20th Century Greats - Lennon & McCartney - a review

Howard Goodall presented the programme as one of 4 in the series, which also featured Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein and Bernard Hermann. He was the special guest at the event.

This programme was different from other Beatles productions in that it highlighted their musical influence rather than just being a standard biography of the band.

The show opens with a performance of From Me To You, then moves on to Strawberry Fields, showing the massive swing in creativity from loveable mop-tops to artists in the short space of 4 years. This was likened to the progress of a modern day Mozart.

The show highlighted the basic building block of music from melody to rhythm and harmony.

Whilst The Beatles were building their trade in Hamburg, playing anything from rock'n'roll to standards, film music and anything contemporary, the 20th century classical composers were dispensing with the standard note pattern system that had served them so well, even resorting to the rubbing of sandpaper as a form of music.

Popular music, however, stayed with the standard scale pattern and the difference between pop music and classical grew further apart as a result.

A clear example is the track I Saw Her Standing There, which consisted of just 4 chords. To highlight The Beatles' development, the track I am the Walrus used 16 chords, including 8 in the intro alone. The standard note patterns, however, are still relevant in both tracks.

Modulation, illustrated in the film by the changing of rooms, for example from one colour to another, is compared to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.

A great example of this is the track Penny Lane, where modulation occurs by stealth and the track is clearly written by a composer who knows what he is doing (a 24 year old Paul McCartney).

The programme then highlights how Paul can compose a song with such brilliance without musical training and highlights the long hours in Hamburg which have been documented above, where both Lennon and McCartney must have drawn influence from their visits to local churches, where many hymns were written in pre-renaissance Dorian keys, which made their songs different from anything else at the time.

Eleanor Rigby was not written in a conventional key, not using major and minor keys, as a result becomes a classic example of use of pre- renaissance Dorian keys.

George Harrison was influenced greatly by Indian music and was introduced to the sitar by Ravi Shankar. The sitar first appeared on a Beatles record, Norwegian Wood in late 1965, but Indian music was to also have an effect on John, who wrote a song called Child of Nature whilst in India, which later materialised as Jealous Guy on his 1971 Imagine album. This piece clear based on the pentatonic scale (a scale that can be played on just the black keys of a piano), which was prevalent in Indian music.

After The Beatles stopped touring in the summer of 1966, they spent more time in the studio and one track in particular had a huge impact on listeners the way music would develop.

Tomorrow Never Knows, used avant garde techiniques and was an attempt by John Lennon to capture an LSD experience in musical form -- influence drawn from Timothy Leary's Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The programme compares Lennon and McCartney to the modern day Bach, and gives a fascinating insight to how they wrote their music; whether both John and Paul knew this at the time we shall never know.

The interview which followed was just as fascinating. Howard stated that there is not a musician around today who has not been affected by Lennon and McCartney in some way.

Due to their popularity, for example in Calcutta, they have affected people all over the world. Stravinsky was popular, but not in places as far afield as Calcutta -- The Beatles reached everyone.

He just asks you to listen to the music and doesn't give any signposts as the direction to take.

Penny Lane and certainly Eleanor Rigby made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up after seeing this wonderful documentary.

The show won a RTS Educational Television Award in June 2005.

© 2008 British Beatles Fan Club