Comments on: Seven

by: Mean Gene

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 03:27:38 +0000

No, the original assumption was not correct. It’s perhaps understandable to assume that as talented a musician as McCartney was classically trained, but that assumption is completely wrong.

Here’s a line from George Martin’s entry in Wikipedia:

“Most of the orchestral arrangements and instrumentation (as well as frequent keyboard parts on the early records) on Beatles records were made or performed by Martin, in collaboration with the band. (A good example of this was on “Penny Lane”, where Martin worked with McCartney on a piccolo trumpet solo: McCartney hummed the melody, and Martin wrote it down in music notation for the classically trained trumpeter.)”

So you have the “uneducated” musician actually creating the music, a classically-trained composer writing it down, and a classically-trained trumpeter playing the notes. McCartney is the most important person in the equasion, and he’s the one who learned his trade by forming a band with his mates and playing gigs in dive bars.

by: Cao

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 10:48:45 +0000

I don’t know how it ended up as far as their being able to write music, but the original assumption is correct. George Martin, considered the ‘5th Beatle’ was classically trained and had an influence on their arrangements.

by: GawainsGhost

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 23:16:39 +0000

Of course the melody originates in the head, and of course most musicians compose by ear. (The same is true for poets, by the way.) But unless you happen to be a prodigy like Mozart and can remember every note of a song upon hearing it once, you write it down. Like a poet, composition begins in the mind and then is committed to paper.
Committing the melody to paper allows one to develop the song, add harmony, make it more and more complex. I suppose that was what McCartney was doing on Band on the Run. Since only he and Linda and Denny Lane play instruments on that album, with some African musicians thrown in for some special instruments and background vocals (Howie Casey added the sax solos later), Paul plays the guitar, bass, drums, piano, and several other instruments. (Denny plays the lead guitar and flute and other instruments. Linda plays the synthesizer.) That kind of talent doesn’t come by picking up an instrument and teaching yourself how to play. It only comes from training and mastery of one instrument first. Once an artist has mastered one instrument, especially the piano, he can easily pick other instruments.
McCartney is simply too good a pianist to not have been trained. It’s as simple as that.

by: Mean Gene

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:05:29 +0000

What, you think I made all this up? There’s this exciting new tool that’s all the rage called the “internet”. Go to www.google.com and in the box type “paul mccartney can’t read notation”. You’ll get all sorts of links proving exactly what I said. I don’t know what Paul was scribbling on that poster–but it wasn’t treble clefs.

I saw a documentary about the Beatles a few years back, McCartney talked about it at length. He composed by ear, at the piano or strumming on a guitar. He said he used to be embarassed about it, but it might have actually helped him as a musician because he didn’t have a framework to adhere to, he could just let his imagination go and manually work out the music he heard in his head.

It’s not that unusual for a musician not to read sheet music. Elvis Costello couldn’t read a note for the first 20 years of his career, but when he did a project for the Brodsky Quartet he had to learn. He learned the way lots of musicians learn–they play and practice and experiment for thousands of hours and gradually they get better. Reading notation is certainly a good thing to know, but it isn’t a requirement for playing great music.

by: Y2Krashman

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:20:18 +0000

Have to add my 2 cents here. I just hate know-it-alls-that-know-nothing. Regard Vangelis. Yanni. I myself compose, and I have not been formerly trained. Musical tutors and musicians alike have coined my music as to being in the same vein as composer Michael Nyman. I was a film student, and would write music for not only my own films, but for the products of other students. I don’t profess to being comparable to McCartney. But, the melody originates in the head, not on the page. But you know that GawainsGhost don’t ya?

by: GawainsGhost

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:31:54 +0000

Well, I pulled out my old vinyl record of Band On The Run and looked at the poster insert which has photos Linda took of the recording sessions. Yep, just as I remembered, there’s a picture of Paul, sitting in front of a piano, smoking a cigarette, writing musical notation. Are we supposed to believe he’s writing musical notation he can’t read? That’s even more ridiculous than believing he just sat down in front of a piano one day and taught himself how to play, making it up as he went along. This is sophistry.
But it’s just like another widely held myth–that Elvis couldn’t play a musical instrument. People who believe such tripe say, “Oh, Elvis, yeah, great singer but he couldn’t play an instrument.” Then listen to his version of the Righteous Brother’s Unchained Melody and ignore the fact that it’s Elvis who’s playing the piano! Those are complex melodies he’s playing while singing at the same time. What, are we to believe that Elvis taught himself the piano? No, he was trained. As was McCartney.
It is impossible for anyone to play the piano with such mastery, much less to write music on the piano, without training. To believe otherwise refelcts nothing but a complete lack of understanding of music.

by: GawainsGhost

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:08:35 +0000

I don’t believe that. No one who cannot read musical notation can write music of the quality McCartney writes.

by: Mean Gene

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:59:59 +0000

While I’ll agree that McCartney wrote some of the best songs of all time, he wasn’t a classically-trained pianist. In fact, to this day he famously can’t read musical notation. It’s always been part of his mythos, that he wrote some of the greatest, most-popular songs of all time and he can’t read a note.

by: GawainsGhost

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:52:57 +0000

You are right on about the principles of classicism and the absence of it contemporary music.
Paul McCartney was trained as a classical pianist; he never even picked up a guitar until he was 19. Through his training he learned musical structure, rhythym, melody, and harmony, and went on to write some of the most beautiful songs ever recorded.
Today, most artists, and I use the term loosely, are not classically trained and do not even study music. As a result, their talent does not extend beyond scratching a record and cursing women.
We see the same phenomenon in the public schools, which abandoned the classical liberal arts–grammar, logic, rhetoric, literature, mathematics, science, and art–in favor of “progressive” education–whole language, emotion, grievance, pulp, new math, pseudoscience, and smut–decades ago.
The end result of whole language learning is that the schools have produced two or three generations of Calibans: “You taught me language, and my benefit on’t is, I know how to curse” (The Tempest).