Ned Rorem

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I never go to classical concerts any more, and I don’t know anyone who does. It’s hard still to care whether some virtuoso tonight will perform the Moonlight Sonata a bit better or a bit worse than another virtuoso performed it last night.

I do often attend what used to be called avant-garde recitals, though seldom with delight, and inevitably I look around and wonder: what am I doing here? what am I learning? where are the poets and painters and even composers who used to flock to these things? Well, perhaps what I’m doing here is a duty, keeping an ear on my profession so as to justify the joys of resentment, to steel an idea or two, or just to show charity toward some friend on the programme. But I learn less and less. Meanwhile the absent artists are home playing records; they are reacting again, finally to something they no longer find at concerts.

Reacting to what? Why, to the Beatles, of course – the Beatles, whose arrival has proved one of the most healthy events in music since 1950, a fact which no one sensitive can fail to perceive to some degree. By healthy I mean alive and inspired — two adjectives long out of use. By music I include not only the general areas of jazz, but those multiple expressions subsumed in the categories of chamber, opera, symphonic: in short, all music. And by sensitive I understand not the cultivated listening ability of élite Music Lovers so much as instinctive judgment. (There are still people who exclaim: ‘What’s a nice musician like you putting us on about the Beatles for?’ They are the same who at this late date take theatre more seriously than movies and go to symphony concerts because Pop insults their intelligence, unaware that the situation is now precisely reversed.) As to what occurred around 1950, that will be the starting concern of this brief essay, an essay with a primarily musical approach. Most of all the literary copy devoted to the Beatles extols the timely daring of the group’s lyrics while skirting the essential, the music. Poetry may be the egg from which the nightingale is hatched, though in the last analysis that nightingale must come first.

My ‘musical approach’ will be that of what was once termed a longhair composer, somewhat disillusioned, nourished at the conservatory yet exposed all his life (as is any American, of necessity) to jazz. It will not pretend to a total appraisal, only to the fact that I and my colleagues have been happily torn from a long antiseptic nap by the energy of rock, principally as embodied in the Beatles. Naturally I’ve grown curious about this energy. What are its origins? What need does it fill? Why should the Beatles— who seem to be the best of a good thing, who in fact are far superior to all the other groups who pretend to copy them, most of which are nevertheless American and perpetuating what once was an essentially American thing-why should the Beatles have erupted from Liverpool? Could it be true, as Nat Hentoff suggests, that they ‘turned millions of American adolescents on to what had been here hurting all the time… but the young here never did want it raw so they absorbed it through the British filter?

Do the Beatles hurt indeed? And are they really so new? Does their attraction, be it pain or pleasure, stem from their words-or even from what’s called their sound—or quite plainly from their tunes?

Those are the questions, more or less in order, that I’d like to examine. Around 1940, after a rather undifferentiated puberty, American music, deprived of foreign fertiliser, began producing an identifiably native fruit. By the war’s end we had cultivated a crop worthy of export, for every branch of the musical tree was thriving: symphonies of all shapes were being ground out in dozens; opera concepts were transplanting themselves into midwestern towns; and, for consideration here, vocal soloists were everywhere making themselves heard. On one side were Sinatra, Horne and Holiday, stylists of a high order, gorgeously performing material whose musical value (when not derived from the ‘twenties of Gershwin or Porter) was nevertheless middling and whose literary content was low. On the other side were specialised concert singers—Frijsh, Fairbank, and Tangeman—who, though vocally dubious, still created a new brand of sound by persuading certain youngish composers to make singable songs based on texts of quality.

By 1950 the export was well under way. But our puerile effervescence soon fattened in the realisation that no one abroad cared much. Jazz, of course, had always been an attraction in the Europe that dismissed American ‘serious’ music as not very serious; Europe, after all, was also reawakening after two numb decades under Hitler’s shadow. But that awakening was into the past, namely into the dodecaphonic system which in America had atrophied, and in Germany had been forgotten by the war. This device (no, not a device but a way of thinking, a philosophy) was being revitalised not in the Germany where it had all begun, but in France, of all places! By 1950 Pierre Boulez had single-handedly cleared the path and set the tone that music would follow for the next decade throughout the world. And America took the cue, following her new-found individuality to dissolve into what ultimately became the bandwagon of International Academicism.

This turn of events surprised no one more than everyone, namely our most personal and famous composers. The lean melodism conscientiously forged by Aaron Copland and which had become the accepted American Style, was now tossed out by the young. The complicated overfat romantic Teuton soup in which music had wallowed for a century was, in the ’twenties, reacted against either by the Spartan purification of a Satie or a Thomson (where from Copland’s ‘Americanism’), or by the laughing iconoclasm of Dada which-though primarily, like Surrealism, a painters’ and poets’ medium-was musically exemplified in certain works of Les Six. Now in the ’fifties complex systems were revived, literally with a vengeance by certain of the middle-aged (Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, etc.) whom fame had by-passed during the Coplandesque ’forties, and by the young in general. If Dada randomness was reanimated by John Cage, this time with a straight face, Copland himself now chose to become re-engaged in serial formality, also with a straight face, as though intimidated by those deadly serious composers half his age.

These ‘serious’ youngsters, in keeping with the times, were understandably more geared to practical concerns of science than to ‘superfluous’ considerations of Self Expression. When they wrote for the human voice (which they did less and less) it was treated not as an interpreter of poetry—nor even necessarily of words—but as a mechanism, often electronically revamped. Verse itself was no longer married to the music, or even framed by the music, but was illustrated through the music. And there was little use left for live singers.

Live singers themselves, at least those of formal training, weren’t interested anyway. Modern music was too difficult. Besides it had no audience, and neither any more did the classical song recital so beloved in the already distant years of Teyte and Lehmann. Young singers were lured away from lieder, from la mélodie, from their own American ‘art song’, until not one specialist remained. They had all been seduced by the big money and hopeful celebrity of grand opera.

Even today the few exceptions are European: Schwartzkopf, Souzay, Fischer-Diskau. A New Yorker like the accurate Bethenay Beardslee proves the rule, and certainly makes no money; while her excellent West-coast counterpart, Marni Nixon, now does movie dubbing and musical comedy. But most modern song specialists have awful voices and give vanity concerts for invited guests.

Meanwhile the wall separating so-called classical from so-called jazz was crumbling as each division sought somehow to join with and rejuvenate the other. Yet the need for ‘communication’, so widely lamented today, seemed to be satisfied less through music- any music than through other outlets, particularly movies. Movies, in becoming accepted as a fine art, turned out to be the one medium which could depict most articulately the inarticulateness of today, to intellectual and proletarian alike.

Myself and that handful of song-writing friends (Paul Bowles, Daniel Pinkham, William Flanagan, David Diamond) who began in the ’forties I consider as having come in at the end, as having attempted irrelevant resuscitation on a Creature with sleeping sickness. Most of us have written depressingly few songs lately, and those few emerged less from driving need than from ever-rarer commissions extended by die-hard specialists. Since there’s little money, publication, recording, performance, or even concern for songs, our youthful enthusiasm for that most gently urgent of mediums has, alas, pretty much dampened.

But if the once-thriving Art of Song has lain dormant since the war, indications now show it restirring in all corners of the world —which is not the same world that put it to bed. As a result, when Song really becomes wide awake again (and wide awake it shall be: the sleep has been nourishing), its composition and interpretation will be of a quite different fashion and for a quite different public.

Since big-time vocalists like Leontyne Price are, for economic reasons, no longer principally occupied with miniature forms, and since ‘serious’ composers like Stockhausen are, for scientific reasons, no longer principally occupied with human utterances (of which singing is the most primitive and hence the most expressive), and since a master like Stravinsky (who anyway was never famed for his solo-vocal works) seems only to be heard when seen, the artful tradition of great song has been transferred from élite domains to the Beatles and their offshoots who represent—as any non-specialised intellectual will tell you—the finest communicable music of our time. This music was already sprouting a decade ago through such innocent male sex symbols as Presley in America and Johnny Holiday in France, both of whom were then caricatured by the English in a movie called Espresso Bongo, a precursor of Privilege, about a none-too-bright rock singer. These young soloists (still functioning and making lots of money) were the parents of more sophisticated, more committed, soloists like Dylan and Donovan, who in turn spawned a horde of masculine offspring including twins (Simon and Garfunkel, the most cultured), quintuplets (Country Joe and The Fish, the most exotic), sextuplets (The Association, the most nostalgic), even septuplets (Mothers of Invention, the most madly satirical). With much less frequency were born female descendants such as Janis Joplin or Bobby Gentry (each of whom has produced one, and only one, good song—and who may be forgotten or immortal by the time this is read), and the trio of Supremes. Unlike their ‘grandparents’, all of these groups, plus some twenty other excellent ones, write their own material, thus combining the traditions of twelfth-century troubadours, sixteenth-century madrigalists, and eighteenth-century musical artisans who were always composer-performers—in short, combining all sung expression (except opera).

For this expression one must now employ (as I have been doing here) the straightforward word Song, as opposed to the misleading lieder which applies just to German repertory, or the pretentious art song which no longer applies to anything. (The only designation in English that ever really distinguished ‘serious art song’ from what used to be named ‘pop tune’ was recital song.) Now, since pop tunes as once performed by such as Billie Holliday and the Big Band during an epoch not even dormant but dead, are heard not only in night club and theatre but in recital and concert, and since those tunes are as good as if not better than—anything ‘serious’ being composed today, the best cover-all term is simply Song. The only sub-categories are Good and Bad. Curiously, it is not through the suave innovations of our sophisticated composers that music is regaining health, but from the old-fashioned lung exercise of a hundred gangs of kids.

That the best of these gangs should have come from England is un-important; they could have come from Arkansas. The Beatles’ world is just another part of the International Academicism wherein the question is to be Better rather than Different. It seems to me that their attraction has little to do with (as Hentoff implied) ‘what had here been hurting’, but on the contrary with enjoyment.

No sooner does Susan Sontag explain that the new sensibility takes a rather dim view of pleasure, than we discover her ‘new’ sensibility growing stale. Her allusion was to a breed of suspiciously articulate composers—suspicious because they spend more time in glib justification than in composition, and who denigrate the liking of music, the bodily liking of it. Indeed, one doesn’t ‘like’ Boulez, does one? To like is not their consideration; to comprehend is. But surely fun is the very soul and core of the Beatles’ musically contagious expression, because the Japanese and the Poles (who ignore the poetic subject matter of suicide and bombs) love them as much as their English-speaking fans; and surely that expression, by the very spontaneous timeliness of its nature, is something Sontag must approve of. The Beatles are antidote to the new (read ‘old’) sensibility, and intellectuals are allowed to admit, without disgrace, that they like this music.

The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good, i.e. in spite of those claims of the Under Thirties about their filling a new sociological need like Civil Rights and LSD. Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure. All other arts in the past decade have to an extent felt this renewal; but music was not only the last of man’s ‘useless’ expressions to develop historically, it is also the last to evolve within any given generation even when, as today, a generation endures a maximum five years (that brief span wherein ‘the new sensibility’ was caught).

The Beatles reign from the facile vantage that most of their competition (like most everything everywhere) is junk, and from the difficult vantage that their betterness is consistent: each of the songs from their last three albums is memorable. The best of these memorable tunes – and the best is a large percentage (Here, There and Everywhere, Good Day Sunshine, Michelle, Norwegian Wood, are already classics) compared to those by composers from great eras of song: Monteverde, Schumann, Poulenc. In this respect no other group or soloist comes near them. Their superiority, of course, is as elusive as Mozart’s over Clementi: both spoke skilfully the same tonal language, but only Mozart spoke it with the added magic of genius. Who will define such magic?

The public, in realising this superiority, is right as usual, though not as usual for the wrong reason as it was, say, ten years ago with Lolita. For while Lolita was accepted pretty much as just a sexy novel, the Beatles can legitimately be absorbed by all ages on all levels: one is allowed to dance or smoke or even have a funeral (playwright Joe Orton’s in London) while listening to this music. The same public when discussing the Beatles does not do so by relating them to others, but by relating them to aspects of themselves, as though they were the self-contained definition of an entire movement, or as though in their so-brief career they had (which is true), like Picasso or Stravinksy, already passed through and dispensed with several ‘periods’. For example, no sooner was the Sgt. Pepper album released than a quiver of argument was set off as to whether it was inferior to their previous album Revolver, or to Rubber Soul. The Beatles, so to speak, had sired themselves. But was Eleanor Rigby their mother or their daughter? was Michelle their grandmother or granddaughter? and was the She of She’s Leaving Home perhaps a sister, since she was the most recently born?, or a wife?

And what’s this one hears about their sound, those psychedelic effects produced from orchestration ‘breakthroughs’ presumably inspired by Paul McCartney’s leanings toward Stockhausen and electronics? Well, as first demonstrated in Tomorrow Never Knows and Strawberry Fields, the sound proves less involved with content than colour, more with glamour than construction. McCartney’s composition has not been affected by these ‘innovations’ which are instrumental tricks glossily surrounding the composition. Nor is any aspect of that composition itself more ‘progressive’ than the Big Bands of yore, or the Cool groups of yesterday. The harmony at its boldest, as with the insistent dissonances of I Want to Tell You, is basically from Impressionism and never more advanced than the Ravel of Chansons Madécasses. The rhythm gets extremely fancy, as in Good Day Sunshine, but nearly always falls within a 4/4 measure simpler than the simplest Bartok of fifty years ago. The melodies, such as Fixing a Hole or Michelle, are exquisitely etched, but evolve from standard modes—those with the lowered thirds and sevenths of the Blues. The counterpoint when strict, as in parts of She’s Leaving Home, is no more complex than Three Blind Mice, and when free, as in Got To Get You Into My Life, has the freedom of Hindemith—which is really Bach without the problems (the Supremes, not to mention instrumentalists like Ornette Coleman, go much farther out than the Beatles in this domain). As for the overall form, the songs of Sgt. Pepper are mostly less complicated than those of previous albums which, themselves, seldom adventured beyond a basic verse/chorus structure.

No, it is not in innovation that Paul McCartney’s originality lies, but in superiority. It remains to be seen how, if ever, he deals with more spacious forms. But of that miniature scene, Song, he is a modern master. As such he is the Beatles’ most significant member.

The lyrics, or rather the poems, of John Lennon have been psycho-analysed beyond recognition. They are indeed clever, touching, appropriately timely, and (which is most important) well mated with the tunes. Yet without the tunes, are they really all that much better than the words of, say, Cole Porter or Mark Blitzstein? Certainly Blitz-stein’s music succeeds despite the dated commentary of his words, and Porter’s songs remain beautiful with no words at all. We are often told (for instance by Korall in Saturday Review) that the Beatles are shouting about important things, but are these things any more pertinent than Strange Fruit yesterday or Miss Otis Regrets the day before? And even if they are, could that be what makes the Beatles good? While a film like Privilege portrays a rock singer so subversive he requires total control, the fact, as Gene Lees puts it, is that ‘thus far no rock group, not even the entire rock movement put together, has made a government nervous, as Gilbert and Sullivan did’. Even if, at a pinch, poems can be successfully political, no music can be proved to signify anything, neither protest, nor love, nor even bubbling fountains, nothing. John Lennon’s words do indeed expose not only current problems (A Day in the Life) but suggest solutions (Fixing a Hole); and the music –which is presumably set to the verse, not vice versa— works fine. But that music is stronger; and, like the slow and metreless Gregorian Chant which altered the ‘meaning’ of the rapid and ribald street chanties it stemmed from, Lennon’s words do or don’t matter according to how they’re sung.

With Billie Holliday it was not so much the song as her way with the song; like Piaf she could make mediocrity seem masterful. With the Beatles it’s the song itself, not necessarily their way – like Schubert whom even a monster can’t destroy. Michelle, for example, remains as lovely but becomes more clearly projected when performed by a ‘real’ singer like Cathy Berberian. Her diction (and the diction of nearly anyone) is better than theirs, at least to non-English ears. Even if the words did not come second, the Beatles oblige you to judge the music first, by virtue of their blurred diction.

As for George Harrison’s excursions into India, they seem the least persuasive aspect of the more recent Beatle language. Like McCartney with electronics Harrison seems to have adapted only the frosting; but in pretending to have adapted also the structure his two big pieces, Love You To and Within You Without You, end up not hypnotic, merely sprawling. Harrison’s Orientalism is undoubtedly sincere but sounds as fake as the pentatonicism of Country Joe and The Fish. Debussy, like all his cohorts, was profoundly influenced by the Balinese exhibits at the Paris World Fair of 1900 which inspired his Pagodes and Lindaraja. These pieces were as persuasive in the same genre as were the concert works many decades later by Henry Cowell or Harry Partch or even Peggy Glanville-Hicks. But whereas these sophisticated musicians without concern for ‘authenticity’ translated Eastern sound effects into Western jargons and then spoke those jargons with controlled formality, Harrison still flounders for faithful meaning where it just won’t work: good will and ‘inspiration’ will never provide him with the background – the birthright – which of necessity produced the music he would emulate.

Ringo Starr’s projects, when not involved with his comrades, are unknown, though he does seem to be learning to sing with what is quite literally an unutterable charm. Nor have I seen John Lennon’s war movie. Thus far, however, when the Beatles are a conjointly creative process (even more than as a performing unit) they are at their most interesting.

Just as today my own composition springs more from pristine necessity than driving inspiration (I compose what I want to hear because no one else is doing it), so I listen—sifting and waiting—only to what I need. What I need now seems less embodied in newness than in nostalgia: how many thrilling experiences do we get per year ​​anyway, after a certain age? Such nostalgia appears most clearly engendered by the Beatles. There isn’t much more to say, since structurally they’re not interesting to analyse; they’ve added nothing new, simply brought back excitement. The excitement originates (other than, of course, from their talent) in their absolutely innocent unification of music’s disparate components. The Beatles, so to speak, have brought fiction back to music, supplanting criticism. No, they aren’t new, but as tuneful as the ‘thirties with the same exuberance of futility that Bessie Smith employed. They have removed sterile martyrdom from art, revived the sensual. Their sweetness lies in that they doubtless couldn’t care less about these pedantic explications.

If (and here’s a big If) music at its most healthy is the creative reaction of, and stimulation for, the body, and at its most decadent is the creative reaction of and stimulation for the intellect; if, indeed, health is a desirable feature of art; and if, as I believe, the Beatles exemplify this feature, then we have reached (strange though it may seem as coincidence with our planet’s final years) a new and golden renaissance of song.

Ned Rorem was an American composer of contemporary classical music and a writer.