Now and then, I’ve heard it said that the Beatles did something unusual without knowing it. Apparently, songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” has a verse that goes up when it should go down. I have a pretty good ear for music, and personally, WTF are people talking about? Music really has no rules! Even rules about beats per measure can be toyed with giving rise to some interesting sounds. (If music had rules, it’d get real boring real fast.)
And as for wrong notes? The rule is there are no wrong notes; however, some notes sound better than others! So, what are people saying? Perhaps it just rubs the classical performers the wrong way, as bad as a Beatles haircut?
It just means that before 1963 the conventional musical vocabulary of pop songs was more limited, and the Beatles expanded it. It isn’t about rules or wrong notes, just that it was something new and fresh because it hadn’t been expected based on what had been done up until then.
I remember hearing an interview with George Martin once where he told a story of how he unsuccessfully tried to talk the lads out of using a certain chord. IIRC it was the final vocal harmony at the end of “She Loves You”, which (again, IIRC), is John, Paul, and George together singing a major sixth. Martin tried to persuade them it sounded corny as a song coda, but they insisted on it. To them it seemed fresh and original. Of course, they were right. In an earlier musical era (swing?) it had been overused, so that musicians had come to think of it as corny,and had ceased to use it. It had been out of common use long enough that, to the Beatles themselves, and to their young audience, it was fresh and original.
Sounds like people can’t handle the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night
What’s funny is that they started to get critical appreciation in the UK when one newspaper’s music critic (The Times??) cited their use of “Aolian Cadences” in one song (It Won’t Be Long - yeah YEAH yeah YEAH yeah YEAH!)…
WordMan, don’t know if you’ve heard this already, but someone hipped me to it a few days ago. Another chapter in the “what are they playing…” saga. Listen to the end.
They are descended from the people who couldn’t handle the opening chord of Beethoven’s first symphony. Not a unique chord, but no one prior to 1801 ever thought of starting a symphony with it.
That may have been true about certain types of rock music before the Beatles, but I don’t think it’s true about popular music in general. The better types of popular song in the '30s, '40s, '50s, etc. could be very harmonically complex. Maybe the Beatles expanded the range of what up to then was considered simple “kids” music.
I’ve been having lots of fun reading All the Songs, a song-by-song discussion of every recording session. I find the full album on YouTube (because I don’t have the original British versions only the insane mixed-up American ones) and each write-up takes about two minutes to read, the same as the length of the early songs.
They quote as much stuff about the origins of the song as they can find. For “Yesterday,” e.g., Paul is quoted as saying:
They call the chord at the beginning of “A Hard Day’s Night” a D major 7th sus 4. Class can discuss.
The quote from William Mann is there, too:
There are far more technical books that go into this, and probably nothing special about this one except the circumstance that I’m currently reading it and it’s fresh in my head. It is aimed at knowledgeable fans with enough floss to make it work for tone-deaf hummers like me. It does make the point that the Beatles were always experimenting with sound and trying out new things with every session, even every take. They also did a lot more doubling of both voices and instruments than I realized, plus other stuff that George Martin added.
Just thought I’d mention that I bought a book for my kindle called Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles. I only briefly started reading it and have been too busy to get back to it but the author contends in his intro that most of the group’s innovative songwriting occurred early in their career. We’re talking about songwriting, not studio sonics or formal affectations like the attempt to make a unified concept album like Pepper or the Abbey Road medley.
As an aside, this book is probably better appreciated in hardcopy. There are charts and other illustrations that aren’t easy to read on a kindle.
