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It was the Summer of Love. The Fab Four, having completely shed their "Mop Top" image now emerged with a drastically different kind of creation, the "concept album". Sgt. Pepper was looked upon as having revolutionized rock 'n' roll. A musical scholar of the time wrote this analysis of the seminal Beatles album. What do you think of her interpretation? |
"Sergeant Pepper" is an extraordinary work, not just comparable to a new sonata or opera, but far more important. It is a work of art that has sprung from unexpected, non-art roots. The salesman's comment was appropriate; "Sergeant Pepper" is to be listened to in the concert context and the Beatles set the tone right away. The beginning of the album stimulates the sounds in a concert hall before the performance. Musicians tune instruments, people talk and move around, and an air of expectation prevails.To the accompaniment of a distorted old-time English music hall sound, the Beatles begin Side I; their business is the show business:
Side II begins with a piece by George Harrison. It is the album's longest song, built on Indian ragas, and explicitly describes what Side I was all about:
There follows a reprise of the Sergeant Pepper theme--with a stunning difference, Sergeant Pepper is no longer the raucous fun man, promising smiles and good times. Avoiding the initial expression of these empty hopes the band starts shouting Hup, two, three, four, pounding out the beat and the ultimate truth of Sergeant Pepper's inner life:
Thus Lennon and McCartney, the group's guiding spirits, commit themselves to a philosophy that Eugene O'Neill expressed in "The Iceman Cometh"--that man cannot live without illusion. The last song, "A Day in the Life," suggests that man cannot live with it either. It is a moving work, a desparate reflection of contemporary life, a song Newsweek described as the Beatles' "Wasteland."The piece is, in a sense, a roman a clef. Shortly before its compostion a close friend of the Beatles, the 21-year old son of a prominent British couple, smashed his car in the center of London while high on drugs. After telling of the accident, the narrator cites a film of the English army after it had won the war. In boith instances the protagonist is removed from the core of the experience in much the same manner of the central character in an Antonioni film. The only links with his friend's death are a news story and a photograph; the only connections with a violent war, a film and a book. Lennon's voice, breaking with sadness, invites the listener: "I'd love to turn you on." The last word of this one line refrain leads into an electronic passage in which a large orchestra, recorded on tracks laid upon tracks, builds up to a growing controlled crescendo, simulating a drug-induced "trip." An alarm awakens the narrator who continues his story to the accompaniment of a nervous jazz idiom:
At the bottom of the album cover a burial plot covered with red flowers arranged spell BEATLES. The original Beatles of the 1950s, joyous and innocent, are dead. Above and to the left are four standing figures in dark ties and suits, Madame Tussaud's wax reproductions of Brian Epstein's carefully groomed group of the early '60s. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is pictured in the center of the cover. Its members are adorned with colorful, psychedelic costumes and are devastatingly unsmiling. They are the Beatles of today. Sergeant Pepper's Band, Madame Tussaud's figures, and a host of others, including Shirely Temple, Mae West, Fred Astaire, W.C. Fields, Marilyn Monroe, Timothy Leary, Edgar Allen Poe, Tom Mix, Bob Dylan, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tony Curtis, and Lawrence of Arabia look down at the grave below. All mourn the loss of the youthful Beatles, the group Lennon recently referred to as "those four jolly lads."Dealing with identity, illusion, loneliness, and death, the Beatles represent their generation and its overwhelming sense of anomie. refusing to accept the status quo and take square places in a "straight" society, they reach everyone from the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco to the Manhattan East side discotheques. In this respect they differ most dramatically from the art muscian of our time. Contemporary art composers are committed to a style of composition that is, in its essence, opposed to a dramatic expressionism that has prevailed in art music for the last few hundred years. Music as drama grew, in part, from tonality, a musical system in which one note, the "key", serves as the focus of an entire work. This single focus is placed into conflict with the other keys throughout the course of the piece; the juxtaposition and resolution of the resulting tonal conflict weaves a dramatic, extramusical meaning into the musical fabric of the composition.During the years in which Picasso and Kadinsky shattered the single focus of perspective in painting, Schoenberg and Varese shattered the single focus of tonality in music. Schoenberg did it by organzing a new musical arrangement in which all 12 tones of the chromatic scale are equal and Varese went even further--by opening his music to all sound, not just pitched sound. Although a number of present-day musicians continue to rely on a traditional, tonal base for compostion, the significant musical action of the 1950s and '60s has centered on Milton Babbitt, John Cage, and the musicians working around both men. All make music that is intramusical; abstract, beatless and non-melodic, it reaches only those trained in the highly complex manner of what is referred to as a new musical expression.Babbitt's highly structured form and Cage's negation of traditional form have a common base; both are expressions of a belief that tonality is no longer valid, that there is no a priori order, no God-given frame of reference. The particular tonal-expressive tradition that began with Monteverdi in the seventeenth century and culminated in the dramatic works of Richard Wagner has been overthrown. It is inevitable that serious art musicians write music the way they do. The battle against dramatic expressionism in art music has been waged and won.But the Beatles never had anything to do with war. They replaced revolution with affable irreverence. Born in Liverpool, they grew up among the constantly shifting population and extremely high crime rate of a large seaport, where the standards and taste of bourgeois London mattered little, and local guitar players enjoyed higher repute in the community than opera singers. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr emerged from this milieu as the antithesis of British tradition, classless kids who began their meteoric rise not musically but socially, by overstating the clothing and hairstyles of the educated Eton boy. Brashness and confidence have always distinguished their conduct. In Buckingham Palace McCartney criticized the condition of the carpets. And at a Royal Command Performance in London Lennon directed the audience: "People in the cheap seats can clap. The rest of you--rattle your jewelry!"The Beatles' sense of freedom from the shackles of social tradition is matched by their freedom from the shackles of the hallowed styles of musical compostion. Lennon, whose mother played the banjo (she died when he was 13) and McCartney, whose father had a jazz band 30 years ago, never had an awesome musical tradition to fight. At least 10 years younger than the youngest of the recognized art composers of our day (the oldest Beatle is 27), and a generation younger than Babbitt and Cage, the Beatles grew up with transitor radios next to their ears. Bach's "Art of the Fugue" and Schoenberg's "Method of Composing with Twelve Tones" had as little relevance to them as English imperialism and the White Man's Burden. Despite the use of styles and techniques from various periods throughout the history of music, the Beatles and their youthful colleagues are essentially ahistorical. Born after the social and musical revolutions of the twentieth century, able simply relax and use all the musical tools available, they have created something moving and altogether new.
