Music Analysis
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The Beatles's 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" represented the highpoint of the the group's recording career. Focusing on the musical quality of the songs and the interpretations offered by a range of commentators, London College of Music's Allan Moore considers each song on the album individually, tying his analysis to the recorded performance on disk, rather than the printed music. | |||||||
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The Beatles had numerous fresh ideas about melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, form, colours and textures, and much new ground was broken by their lyrics alone. This book is a comprehensive chronological study of every aspect of the Fab Four's musical life - including full examinations of composition, performance practice, recording and historical context - during their transcendent late period (1966-1970). Interpretations are interwoven through a documentary study of many thousands of audio, print and other sources. | |||||||
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A lavishly illustrated, rollicking account of the real people and events that inspired the
Beatles' lyrics. Who was "just seventeen" and made Paul's heart go "boom"? Was there really an Eleanor Rigby? Where's Penny Lane? In A Hard Day's Write, music journalist Steve Turner shatters many well-worn myths and adds a new dimension to the Fab Four's rich legacy by investigating for the first time the ordinary people and events immortalized in the Beatles' music and now occupying a special niche in popular culture's collective imagination. Arranged chronologically by album, the book breaks new ground by exploring how private incidents influenced the group's writing and how their music evolved. Turner reveals that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was really a drawing by Julian Lennon of his childhood friend; Bungalow Bill was an all-American tiger hunter; Doctor Robert was a New York 'speech doctor'; and much more. A longtime Beatles admirer, Turner tracked down and interviewed the real-life subjects of the songs, probed public records and newspaper archives, and spoke in depth to the people closet to the Beatles to unearth tales that have never before been made public. The result is a book that chronicles an untold story of the Beatles themselves. Illustrated with over 200 photographs, A Hard Day's Write is a visually alluring and highly entertaining journey to the land stretching just beneath your conscious mind, mapped out with strawberry fields, fool-topped hills, and long and winding roads. |
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There's certainly no shortage of books on the Beatles. In this latest one, MacDonald--musician, composer, and former New Musical Express editor--purports to do something different by putting the group in the cultural context of its decade. His observations on the 1960s, fortunately confined largely to an introductory section, are, however, too often distressingly obvious. He's far more successful when he focuses on the music with a song-by-song chronicle of the group's career. Other Beatles books have taken the same approach, but MacDonald's incorporates session information from Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (1988), and it details the group's musical development and growing reliance on the recording studio and then makes some cogent observations on both the culture and the music. He makes the tie-in to 1960s culture most effectively through a month-by-month time line that follows the song-by-song main text and places the Beatles' history next to developments in world affairs and pop culture. Even if your Beatles shelf is groaning, MacDonald's work will be a useful addition. | |||||||
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