On Polyphony and a New Vocal Quartet

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[The] Beatles are now in a position to do anything at all and have it listened to. Their recent oeuvre, notably Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Magical Mystery Tour, is a great eclectic circus of Indian raga, Salvation Army, Benjamin British, tailgate, gutbucket, and aleatoric chance-music, all handled without hang-ups or uptightness. There is a lovely lawlessness about it that reminds one of the "indeterminacy" experiments of John Cage, the father of random music-making. Cage did this sort of thing for years, but he had to explain himself. The Beatles do it without explaining: "You don't say love, you do it" is an old psychedelic proverb. (p. 56)

Rhythmically [the] early Beatle numbers were lineal descendants of "race records," Mississippi blues, Alabama field hollers, and such. But while the thumb was playing with blues tension, the windpipe was enunciating British sentiments closer to Bea Lillie than Lead Belly. The words were surprisingly bland, coming from a generation whose mod/rocker antics were just then making headlines and whose taste for unabated high volume was blowing the roof off the discotheques.

Apparently the Beatles had got to the root of some secret sorrow and made it articulate: the first groping love efforts of a generation that had undergone the trauma of permissive parenthood and demand feeding. Beneath the tough-sounding surface of this music one could detect a vaguely oedipal predicament: Don't be bad to me; Hold me love me; I call your name but you're not there; I'm a loser; Did you have to treat me oh so bad? These are clearly songs of innocence rather than experience, and when Lennon and McCartney ask, "Don't go 'way I'm afraid that I might miss you," they touch on the same anguish that an earlier British poet [A. A. Milne] summed up so poignantly in the line: "You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me."

What had begun as an art brut, all capitals and no lower case, gradually acquired more subtle shades of pop impressionism. (pp. 56-7)

In "We Can Work It Out" echoes of a French musette band broke like a thunderclap across a pop scene that had heard nothing but four-four time for fifty years; the Beatles had independently invented waltz time, here disguised as triplets, and even this simple rhythmic innovation shook the pop world to its foundations.

These were the Beatles' Wanderjahre, and though their efforts to shore up the British pound took them as far west as Texas and California, their whole style was moving further and further toward the East. George Harrison (afterward to spend a semester in India with Ravi Shankar) took up the uncertain sitar that is to be heard twanging for the first time in "Norwegian Wood." It was a decisive addition to the arsenal of Beatle sounds. In time, after some other experiments with Indian ragas and gurus, the Beatles found their real depth as the mind-expanding dragomans of the love generation, translating Yoga into pop and interpreting the new Vedanta for the Western scene.

Their poetry loses its shrill note of sexual urgency and goes softly out of focus: "We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine …" The Revolver album … stakes out the boundaries of the Beatles' expanded domain, now no longer circumscribed by the Mersey beat. "Taxman," the opening song in the album, offers a first attempt at social protest for people in the upper income brackets: "If you get too cold I'll tax the heat, If you take a walk I'll tax your feet." "Good Day Sunshine" revives the spirit of barrelhouse and barbershop; "For No One" borrows a romantic French horn obbligato from Schubert's Hirt auf dem Felsen. Though love appeals are more casual than ever—"I'll make love to you if you want me to"—the group is not above reverting to an old-fashioned crooner ballad, intoned so beatifically that butter wouldn't melt in their guitars. Harrison's sitar, improving with practice, appears in "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows," proclaiming a new-found doctrine of flower power: "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream," at which point the sound does become very relaxed and unpremeditated, close to the edge of indeterminacy. But the album's real pièce de résistance, "Eleanor Rigby," is actually a kind of Lennon-McCartney passion chorale….

In the outline and texture of its string accompaniment "Eleanor Rigby" bears a more than fleeting resemblance to the Bachianas Brasileiras of Villa-Lobos. (p. 57)

Intentionally or not, the Beatles had already breached the wall between classical music—passé, insuperable—and whatever it was they had been doing. With their next single they arrived at virtually the same intersection between the square and the amoebic that Kurt Weill had reached, for some brief but glorious moments, in his Berlin theatre songs of the 1920's. "Penny Lane" opens up neobaroque vistas, with Bach trumpets blowing hallelujahs for the fireman who "likes to keep his fire engine clean, it's a clean machine." And "Strawberry Fields Forever," on the other side, completes the job of utterly demolishing the form and formula of the erstwhile "pop single." (pp. 57-8)

The Beatles have come to the point where the message has outgrown the medium. Sgt. Pepper contrives to be a sort of play within a play, à la Brecht, with the Beatles already at one remove from their former cherubic selves…. Musically it is all done with mirrors—the happiest orgy of free association since Wagner invented his ninety leitmotifs: jangling harps and harpsichords, wheezing accordions, the gatling-gun rhythms of the Tamla-Motown Detroit Negro style, Caliban thumping a high-hat, electric guitars going off like wobbly oboes, a choral fugato on "We shall scrimp and save," dogs barking, cocks crowing, paeans to a "Mr. K" who could be [Franz] Kafka or [Paul] Klee, memories of Fred and Adele Astaire, a charge of light brigades and an instant-gamaka Hindu chant about saving the world through love. As usual the libretto is illumined by flashes of brilliant psychological insight….

The music is basically neobaroque, but as full of miscellanea as a basura joint bought in a Tangier café: trumpets, saxophones, random noises of the Zen-Cage school, and footnotes from "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "Greensleeves." Several further wrinkles and refinements are added in "I Am the Walrus," which is really the more interesting side of their next single though it is "Hello, Goodbye" that gets all the plays. "Hello" is a palpable hit on account of its neatly posited dialectics: "I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello." But "Walrus" takes a much bigger and more significant step toward the abolition of determinacy. It finds grist for its mill in retreaded 1947 Hollywood movie chords, choruses inspired by early laughing-gas dentistry, and "Elementry penguin singing Hare Krishna." Amid the inchoate prenatal or postprandial noises of this "Walrus," the universe resounds with the mighty cry of "I am the eggman" and intimations of the great ooohm, muttered through mink teeth. The record also marks their first tentative exploration of forbidden territory: "boy you been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down." (p. 58)

"Walrus" also turns up in the filmic Mystery Tour package, where the idea of carelessness is carried beyond iconoclasm and raised to the status of an organizing principle. The title song and "The Fool on the Hill" represent the Beatles' two current brands of hot and cold running expressionism: on the one hand, "They've got everything you need / Satisfaction guaranteed," and on the other, "The Fool on the Hill / Sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head / See the world spinning round."

Elsewhere in the album; particularly in "Your Mother Should Know," the Beatles reaffirm their ties to the great western tradition of J. Brahms and the close-knit family. "Your mother should know" is the motto, repeated and repeated. (pp. 58-9)

The sheer irrelevance of much of this music suggests that possibility of another put-on, but McCartney has made it quite plain that "Elementry penguin singing Hare Krishna" and "Love is all you need" constitute an authoritative pronunciamento from Beatle headquarters. "I believe that love is the one thing that can supersede everything else," he explains. "Love is a groove … Love is the only natural thing … God is in everything…. It just happens that I've realized all of this through acid, but it could have been through anything. It really doesn't matter how I made it … The final result is all that counts."

Already the Beatles have nearly succeeded in bringing the two mainstreams of music, serious and pop, Bach and barrelhouse, flowing back in the same broad channel—something that hasn't happened since the days when they were dancing bourrées in the streets. What a relief it is to turn on a radio and hear the blare of poetry instead of drivel: "Lovely Rita meter maid" or "Expert texpert choking smokers don't you think the joker laughs at you? Ha ha ha!"

When their revolution is complete and the Beatle millennium arrives, the art of music will once more be a continuum instead of a series of soundproof compartments. For a generation bent on enlarging the spectrum of its sensations, the Beatles—like Beethoven before them—have permanently expanded the limits of the world we live in, the world of vibrations. (p. 59)

Frederic V. Grunfeld, "On Polyphony and a New Vocal Quartet" (copyright © 1968 by Frederic V. Grunfeld; reprinted by permission of Wallace & Sheil Agency, Inc.), in Horizon, Spring, 1968, pp. 56-9.

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