The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  And indeed the overriding emotion of ‘American Tune’ is an understated patriotism that is characterised not by cynicism but rather by gratitude. It is a song about – and for – the ordinary people of a nation struggling to reconcile the growing pains of diversity with a boom in affluence and technology, to understand what its stars and stripes actually represented at the same time as planting them on the moon. There was a quarrelsome, ill-at-ease atmosphere at play in the post-war United States – ‘you can’t be for ever blessed’ – but Simon’s song is representative of a sort of social contract between the vast melting pot of cultures and backgrounds who ‘come in the age’s most uncertain hours and sing an American tune’. It is an attitude he shared with, among many others, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Elmer Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Bernard Herrmann, Benny Goodman, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Burt Bacharach, Philip Glass, André Previn, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond and Bob Dylan – all the children or grandchildren of Jewish immigrants.

  While the United States was by no means unique in embracing a diverse human melting pot, its size and prominence on the world stage pushed its racial and cultural tensions into the spotlight in the 1960s and ’70s. In many ways this was a good thing for the nation’s artistic output: it is certainly fair to claim that popular music played a significant role in allowing communities to embrace their differences, to find common cause with one another and to celebrate the heterogeneity of their origins. It should not surprise us at all that some of the richest fusions of genres took place in the arena of American music.

  ‘American Tune’ was not Paul Simon’s first attempt at integrating disparate styles of music – Simon and Garfunkel’s monster hit of 1970, ‘Bridge over troubled water’, had brought together folk and gospel elements, a ravishingly full grand piano and a large classical orchestra – nor was it his last. In 1986 he released arguably his most radical melding of previously unconnected genres in Graceland, a collaboration with South African singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others. The project was not without its controversies: the recording process technically flouted a UN embargo on Apartheid South Africa, while the question of whether due credit had been given to all participants was reminiscent of the debate that had surrounded Dvořák’s New World symphony. But from a musical point of view, Graceland was quite extraordinary, mixing the irrepressibly energetic township sound with folk styles popular in the Southern United States, such as Cajun, zydeco and Tex-Mex; the album’s title, of course, is a reference to Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee. It achieved incredible international success, any qualms about its genesis assuaged by the reassurances of Joseph Shabalala, founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, that Graceland was a sincere, non-exploitative collaboration that had given a worldwide platform to the voices of black Africans whose only freedom at that time was the exuberance of their hitherto largely unnoticed music.

  Time and again in the rich tradition of fusing musical genres we have seen composers draw on little-known folk styles – as Paul Simon did on Graceland – or trawl through music’s attic in search of inspiration. While Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan were prominent members of the 1960s movement that sought to explore the possibilities of regional American and Anglo-Celtic folk music, they were outdone in terms of sheer volume of experimentation by the leading pop group of the period – and indeed of all time – The Beatles.

  Between their first love, rock and roll, and their late-1960s infatuation with drug-induced psychedelia, The Beatles embraced Anglo-Celtic folk music and ancient folk modes, notably bringing them together in ‘Eleanor Rigby’. They plundered the tongue-in-cheek novelty song style of music hall and vaudeville in ‘When I’m sixty-four’ and they played with tape-looping and other electronic experiments of the 1960s avant-garde in ‘Tomorrow never knows’, a song that also featured both a drone – recruited back into service for the first time since the thirteenth century – and voices run through a ‘Leslie speaker’, a Doppler-effect sound processor originally developed in the 1940s for Hammond organs. They ventured eastwards into Indian music and instruments – as in ‘Within you, without you’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ – prefiguring the later boom in world music, and westwards for close-harmony vocal arrangements, used for example in ‘Nowhere Man’. They invited back into popular music the sounds of the classical orchestra (‘A Day in the Life’), brass band (‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’), string quartet (‘Yesterday’) and harp (‘She’s Leaving Home’), as well as instruments long since consigned to the curiosity cabinet: harpsichord (‘Fixing a hole’), melodeon and fairground organ (‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’), harmonium (‘We can work it out’), the eighteenth-century ‘piccolo’ trumpet (‘Penny Lane’), recorder (‘Fool on the Hill’), ukelele and banjo (‘Honey Pie’). Of course they did not overlook an array of instruments recently invented, and in many cases since abandoned, such as the Mellotron (‘Strawberry Fields Forever’), the Selmer Clavioline (‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’), the twelve-string guitar and the synthesiser, these last two becoming rock staples ever after.

  The Beatles became the most famous and successful musicians of the twentieth century mainly because their songs were youthful, catchy and imaginative, and because everyone who heard them – millions of people across the planet – felt the world was a better place. And by becoming such an international phenomenon, everything they chose to do by way of musical adventure flowed generously into the mainstream, so they acted – thanks to modern communications – as conduits of experiment and diversity on an unprecedentedly rapid scale. To be sure, the studio albums The Beatles created with producer George Martin between 1965 and 1970 – Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, The White Album, Abbey Road and Let It Be – are like a vast, joyful, kaleidoscopic journey through musical history. The message their irrepressible creativity sent out to the young at heart, swimming in teenage pop culture, was that the old stuff still had a role to play, that music’s past was relevant, enthralling and engrossing.

  What John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison achieved as composers had an impact way beyond the internal fashions and rejuvenations of pop itself. At a time when classical music was grappling with what it was supposed to sound like and what its fundamental building blocks should be, The Beatles (intuitively, not intentionally) reaffirmed the supremacy of the Western system of key-families, the interlocking jigsaw of harmony and melody that had worked for the likes of Bach, Schubert and Mendelssohn. They were the most unlikely saviours of old-fashioned music, but that’s undoubtedly what they were.

  This may seem a bold statement, but a look at the concerns of the classical community of the 1950s and ’60s reminds us just how radical The Beatles’ revolution was to the plight of Western music. The composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, the leading European spokesman for the vanguard of modern classical music during The Beatles’ heyday, is a useful weathervane of prevailing attitudes to what composers believed was the moribund condition of the musical tradition they had inherited. In an angry 1963 publication called Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Thinking of today’s music), Boulez articulated his disenchantment with more or less all the organising features of Western music – melody, harmonic progression, dance rhythm, repetition – and with virtually all music written before 1900, which was ‘nostalgic’ and ‘bourgeois’. (A fair amount of post-1900 music was likewise victim to his venom, Erik Satie being singled out as a ‘spineless dog’.) Boulez promulgated a form of ‘total’ serialism, in which Schoenberg’s twelve-tone idea – the removal of all repetition and therefore of hierarchy in the scale of notes – would be extended to rhythm, note duration, dynamics (degrees of volume) and even ornamentation. Any living musicians who did not fully immerse themselves in this system were ‘USELESS’. But while Boulez’s iconoclasm was attractive to some students of twentieth-century classical music, who venerated his 1957 composition Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer withou
t a Master), most neutral listeners then as now found both his polemic and his music thoroughly impenetrable.

  Lennon and McCartney were, no doubt about it, intrigued by certain experimental aspects of avant-garde classical music, but in the main their creativity was directed – perhaps surprisingly, given their status as the supreme representatives of the younger generation – backwards in time. The kiss of life they gave to long-lost and hitherto unfashionable musical styles reintegrated them with the popular mainstream at a time when one might have expected modern sounds like Boulez’s to rise to the fore.

  Classical music was in trouble, and by the whirlwind conclusion of The Beatles’ adventure, it looked as if the words of one of their early Chuck Berry covers, ‘Roll over Beethoven’, were actually coming true. This was a time in which the most extraordinary and bizarre sonic experiments were being conducted at the cutting edge of classical music, but what need did an ordinary music lover have for the complicated, uncomfortable results of these ideas in their raw, unfiltered state – complete with incomprehensible theories and analyses – if they could enjoy sonic experiments that had been integrated into a Beatles track? Mischievous though it undoubtedly was to include classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, how many of its millions of buyers would have sought out and relished the latter’s Zyklus (1959), in which a lone percussionist appears to strike instruments at random for anything between eight and fifteen minutes? Its spiral score is laid out graphically, has no set starting point and can be read left to right, right to left, upside down or back to front. The player is expected to respond to the sketched-out instructions ‘spontaneously’. There is no doubt that Stockhausen left an impressive pioneering legacy, but it did little for classical music’s reputation – or popularity – that one of its most distinguished composers was creating music out of what sounded to most people like a small child thrashing about unpredictably in a room filled with objects to be struck.

  While modern classical music had its challenges, older music was encountering its own difficulties in the twentieth century, despite – or indeed because of – an explosion in recordings in the 1960s. The success of the classical recording industry, improved long-player technology and an understandable desire to expand the market and broaden listeners’ horizons had led to the rediscovery and release of music that pre-dated the ‘core’ classics (broadly defined as Haydn to Sibelius). This development was a huge bonus, with music of the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries first in line for resuscitation, followed by music from even earlier periods. Alongside this fresh boost of material came a desire to try to reproduce as accurately as possible the sounds that the original composers might have heard – a movement searching for ‘authenticity’.

  Much of what was discovered in this search, from the late 1960s onwards, was to feed directly and irreversibly into performance practice of earlier music, for example the use of older-style – often replica – instruments, or of bowing techniques on violins, violas and cellos. Modern metal and synthetic materials for strings were replaced with the older animal gut that had been in use prior to the nineteenth century, and more recent changes to the design of instruments – to make them sturdier, louder or more consistently in tune – were reversed. It was determined, amid much debate, that the pitch of modern notes was appreciably higher than that in the time of Bach, so his works and the works of other composers of his period were transposed downwards accordingly, to make them sound more authentically ‘eighteenth-century’: an A became an A♭, and so on.

  The yearning for authenticity did not stop there. In the 1950s and ’60s it was commonplace to record or perform a cantata by Bach or an oratorio by Handel with a large chorus and a Mahler-sized symphony orchestra using contemporary instruments – perhaps three times as large as the group Bach would have employed – but by the 1980s this had become a rarity. Small ensembles playing ‘Baroque’ instruments at lower pitch had become the norm. The urge to make performances ‘authentic’ gradually spread to music of Mozart’s and Haydn’s period, and recently, for example in the recordings made in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, to the orchestral music of Felix Mendelssohn, composed in the 1840s.

  This mostly invigorating, positive trend was not without its drawbacks. For one thing, where does one draw the ‘authentic’ line? Handel’s operas, for (an albeit extreme) example, all feature leading roles for castrati: in order to hear as faithfully as possible what Handel heard, should this barbaric custom not be reintroduced? Likewise the concept of an ‘authentic’ (replica) Baroque violin: the very notion assumes that the violin of the period 1600–1750 was a standardised, unchanging instrument across Europe, which of course it was not. Different composers would have had different sounds in mind when they composed for the violin.

  But perhaps the weightier question surrounding the new enthusiasm for reviving the classics is the effect of flooding the record market with such a glut of ‘new’ material, the enormous back catalogue of music from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries now joined by music stretching back as far as the thirteenth. Even by 1970, hundreds of recordings of the same clutch of works by Beethoven were available, to name but one nineteenth-century composer, bulging the shelves of the (then) relatively numerous High Street record shops. Radio programmes analysed the merits of different interpretations of the same pieces, while there were always new reasons to hear, say, Mozart afresh, thanks to the selling point of newly researched performance techniques. People were enjoying classical music, certainly, but what this mountain of material demonstrated was a near fatal shift in classical music away from the new to the old. Live concerts in the nineteenth century had typically presented mostly premières, with some familiar favourites sandwiched in alongside them. At a concert in February 1814, for example, Beethoven presented the première of his eighth symphony alongside a performance of his seventh, which itself was only two months old. No one at the time thought this unusual. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the tables had been turned: old favourites became the bread and butter of live concerts, with new works squeezed in between them apologetically.

  The weight of the past and its majestic legacy weighed very heavily on the shoulders of young and untested twentieth-century composers in the classical tradition, since they were competing for audiences and promoter attention with an ever greater body of ‘masterworks’ from the past, rather than – as their predecessors in previous centuries had – simply the works of their parents’ generation. It would not have occurred to The Kinks, The Beatles or The Beach Boys in 1967 to be inhibited by the prior successes of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly or Lonnie Donegan, still less by the popular songs of Cole Porter in the 1920s or the minstrel songs of Stephen Foster of the 1850s – nor would concert and record promoters have been reluctant to take a risk on them because they were not Presley, Porter or Foster. But this was the great divide between the two genres: in pop, being new was a bonus; in classical, it had become a hurdle.

  Classical music’s infatuation with mining the riches of the distant past only reinforced the popular impression that it was backward-rather than forward-looking. All around its besieged citadel, live music was booming as never before, but only in genres in which it was acceptable – desirable, even – to move with the times. That is not to say that some classical musicians did not attain fame and success, but these were mostly singers, conductors and virtuoso players, making their names with Verdi, Mahler, Mozart or Wagner. Meanwhile the ‘big’ international names among classical composers of the 1960s – Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans Werner Henze, Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, John Cage, György Ligeti, Igor Stravinsky – had what one might call a Sunday-supplement visibility: their new works were reviewed and discussed in the broadsheets, large cultural institutions commissioned them, publicly funded radio stations played them, uni
versities studied them, but the general public was largely unaware of, and uninterested in, their music. None of these composers was as well known as their counterparts in film music: John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Maurice Jarre, Alfred Newman, Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa and Michel Legrand. But nowhere was the rout of classical music’s previous position of dominance more clearly seen than in musical theatre.

  The musical had, as the twentieth century matured, gratefully filled the vacuum created by opera’s self-imposed exile from accessibility, an attribute it had successfully maintained from the 1630s to Puccini’s last operas in the 1920s. The musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Ira and George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Kander and Ebb, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, Andrew Lloyd Webber and others retained the affections of a large portion of the ticket-buying public, while at the same time broadening the scope, ambition and stylistic edge of the musical form.

  This is particularly true of Stephen Sondheim, whose disdain for both high opera and tacky pop drove him to create a sound that lay comfortably and distinctively equidistant between the two: an instinct that was typically twentieth-century Sondheim had learnt his trade by writing lyrics for West Side Story, which opened in 1957. That West Side Story’s composer was Leonard Bernstein – easily America’s most famous twentieth-century classical musician, a conductor-composer-broadcaster of giant status and prestige – should have sent out a loud and clear message that, for all the popularity of the older classical repertoire, newer forms of entertainment driven by Broadway and Hollywood were now monopolising key musical talent. Bernstein’s score for West Side Story derived its energy from a sassy fusion of jazz, vaudeville, Broadway pizzazz, Latin American popular dance – and his own spectacularly accomplished classical training, which is evident in, among other elements, its sophisticated structure and recurrent musical themes. Though Bernstein himself composed other musicals, Wonderful Town and Candide among them, it was his young lyricist Sondheim, also a composer, who most enthusiastically took on the challenge laid down by the genre-hopping adventurousness of West Side Story. Over the ensuing half-century he wrote a series of brilliant, unusual and thought-provoking Broadway musicals, from the kabuki-theatre-influenced Pacific Overtures (1976) to the Victorian music hall thriller Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), and from Sunday in the Park with George (1984), inspired by a Georges Seurat pointillist painting, to an exploration of the darker side of children’s fairy tales in Into the Woods (1986).