Post by LUCY on Aug 10, 2004 19:49:56 GMT
"The `Magical Mystery Tour', an album title of the Beatles, could reflect this journey on a magic carpet.
The Beatles had began like Elvis Presley with boogie-woogie and be-bop adopted from Fats Waller and other performers in harmonic progressions such as `Hound Dog'. This was servedup like hot potatoes in the late 1950s by music distributors. In short, using White American performers, music distributors sold Black American staples.
After a repackaging enterprise far across the breadth of the Atlantic in Liverpool, the Beatles turned their electric guitars and seemed to stumble into something else with manager Brian Epstein - into music academy.
Britain was historically known to be long on shop-keepers (even military man Napoleon has a quip) and on puns, immortalised by Shakespeare,
At the same time the country was known to be short on composers.
Howver, the electric guitars of the Beatles roamed into Slav music in academic archives. The English words in their song `Those Were the Days' were set note for note to the Russian traditional ballad `Dorogoj dlinnoju'. Only the tempo was altered from the original 6-beat, the same as in the gypsy airs `Two Guitars' and `Dark Eyes' (the rhythm resembles the later `Blue Danube' waltz, which Strauss made famous in Vienna.) Most Russian ballads are pitched in minor key (in contrast to the episodic minor transition, say in, in time-honoured English favourites such as `Ash Grove' or `Greensleeves'.)
From the `Swan Lake' ballet, the haunting harmonic progression of Tchaikovsky's main theme became for Les Beatles the main chorus in their song `All my loving.'
Then there was Rimsky-Korsakov's famed `Song of the Guest from India' in the opera `Sadko'. The song is based on a wafting between major and minor scales because the composer's objective was to let India dialogue with Russian audiences (he intended a multicultural event.) In the repertoire of Les Beatles , a waltz rhythm was introduced and the problem of song title resolved by calling the melody `Norwegian Woods'. However, it remains a give away. In the mind of a musicologist still constrained in the 1960s by `Britannia Rule the Waves', Norse would represent multiculturalism too.
So whether John Lennon and lads took their `Magical Mystery Tour' together with consultant musicologists from OUTSIDE the erstwhile British Empire is a question for us to resolve. "
www.geocities.com/worldcityessays/worldcityessays_7-note.htm
