in Liverpool], but which nobody was doing on record. (…) The second stage is now, when they know what they want to put in a record, but they rely on me to arrange it for them.⁴⁶
As The Beatles’ musical mentor, Martin also had a teacher-student relationship with them. For example, in their song arrangements, he taught them the strict four-part harmony that every music student learns in the first semester of a course in harmony. “You mustn’t double a third,” Paul remembers Martin saying, or “It’s corny to end with a sixth and a seventh is even cornier.” In the last “Yeah” of “She Loves You,” Paul and John had introduced a major sixth. Martin again protested that it was “corny” and had been used by Glenn Miller in the 1940s. Paul remarked later, “It was a good thing we could override a lot of his so-called professional decisions with our innocence.”⁴⁷ Martin later agreed, writing,
…I think that if Paul, for instance, had learned music ‘properly,’ — not just the piano, but correct notation for writing and reading music, all the harmony and counterpoint that I had to go through, and techniques of orchestration — it might well have inhibited him. (…) ″…[H]e had freedom, and could think of things that I would have considered outrageous.⁴⁸
Martin tried to teach them professional techniques, but at the same time he appreciated their being unrestricted. “I have often been asked if I could have written any of The Beatles’ tunes, and the answer is definitely no: for one basic reason. I didn’t have their simple approach to music.”⁴⁹
Sometimes George Martin made a bit of fun about their lack of musical knowledge, writing, “They ask for such things as violins to play an F below middle C, which, of course, violins can’t do.”⁵⁰ Martin was “slightly amused by their innocence and naivety.”⁵¹ He also wrote, “A lot of the songs we made into hits started life as not very good embryos.”⁵² “At the start I was like a master with his pupils, and they did what I said. (…)…[A]nd by the end, of course, I was to be the servant while they were the masters.”⁵³
In spite of his superior academic background, Martin always thought of himself as the intermediary between The Beatles’ original ideas and their notation and performance.⁵⁴ However, he played such a key role, that he was repeatedly named by music critics as the “fifth Beatle” — similar to Bach being called the “fifth evangelist” by the Swedish bishop Nathan Söderblom, in order to highlight Bach’s importance for Christianity in the 20th century. For The Beatles’ record production, Martin was their advisor, arranger, orchestrator and occasional pianist. More on this later.
In one way, Johann Sebastian Bach was the gold standard for George Martin. Whenever he wanted to pass a judgement upon a piece of music, it was often “like Bach” or “not like Bach.” Thus, about the arrangement of “Yesterday” he said to Paul McCartney, “Bach certainly wouldn’t have done that….” as Paul wanted to set his own mark (see below: Miles p. 206). It was certainly also no accident that in spite of his patchy knowledge of music history, he chose a (fictitious) scene from Bach’s life, when he wanted to make a certain point.
Besides his own compositions (several film compositions, especially for James Bond movies), Martin also orchestrated works of Bach’s in the style of Leopold Stokowski, who was, for example the arranger for Walt Disney’s Fantasia. These works are now on Martin’s CD Beatles to Bond to Bach. In addition to the above-named film music and orchestral arrangements of Beatles’ songs, there are his arrangements of Bach’s “Air” from his Suite №3 for orchestra and of his “Prelude №8 in E-Minor” from the Well-Tempered Clavier. The series of names in the title is definitely thought of as increasing in rank.
Traces of Bach
In the following songs, Bach’s influence can be identified.
Yesterday
“Yesterday” (1965) is said to be “the most played song of all times.”⁵⁵ Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the melody in his head as in a dream, turned to a piano beside his bed and found the succession of chords. Accompanying it with a string quartet — completely unheard of for a rock song till then — was George Martin’s idea. He also wrote the basic arrangement.
Paul recalls:
I remember that on that session George explained to me how Bach would have voiced it in a choral voicing or a quartet voicing. And he’d say, “This would be the way Bach would do it,” and he’d play it.⁵⁶ (…) And there was just one point in it where I said, “Could the cello now play a slightly bluesy thing, out of the genre, out of keeping with the rest of the voicing?” George said, “Bach wouldn’t have done that, Paul, ha ha ha.” I said, “Great!” That was what we often used to do, try and claim our one little moment. I mean, obviously it was my song, my chords, my everything really, but because the voicing now had become Bach’s, I needed something of mine again to redress the balance. So I put a 7th in, which was unheard-of.⁵⁷
From “Yesterday” on, George Martin strongly influenced the style of The Beatles.⁵⁸
Blackbird
Paul:
The original inspiration was from a well-known piece by Bach, which I never know the title of, which George and I had learned to play at early age…. Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favorite composers; we felt we had a lot in common with him. For some reason we thought his music was very similar to ours and we latched on to him amazingly quickly. We also liked the stories of him being the church organist and whopping this stuff out weekly, which was rather similar to what we were doing. We were very pleased to hear that. I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted the words to it.⁵⁹
The Bach piece was the “Bourrée” from the Lute Suite in E minor (BWV 996)⁶⁰. Paul does not say anything about the time reference of the song at this point; he did that later in various interviews. The song was written a week after the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968. The title “Blackbird” does not refer to the European blackbird (as in the usual British meaning of the word), but to black people in the US in general, who for decades were called blackbirds or crows. Paul devoted this song to their fight for civil rights, which had just suffered a heavy blow with the killing of Dr. King. At the end of the song on the album is an original recording of a European blackbird. There are various sources of information about its source: according to Barry Miles, the source is the EMI sound archive in London,⁶¹ but according to Steve Turner, Paul recorded it himself early one morning in the garden.⁶²
George Martin had no share in the connection to Bach in this play; the connection comes from Paul’s memory. A relationship between the “Bourrée” and “Blackbird” is not obvious: the “Bourrée” is in minor, “Blackbird” in major. A melodic relationship between them is also not discernible. At most, the chromatically progressing bass in the second part of the “Bourrée” could have been a point of connection or inspiration: a similar bass movement is found in “Blackbird.”
However, in an undated video-clip of the 80s Paul McCartney explains how he got from the Bach bourrée to Blackbird: He used to play with George Harrison the beginning of the bourrée as a showpiece but simplified one of the beginning passages. This simplification was a false quotation of Bach’s original. He turned it into the major mode, and thus found the chordal progression at the beginning of Blackbird.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UWkn55ByGM
Penny Lane
In the second part of the song, in which Paul McCartney nostalgically celebrates his childhood and adolescence in Liverpool, a high trumpet sounds. Paul had wished for one in this piece after listening to Bach’s 2nd Brandenburg Concerto broadcast in a BBC TV concert.⁶³ Paul sang the tune he wanted, and George Martin wrote it down. The trumpet that was then used was not the regular Bach trumpet in D, but a B trumpet tuned one octave higher, a so-called “piccolo trumpet.” It is extremely difficult to play: the changes in tone are mainly generated by the player’s lips. “Paul had no idea how damned difficult it was to play, ” remembered G. Martin. Paul’s answer: “He’s a piccolo-trumpeter…that’s his job.”⁶⁴ Martin summed it up: “The result was unique, something that had never been done in rock music before, and it gave ‘Penny Lane’ a very distinct character.”⁶⁵
J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto №2, 3rd movement
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY6HNGUy-SM
In My Life
In this song — with memories from John’s youth — the first draft lacked the usual instrumental middle section. The Beatles turned to George Martin for help. “We would say, ‘Play like Bach,’ or something, so he would put twelve bars in there.”⁶⁶ Recording this song, “they left a gap for a solo; during a break Martin worked up a Bach-like melody and counterpoint” in the form of a two-part invention. In terms of style, the beginning of this passage reminds one of the fugue theme in Bach’s Concerto for two Harpsichords (BWV 1061, third movement). Martin recorded the passage on the piano at half speed an octave lower. Brought up to normal speed, it sounded like a harpsichord, intensifying the similarity to Bach.⁶⁷
All You Need Is Love
For this late song by The Beatles, George Martin wrote a coda in which he composed different pieces over and under one another. At the beginning of the song he put the “Marseillaise”, and in the coda he put the melody of “Greensleeves,” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” and Bach’s Invention №8 in F-Major for two voices — though set here for brass. The Beatles gave Martin here the freedom to write whatever he wished. “‘Write absolutely anything you like, George,’ they said. ‘Put together any tunes you fancy, and just play it out like that.’”⁶⁸ And Martin, because of his appreciation, chose, amongst others, a piece by Bach.
To sum up: despite the role of a favorite composer that Bach allegedly played for The Beatles, only a few concrete traces can be proved in their work — and most of them lead directly or indirectly back to George Martin. Which of Bach’s works were known to them at all is pure speculation. However, the fact that Paul — of the four, the “one most likely to be a professional musician”⁶⁹ — often chose music by Bach for the score for his super-8 films, at least suggests that there was an affinity here far beyond whatever can be explicitly deduced from their songs.
Coda: Playful Combinations of Bach and The Beatles
Bach’s relationship to The Beatles also gave rise to a completely different combination of components: Beatles’ songs in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. The reverse version — Bach played in the style of today’s popular music — has been well-known since the 1960s: Play Bach, the Swingle Singers, and in Germany the Thomas-Gabriel-Trio. Less known, however, are the experiments in the other direction. Here are two examples: Joshua Rifkin’s The Baroque Beatles Book (1965) and Peter Breiner’s Beatles Go Baroque: Concerto Grosso №3 in the Style of Bach (1994).
The title of the latter example already indicates that the proximity to the Bach style is not meant so seriously: Bach wrote no Concerti grossi! The movement names are taken from Bach’s Orchestral Suite №2 (flute and strings): Overture, Rondeau, Sarabande, etc. However, the proximity to Bach is exhausted in such formal tones; the harmonies are more in a romantic style. The design of the fugue themes in the overture (“The Long and Winding Road”), is clever, closely based on its model in Suite №2.⁷⁰
The experiment by Joshua Rifkin stands in a very different proximity to the compositional style of Bach. Rifkin was the American musicologist who revolutionized the performance practice of Bach’s choral works. He discovered that for most of the choral works, only four or five copies for voice are preserved. From this he concluded that Bach had only a small number of singers for most of his works (because of illness, holidays, etc.). Rifkin wrote music history in 1982 when he performed and recorded Bach’s Mass in B-Minor with only four soloists as the choir.⁷¹ That was the starting-point for the so-called “historical performance practice.”
In Rifkin’s playful attempts (already in his student days!), a profound preoccupation with Bach’s world of sound can be perceived. He quotes Bach for long passages, and then suddenly a song of The Beatles arises from Bach’s polyphony, such as in the first set of Royale Beatleworks Musicke, where from the tightly woven orchestral sound of Bach’s Orchestral Suite №3, the theme of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” suddenly bursts out. “Please Please Me” sounds like the opening movement of an imitation Bach choral cantata “From my heart I hold you dear, O Lord” (“Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr”); among others, the Goldberg Variations and the 4th Brandenburg Concerto are interwoven with the melodies of The Beatles. Overall, Rifkin achieves a convincing approach to Bach’s contrapuntal-polyphonic style.
The message in conclusion is: “Bach and The Beatles: these are wor(l)ds that go together well!”
November 2018
¹ Wilfrid Mellers, The Music of The Beatles: Twilight of the Gods (New York: Schirmer, 1973), p. 27.
² Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 485.
³ Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 274. In his book, Elie correlates Bach’s most important periods of creativity with the efforts of musicians of the 20th century to keep Bach’s music alive through increasingly better recording techniques and playback devices.
⁴ On their long-play record of 1969 (later as a CD) “Faithful Friends,” for example, this group recorded a version of the first movement of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto with their own lyrics, entitled “Brandenburg.”
⁵ Dale Cockrell, in the entry “Beatles,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), Vol. 2, p. 322.
⁶ Davies, the beatles (Ebury, 2009), p. 113.
⁷ Davies, p. 379. The biography was first published in 1968, before “Abbey Road,” which was released in Sept. 1969.
⁸ Davies, p. 379.
⁹ Ibid., p. 391.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 401.
¹¹ Miles, p. 43.
¹² BBC broadcast “The Beatles: A Musical Appreciation and Analysis” (Channel 4: 2005), YouTube.
¹³ Davies, p. 84.
¹⁴ Davies, p. 94.
¹⁵ Miles, p. 95.
¹⁶ Miles, p. 23.
¹⁷ Andrew Stewart in: Paul McCartney, Standing Stone, CD album, booklet.
¹⁸ Elie, p. 272. Perhaps Ringo was making fun of the interviewer here.
¹⁹ Davies, p. 403. Mellers: “[A] conversation between Lennon and Beethoven on the subject would be worth hearing.” (p. 187)
²⁰ Steve Turner, A Hard Day’s Write: The Story Behind Every Beatles Song, (UK: Carlton Books, 2005), p. 194.
²¹ Miles, p. 555. On the influence of Yoko Ono, cf. Mellers, p. 116.
²² Paul, quoted in Miles, p. 218.
²³ Davies, p. 402.
²⁴ Quoted in George Martin, Rhythm of Life III: Harmony, BBC-TV-programme, 1997.
²⁵ George Martin, All You Need Is Ears (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 167.
²⁶ Ibid. p. 35.
²⁷ Philip Norman, Paul McCartney: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017), p. 184.
²⁸ Davies, p. 289.
²⁹ Martin, p. 167.
³⁰ Davies, p. 401f.
³¹ Davies, p. 400.
³² Paul McCartneys favorite piece by Stockhausen was Gesang der Jünglinge (Barry Miles, p. 221). Their song “Good Morning” used effects that can be traced back to Stockhausen’s Momente: Mellers, p. 97.
³³ Norman, p. 262. Luciano Berio himself arranged several Beatles songs for solo voice and chamber orchestra in a classical style — for example, the arrangement of “Ticket to Ride” in the style of Bach’s polyphony (Luciano Berio, The Beatles Songs, CD 1977).
³⁴ Norman, p. 225.
³⁵ Miles, p. 273.
³⁶ Miles, p. 344.
³⁷ Norman, p. 247.
³⁸ Norman, p. 394.
³⁹ Ibid.
⁴⁰ Davies, p. 372.
⁴¹ Paul McCartney: George Martin was “the grown-up…somebody completely different, an alien force really”: Miles, p. 346f.
⁴² Martin, p. 27.
⁴³ Martin, p. 35.
⁴⁴ Martin, p. 32.
⁴⁵ Martin, p. 30.
⁴⁶ Davies, p. 399.
⁴⁷ Norman, p. 184.
⁴⁸ Martin, p. 139.
⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 137.
⁵⁰ Davies, p. 398.
⁵¹ Ibid., p. 400. This naivety was also in relationship to rock music. They appropriated technical terms such as “middle eight,” without knowing what it meant. The term usually means the eight-measured instrumental bridge between the sung verses of a song. With The Beatles, it was sometimes 16 measures and sometimes 32. (Miles, p. 177).
⁵² Martin, p. 131.
⁵³ Martin, p. 133.
⁵⁴ Mellers, p. 192.
⁵⁵ Miles, p. 202. This includes the numerous cover-versions by other artists.
⁵⁶ Miles, quoting Paul McCartney, p. 206. For G. Martin’s curious opinion that Bach composed “string quartets,” s. above.
⁵⁷ Miles, p. 206.
⁵⁸ Martin, p. 166. W. Mellers offers a thorough musicological analysis of “Yesterday” (as well as many other Beatle songs) in his book The Music of The Beatles (1973, p. 55ff), but does not yet know about G. Martin’s orientation towards Bach; this was explicitly mentioned in later biographies and interviews. He says of Martin’s arrangement, “Certainly what happens in the instrumental parts in this song is inconceivably remote from what would have been done by the average commercial arranger.” Mellers, p. 57.
⁵⁹ Miles, p. 485.
⁶⁰ Turner, p. 159. W. Mellers does not mention this connection: p. 127.
⁶¹ Miles, p. 486.
⁶² Turner, p. 159.
⁶³ Norman, p. 259. It was a performance by the English Chamber Orchestra in Guildford Cathedral. The trumpeter who played in it, David Mason, was also hired by The Beatles for “Penny Lane.” cf. Martin, p. 201f.
⁶⁴ Norman, p. 259; cf. Martin, p. 201.
⁶⁵ G. Martin, p. 202. Again, W. Mellers in The Music of The Beatles — actually the best musicological analysis of The Beatles’ music — knows nothing of the fact that the insertion of the trumpet goes back to an experience with Bach’s 2nd Brandenburg Concerto. p. 82ff.
⁶⁶ John Lennon, quoted in Elie, p. 276.
⁶⁷ Elie, ibid.
⁶⁸ Martin p. 192. W. Mellers had identified “Greensleeves,” but not the Bach Invention nor “In the Mood”: Mellers, p. 103.
⁶⁹ G. Martin, p. 137.
⁷⁰ Similarly, the CD by John Bayless is not convincing in the sense of a “Bach style”: Bach Meets The Beatles: Variations in the Style of Bach (piano, Intersound, 1989).
⁷¹ Elie, p. 330f.
English translation: Elizabeth van Gelder Deutsch