Beatles: Studio Magic

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Beatles fans loved them to go on tour; there were record crowds at their concerts, both in England and abroad.  But, let's face it; their performances on tour were never very good.  They are most definitely not among the great tour bands.  (Perhaps, since they disbanded, road band equipment has improved greatly, and musicians have learned to better manage their sound on tour.)  Inevitably, the touring stopped around late 1965, and the Beatles became primarily a group that recorded in the studio.

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was an album that broke new ground in many ways.  It was one of the earliest "concept" albums, i.e. an album centered around a unifying idea, in this case, a music-hall variety show.  Almost every song is a winner, though few of them were ever released as singles.  The title track, Sgt Pepper's Lonelyhearts Club Band, is both unremarkable musically, and a familiar landmark of the album! It's declamatory style is very unique, but it isn't a desert island track, by any means.  With A little help from my friends is a brilliant piece of songwriting, sung by Ringo Starr.  It is hard to put a finger on what makes the song so great, but it is an essential piece of Beatle culture. Then comes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, an amazing song that in retrospect seems clearly inspired by the prevailing drug culture, but still managed to connect at a purely musical level.  (There were at least a few songs of that time that had no connection to drugs at all, either in their performance, or their subject matter, but were sung with a certain edge to them, using a style inspired by artists who really were under the influence.  C'est la vie.) The next few songs are favorites of mine, including Fixing a Hole (with a slightly megaphone-like music-hall sound) and Getting Better.  She's Leaving Home (which used a string ensemble), and When I'm Sixty-Four both attracted both popular and critical attention, and are really good songs, though the former is rarely played these days.  For the benefit of Mr Kite is a circus-poster inspired piece, and Lovely Rita a paean to a meter-maid.  There is a George Harrison song inspired by Indian music, which ends with a horse-laugh:  Within you, without you, and of course the stunning A Day in The Life, with the closing piano chord that was celebrated for many years (the Forever Chord).

The Beatles project for the second half of 1967 was Magical Mystery Tour, which was conceived as a TV special, featuring a tour with the Beatles, which was to be condensed down to a musical variety show and an album.  Some memorable songs did come out of this, though few outside Beatles Fandom found the video footage of much interest.  (I personally was surprised at how graceful all 4 Beatles were, physically.  John Lennon, particularly, was a graceful man.)  The Fool on the Hill is a gorgeous, atmospheric song, and Lennon's I am the Walrus is equally stunning, a song that matched the whimsical, humorous poetry of Lennon with a memorable tune and imaginative instrumentation.  I'm at a loss for words to describe the impact of this song at the time it was released, especially for established Beatles fans, and I can't even imagine what effect it must have had on those just being turned on to the Beatles for the first time.  (I hate to rely on YouTube for musical clips, because the visuals sometimes distract from the impact of the pure sound, but a black screen isn't much of an improvement, either.) Hello Goodbye is a deceptively simple, short song featuring Paul's vocals, and All you need is Love is an offering by John Lennon, a very epigrammatic and enigmatic statement about the philosophical environment they were living in. It is impressive that they embraced the philosophical challenges they faced, rather than sidestepping them.  This stuff is difficult to write about objectively, since we know a great deal about these people, and it is tempting to extrapolate backwards, to guess what seeds these songs revealed that would later grow into major themes, feelings and problems.  Hello goodbye seems to point at communication problems among the Beatles, and between them and their financial and logistical staff, while All you need is Love suggests that Lennon focused on the big picture, possibly ignoring many details, which presumably concerned McCartney more acutely.

Next up: Decline and Fall, the fabulous, tragic last albums by the Beatles

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Beatles, the Fabulous Transition Years: Rubber Soul and Revolver

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Rubber Soul is the hiding-place of such wonderful, timeless Beatle songs as Nowhere Man, Michelle, and In my life.  It's startling that John Lennon would write such a retrospective-seeming song barely in his thirties.  Their cleverness with lyrics simply exploded at this time (possibly driven by external forces, such as George Martin), with both McCartney and Lennon writing lyrics that stand well on their own.  Harrison was still getting started, judging from the songs that managed to get on the Beatles albums, but we now know that many of his songs were simply kept out by Lennon and McCartney.  Only their extreme youth can excuse this.

Then came a release of an amazing single with Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, which have not really been established in any of the albums, but inserted as an afterthought it seems, in Magical Mystery Tour.  These two songs have been taken into their collective heart by the mainstream music establishment (despite the strong suspicion that drugs were involved in the inspiration of at least Strawberry Fields).  Strawberry Fields is a recollection of an orphanage into whose grounds John Lennon (at least) liked to sneak, while Penny Lane is Paul McCartney's celebration of a street in downtown Liverpool.  Both songs are heavily orchestrated with brass, Penny Lane featuring a "Bach" high trumpet in C, which Paul heard on the radio, and wanted to feature in the song.  John's strange vocals in Strawberry Fields is due to combining two recordings at different pitches, which necessitated slowing one of them down.  This record, in retrospect, seems to me to be a major milestone in the evolution of the recorded sound of the Beatles.

Revolver, with its striking cover art by Klaus Voorman, a friend from the old Hamburg days (and a major Bassist) is the first instance with a serious contribution: Taxman, by George Harrison, as well as the amazing Eleanor Rigby, brilliantly capturing some of the alienation of the time, in this case, that of agism.  Even if Paul McCartney's feelings about the subject might not be as sympathetic as some way wish, there is no doubt that he was able to depict the pathos of aging pretty well.

This album continues the Beatles tradition of referring to little incidents in their lives in the songs.  This became a common occurrence at that time; it probably reflects the isolation of the group from its fans.  They must have some inspiration, why not the little incidents they experience?  They know the fans are hungry for details about them, and every little clue is analyzed in detail, so why not?!  Dr Robert, She Said, For no one, all these have a feel of excerpts from a journal that make sense only to the subject.  Whatever the lyrics meant, the music is superior.

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My Second Favorite Rock Band: The BEATLES!

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What am I thinking?

I should have written a post on these guys a long time ago!

My first exposure to the Beatles, at least visually, was the movie A Hard Day's Night.  We had just won second place in the inter-house drama contest, and were sent out to see any movie of our choice, and we chose A Hard Day's Night.  It was a complete shock; I was immediately a fan.  Soon I was learning to play the guitar, and was learning all the songs from the movie.  A Hard Day's Night probably won for the Beatles their most faithful fans; the album is one of the most creative and tuneful, and harmonically interesting (in a conventional way) of all the pop music available at the time.  (There were probably better albums out there, actually, but these comparisons must take into account the visibility of the albums . . .  Ok, it's meaningless; satisfied?)  The movie had no plot to speak of; it was a fictional and glamorized account of a day in the life of Our Boys From Liverpool, supported by Paul's fictional Grandfather from Ireland, and a fictional Girlfriend for George.  (Not so fictional, really.)  Supposedly, for the first and last time, this Beatles album featured mainly songs whose creative seeds came mainly from John Lennon.

The opening song, the title song of the movie, opens with a huge chord which, having been analyzed carefully recently by someone using fairly simple Fourier analysis, is revealed to have been played on two guitars, the Bass guitar, and backed with a big 13th chord (a sort of dominant seventh with extra notes) played on a piano.  You can Google it.  There are many harmonic innovations that are hardly original, but possibly new to pop music.  The Beatles --at the very least the three who wrote the songs-- were unarguably very musical people (not a requirement for being a major rock group at that time), and the body of their compositions is a very satisfying collection of music.  A Hard Day's Night features an interlude which sounds as though it was played on an Indian sitar, but is actually played on a 12-string guitar.  (Stop press: I recently read that the guitar solo was doubled on the piano.  Whoa!  That George Martin has a lot to answer for!)  Most of the songs are contemplative, musical and romantic.  The driving rock songs on the B Side were written to balance the mellow A Side of the album.

I should have known better is a fun song featuring John Lennon on a harmonica.  This is one of my favorite cool rock songs.

If I fell is a lovely ballad, a duet between John and Paul, and is harmonically interesting (even disregarding the introduction, which is simply a chromatic chord sequence with no relation to the rest of the song).  It is soft and romantic, and the words are just doggerel rhyme, but it works.

And I love her, sung by Paul mcCartney is a lovely serenade, followed by I'm Happy just to Dance sung by George Harrison.  Another big rock number which was on the album, and which dates from around that time is Can't buy me love, which really rocks.  Here's a live performance, which is noisy and unsatisfactory.  A clip from the movie is a little cleaner.

Shortly after this movie, perhaps the lives of the four Beatles developed in a direction that made sappy sentimental songs less attractive to them, who were in their late twenties and fairly well settled with their respective wives and girlfriends.

Their next album was mostly covers (re-recordings of songs written by others), With the Beatles.  An extensive description of this album is available on Wikipedia, but here are my favorite cuts: No reply, a song with a definite samba, or bossa nova beat.  There is a heavy use of seventh chords (which is common in bossa nova songs).  Rock and Roll Music (Chuck Berry) and Kansas City (Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller) are fun rhythm 'n' blues songs.  Another interesting cut is Every Little Thing, which features the kettledrums, of all things.

Next came Help, a movie, during the filming of which, it is suspected the boys were mostly high on drugs.  Despite that, there were several wonderful songs in the Help album that had little or nothing to do with the movie.  Help, the title track, is well known.  A little-known song, Night Before, is one of my favorites, and comes second in the album, followed by You've got to hide your love away, strongly influenced by Bob Dylan, if not by his poetry, at least by his singing.  A lovely song, sung in 3-part harmony is You're gonna lose that girl.  True 3-part harmony is not uncommon in Beatles songs, but this one is more traditional barbershop than most of the others.  Ticket To Ride is an edgy song with interesting accompaniment and harmony.  It's only love is a contemplative song that out-Dylans Dylan.  Actually, I take that back; the lyrics begin to show a little of the maniacal word play that marked Lennon's literary work; in this case, not punning, but alliteration.  The last two cuts are I've just seen a face, Yesterday, and Dizzy Miss Lizzy, one of the great rock performances, in my humble opinion.  Unfortunately they never played it this well live.

This brings us to the end of the so-called early years.  Already the team of Lennon and McCartney were being inspired by interesting new instruments (and old instruments, e.g. 12-string guitars), and of course they were relentless consumers of the other popular music that was in the air, and much of this found its way into their own music.

[More in the next post.]

Heartbreak & Health Care

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Health care in the US is the only kind that most Americans (most US natives, anyway) know: you pay a certain amount of money to a company; if you get sick, they try to get you well; if you stay healthy, they keep the money.  In the past, of course, most insurance companies could invest your money in the fabulous Stock Market, and make a lot of money, while they waited for you to get sick.  This is how they could afford to sit around arranging for your health care; after all, they were in it for the profits, and we did not hold that against them.

Health care in some other countries are paid for out of taxes; in other words, the government got to hold your money instead of private insurance companies, while the government waited for you to get sick.  In the US, of course, we hate the idea of the government holding onto money, and we would like to avoid it if possible.  I don't know why this is; surely we don't believe that the US government is more corrupt than say, the Canadian government.

Or maybe it's a matter of efficiency.  Maybe we feel that it would be better to let a private company handle health care rather than the government.  Like roads, for instance.  Oh, wait; roads are handled by the government!  Oops.  Maybe if we asked Blue Cross to keep the roads in shape, the roads would be in a heckuva lot better shape than they are now.  (But we would pay a lot more for the satisfaction.  And we could sue them if there were potholes.  And we could sue them if there was a traffic jam just when we wanted to get to the hospital in a hurry!  There are lots of strange pluses to farming out jobs to the private sector.)

The more left-leaning folks in government are more sensitive to the fact that people losing jobs are losing their health insurance.  At least some of these folks probably have family members who are sick just when they're handed a pink slip.  For anyone who doesn't completely avoid listening to media sources that are sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed, it is heartbreaking to listen to the horror stories of people who are unable to get health insurance.  The fiscal conservatives had a good platform when unemployment was low.  When unemployment is high, they really don't have a plan to look after the indigent.  I sometimes wonder what the doctrinaire conservatives really think about the plight of the working class.  Perhaps it is something like: well, someday they'll be well off, too; it's just a matter of time.  And they will thank us for making sure that the wealthy don't have to subsidize the subsistence of those close to the poverty line.  It is amazing that so many Americans of very limited means tend to vote in sympathy with really affluent people.  They do not realize that the problems of the ultra-affluent and the problems of the merely modestly well-off are very, very different. 

There are horror stories about the heartbreak of foreigners who got screwed by their health system, e.g. Brits who could not get decent health care, and Canadians who supposedly had to wait for months and months for health care.  Well, each case has to be examined on its own merits, and we must not only satisfy ourselves about the facts of each case, but also whether the British or the Canadian system, as the case may be, made changes in order to respond to that particular problem.  In the US, insurance companies do respond slowly to pressure from customers.  But they're ultimately responsible to their greedy stockholders, not their patients.

Conservatives in this country tend to respond more to the heartbreak of the insurance companies.  Compared to the large profits they've made in the past, their profits in more recent times must be slimmer, simply because the Stock Market is in trouble.  But a visit to the corporate headquarters of any major insurance company should cure anyone of a suspicion that all their resources are focused on keeping their customers well for a reasonable cost.  The health insurance industry is very high on the food chain, and the worse the unemployment situation gets, the more afraid they should be that Congress will make it very hard for them to keep swindling the consumers on an ongoing basis.

Many so-called "moderate Democrats" are afraid of being called names such as "Socialist" or "Communist" or the accusation of being a blind follower of the President.  All sorts of vicious name-calling has blossomed in response to the irrational reactions of the conservatives, and the influence of the health-insurance lobby.

Nobody is more aware of heartbreak in health care than doctors and nurses.  Many doctors and nurses no doubt went into the profession as a means for gaining power and a certain degree of affluence.  But an amazing proportion of them seem to be in favor of major changes in health care practice, and within the health insurance industry.  In the last analysis, perhaps it is self-evident that without a degree of altruism, one simply cannot be a physician or a surgeon, even if this suspicion seems at odds with our feelings when we get their bills!!!  Whatever the true facts are, doctors have come out in favor of health care reform, though perhaps not as radical reform as would make most Americans really happy once the reform is actually here.  Though it is possible that plans that work in other countries will not work here (because Americans are particularly prone to rip off the system?), the chances are that there is a plan that could work.  The difficulty is to find a plan that (1) can work well, (2) can be adjusted if it needs to be, in small ways, and (3) which cannot be subverted by the conservatives and Big Health in the future.  Because, rest assured, some of the best minds in the country may be trying to get us all better health care, but some good minds are working even now to sabotage the whole thing.

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National Cheeseburger Day 2009

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The Holiday Insights Page has found no documentation of the origin of the annual celebration on September 18th.  But Hungry Girl, a website associated with Weight Watchers has done some research, and

Oh gosh!

Cheeseburgers come with a wide assortment of nutritional values.  A cheeseburger, of course, has a hamburger patty, but --according to Hungry Girl, anyway-- all cheeseburgers are not born equal.

Wendy's Junior Cheeseburger comes in the low-fat winner: 370 calories, and 12g fat.  (If they really like you and they're not too busy, they will make a "W" with the mustard.)

Hungry Girl is deeply grieved by McDonald's 1/3 pound Angusburger with cheese: 750 calories, 40g fat.
McD's were far more pro-nutrition in the past, says Hungry Girl.

Hardees 2/3 pound Monster Thickburger: 1420 calories, and 108g fat.  Its 60 grams of protein is hardly an excuse.

It should be possible to make your own hamburger at home with easily far less fat, and considerably less calories.  Grill a 95% or better lean patty on your George Foreman Lean Machine  (or similar) grill, put on a slice of low-fat colby or swiss cheese, use a reasonable amount of fat-free or low fat mayonnaise, a little steak sauce or ketchup (don't go overboard), and you've got a cheeseburger that probably comes close to the Wendy's Junior Cheeseburger minimum.  (The JC, I must say, has a really small patty, though it's satisfactory for a quick snack.)

Ray Cotes discusses the true cost of a cheeseburger on his page.

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Tristan & Isolde, 2006

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While everyone else was probably watching a breaking news story, I was totally absorbed in a film of a legend on the periphery of the Arthurian sagas: Tristan and Isolde.

I had known the essence of the story since I was a schoolboy: a Cornish knight, Tristan, or Sir Tristram, had been sent out to Ireland to bring home to Cornwall an Irish bride, Isolde, to marry King Marke of Cornwall. The young knight and the princess fall in love, despite their painful awareness of their duty both to the political circumstances and the laws of chivalry, facilitated at least in part by the love potion that was to be administered to the girl to prepare her for marriage to the older King Marke. The potion has the tragic effect of making her fall (even more firmly) in love with the young knight Tristan. The story grinds to its inevitable end, made palatable sometimes, and more painful at other times, by the intense poetic sensibilities of the young lovers, the fussing and blundering loyalty of Isolde’s nurse and maid, Bragnae (or Brangane, in some stories), and numerous details that are inserted by various writers who have retold this tale, to sharpen the edge of the tragedy.

In many ways, having known of the legend since childhood, I was certain that I could not be as moved by the story as I had been as a child. Richard Wagner, too, had written one of his greatest operas based on this story, but that same opera had, in my mind, made the legend useless for all other writers and operattists, simply because Wagner extracted every iota of agony from the story in a score that is considered bloated and self-indulgent by some, and magnificent by others.

A problem with Wagner operas is that they transport medieval stories to some glorious sound-stage in the sky, where the action refers to familiar historic --or legendary-- events, but what one sees is so stylized that only the music saves it from being totally ludicrous. Cinema, meanwhile, has succeeded in many instances in presenting period scenes which are more convincing each year. Despite their heavy-handedness, Cecil B. De Mille’s representations of Roman times set a certain standard of realism that subsequent productions have to beat. I have always said that Monty Python’s Holy Grail, despite the relentless parody and pantomime, realized on the screen my own mental image of those terrible times. In contrast with the lush beauty of The Agony and The Ecstasy, and Romeo and Juliet, for instance, films set in medieval Britain have been, at least half of them, successful at depicting the contrast between the life at court, and the life of the peasants, and the contrast between the depiction of life at court in fairy-tale films such as Camelot, and in later movies which showed a more realistic, less stainless-steel-stylish view of knights and their ladies.

Tristan and Isolde, 2006, presents a step towards realism, even if it stops from going so far towards historical realism as to make the movie unwatchable. I’m probably reacting to the fact that the principals act and behave very much in line with the characters as they existed in my mind, which of course is not saying a lot. James Franco and Sophia Myles, who have the title roles, are perfect, and so is earnest King Marke, and the anxious Bragnae (played by Bronagh Gallagher). There are the usual horrible medieval bullies with their poison-dipped swords, and so forth --after all, one of the main messages of the story is about better living with medieval chemistry-- and enough locker-room humor to keep the men from going out for a cigarette and not coming back. Sophia Myles has a brilliant way of being the beautiful girl next door, who would or would not give you the time of day depending on her mood. Both the young lovers are people one could fall in love with (if one was the appropriate gender, I suppose), and I was so in love that --- I could not watch the ending. So this review is written under false pretenses. One of these days, I will watch the whole thing, and suffer. Three thumbs up!

[Below is a link to a fragment from the prelude to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.]



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A few of Mozart's Last Masterpieces

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Don't misunderstand me: I do not mean to suggest either that Mozart wrote just a few masterpieces, or that they were all written at the end of his life.  I just want to talk about a few late ones.

The first is the Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major, Köchel 488.  This beautiful piece wafts in, like a soft breeze, and comes to an end like a happy smile, with one of his most modest codas.  (The "coda" is the last several chords and gestures at the end of a work, the blustery ending part which, in a Beethoven symphony, for instance, seems to go on for years...)

Here it is:

Note the opening few notes, the falling third as we describe it, from the fifth note of the scale to the third.  In this particular performance Malcom Bilson plays a fortepiano,  a gentler-voiced precursor to the modern piano, more appropriate to piano and orchestral pieces of this period, especially with a period orchestra, as that of the English Baroque Soloists (John Eliot Gardiner).  Note: this recording has been performed in a transitional style to bridge Baroque practice (the keyboard instrument plays throughout the work, and if it is a featured solo instrument, it is given special prominence during solo passages) and Classical practice (the solo keyboard sounds only during passages when it is explicitly scored for).  The constantly sounding fortepiano gives the music a certain "crunchiness" that might sound peculiar to those not accustomed to it.

This work is not only one of Mozart's most brilliant and beloved creations, but a jewel of all Western Art of all ages.  Though it does not contain an expression of great sorrow, or holy joy, it still manages to capture our ability to find pleasure in ordinary things.  John Eliot Gardiner describes Mozart's music as showing us what it means to be human, and I completely agree with this view.  The slow middle movement is lovely, with even painfully beautiful moments that interrupt its overall tranquility.

The same falling third is the opening figure of another beloved work of Mozart's, namely the immortal Clarinet Concerto in A, Köchel 622.  Equally well known and equally frequently played, the Clarinet Concerto has a wider range of emotions than the Piano Concerto. (Mozart wrote at least 27 piano concertos, but only one clarinet concerto has come down to us.)  The work ends with a definitely bubbly movement, in startling contrast to the problems with health, money and marriage that Mozart was thought to have been experiencing at the time at which the piece was written.  Mr Köchel's catalog is generally in chronological order or composition or publication--I'm not sure which, but we cannot really assume that the Clarinet concerto is as much a later work than the piano concerto as their respective catalog numbers would suggest.


The clarinet concerto too, has a beautiful slow (middle) movement which is simply gorgeous.  It comes out clearly, how much Mozart loved to write these slow movements, though the structure of the faster movements displayed his structural genius in more obvious ways.  In a slow movement it is impossible to hide behind structure, and your melodic inventiveness and your harmonic skill are painfully or happily exposed, as the case may be.  The falling orchestral "chorus" intersperses each solo essay by the clarinet, and Mozart uses poignantly different harmonies for the repeats.

At about the same time, Mozart also wrote his Clarinet Quintet, Köchel 581, for clarinet and string quartet.  This masterpiece (numbered between the other two, for whatever that's worth) features the same opening falling third as the other two works mentioned earlier.  Again, there is no fuss or drama here; it seems a pleasant conversation among friends, written by someone who had nothing to prove, except maybe that it is possible to write a perfectly satisfactory quintet with a clarinet as guest with a string quartet.


The slow movement of this one is every bit as delightful as those of the other two works; maybe even more lovely.  The intimacy possible with a string quartet is hard to compare with anything else. The phrases seem almost vocal, speech-like, earnest, ardent, eager, conversational.  Listen to the commentary by the string quartet to the opening statement of the clarinet!  Such perfect agreement!  The remaining two movements are jolly to the point of rowdiness, but that was Mozart all over.  Part of the wonder of the man was how such buffoonery and such ineffable elegance could reside within the same person.

These are among the greatest compositions within classical music of the past four centuries, but it is almost impossible to make a list of The Great Compositions of Mozart.  If you like these, there are many, many more, even if you want to give time for only the very best: the last five symphonies, the last five piano concertos, all the string quartets, the operas (most definitely Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, Cosi Fan Tutte), the masses, especially the Great Mass in C minor and the Requiem in D minor, the piano sonatas (especially K310, K330, my favorites); the five violin concertos, The Concerto for Flute and Harp K 299, the Gran Partita, K361, The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola K 364, and The Sinfonia Concertante for Four Winds K 287b.

[Note: the fact of the two opening notes being the same for the three works featured in this post should not be given any special significance; I merely mention it as a curiosity.  The opening themes of compositions of this period were constructed from arpeggios and scales, and it is easy to see how this particular choice of a germ of a theme would appeal to Mozart.]

Archimedes