Under Development

The Beatles in Process

In the study of popular music, perhaps no other repertoire has received as much scrutiny as the Beatles’ recording catalogue.  In the years between 1962 and 1970, the band released 12 albums, 13 EPs (45 rpm disks with two recordings on each side), and 22 singles.  Several publications have attempted descriptions of all of these recordings from elaborate lists (e.g., Dowlding’s Beatlesongs) to detailed musical analyses (e.g., Everett’s two-volume The Beatles as Musicians).  However, no publication focuses on the core repertoire of the Beatles: their singles and EPs.  The Beatles and their production staff devoted most of their efforts to these recordings and selected them for promotional attention.  Not only does no publication deal specifically with these recordings, none does so as communal creations emerging from shifting cultural contexts and evolving in response to social and technological forces.  In short, we have no ethnomusicology of the Beatles.

The Beatles in Process chronologically examines the social and musical construction of this core repertoire.  First, the study places song composition in the contexts in which John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison wrote.  Understanding their inspirations and strategies, as well as the industrial pressures on them to produce, underscores how stunningly successful they were in this era.  Second, the study considers the studio dynamics in which songs developed into recordings with the assistance of artist-and-repertoire manager George Martin and balance engineers Norman Smith and Geoff Emerick.  Not only did Martin, Smith, Emerick, and others shape how we hear the music, but Martin (and others, such as Mike Leander) helped the Beatles to articulate the music, in some cases actually writing parts that we identify with the songs.  Most studies end at this point, but the marketing and promotion of these recordings plays a significant role in how we have come to know these recordings, as have consequential contemporary critical and commercial reactions. 

26 July, 2017