Radio: Those Songs The Beatles Sing

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30783, 22 June 1965, Page 13

Radio: Those Songs The Beatles Sing

Discussion of the Beatles’ M.B.E. could get away from exports and back to music, the field in which they have excelled, as can be heard on the radio most days.

Two years ago the music critic of “The Times” surprised everyone by selecting John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the most outstanding British composers of 1963.

The critic noted how Britain had taken her popular songs from the United States, either directly or by mimicry, for several decades since the decline of the music-hall.

The songs of Lennon and McCartney, distinctly indigenous in character and the most imaginative and inventive examples of the style that had been developing on the Merseyside halted the decline. They even made Britain a source of popular songs for the United States.

One of the virtues of the Beatles’ repertory, the critic said, was that they did much 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. The critic continued: “The noisy ones are the ones that arouse teen-agers’ 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 That Boy’ is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its chains of pandiatonic 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’). “The Beatles’ compositions also have a firm and purposeful bass line with a musical life of its own.” There was a great deal of variety in the Beatles’ singing. An autocratic but not by any means ungrammatical attitude to tonality (closer to say, Peter Maxwell Davies’s carols in “O Magnum Mysterium” than to Gershwin or Loewe or even Lionel Bart). Exhilarating and often quasiinstrumental vocal duetting, sometimes in scat or falsetto, behind the melodic line. The melismas with altered vowels (“I saw her yester-day-ee-ay”) which have not quite become mannered. 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.

“The Beatles have brought a distinctive and exhilarating flavour into a genre of music that was in danger of ceasing to be music at all,” the critic said.

Rawsthorne Studies

Alan Rawsthorne, who celebrated his sixtieth birthday in April, will be the subject of this week’s programme in the 3YC Friday series devoted to significant works by British composers. The work to be heard is the Symphonic Studies of 1938, from the time when he

emerged as an international composer. It was first performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Warsaw in 1939. The theme is heard at the outset and is followed by five studies without break, It is highly assured music that rejects euphonious topicless waffling for real ideas properly argued. Many of its intriguing ideas have reappeared in subsequent works Hawaiian Music Dai-Keong Lee, a Hawaiianborn composer, first achieved recognition in the 1940’5. His 1959 Polynesian Suite, which will be heard from 3YC on Saturday evening, embodies the popular and ethnic Polynesian musical idiom within a Western musical framework, and was first performed during the statehood celebrations in 1960. The movements are “Ori Tahitian” (Tahitian dance), a swift orgiast ritual, “Hula,” a more graceful dance, and “Festival,” which makes use of premissionary chants. Gershwin Case

More of the music of Geroge Gershwin would be played in the year 2000 than of any other American composer from the half-century 1910-60. according to Jules Wolffers, who argues the case for Gershwin in the second of his programmes devoted to American music, which will be heard from 3YC on Sunday. Double Bill

Two radio plays will be heard from the National Link on Sunday afternoon, “The Colonel’s Lady” from Somerset Maugham’s story about a retired colonel’s wife who writes a best-selling book of poetry, and August Strindberg’s “Pariah,” a struggle of wits between an archaeologist and an outcast alone in a country hut in a storm.