Howard Goodalls 20th Century Greats - The Beatles (Part 2)

creepy looking walrus there....

I knew all this information by the time I was 12 years old!

i was laughin hard at 3:52, since i sound like that, too! and i know im wrong. guess what, that's why i love these videos, have lot to learn

god, I was 13 when I first saw this and immediately fell in love with the beatles, I remember teaching myself I am the walrus on the piano.

Maybe the commenter meant that finding such techniques and development in their music is pretentious. That's how I read it.

MrBronson66 is absolutely right- Goodall is an expert in his field (harmony, melody, rhythm etc), so it's depressing to read that this clear and simple attempt to explain how the Beatles employed such an amazing variety of harmonic tricks in their music could be dismissed as pretentious. It isn't. Although using a word that you don't know the meaning of or cannot be arsed to learn how to spell properly is.

I don't think Goodall is suggesting that the Beatles had the expressed intention of "rescuing western tonality" or whatever; they just did it through their ambition to write great and original songs. Sure they probably weren't aware of words like "modulation" or "chromaticism" at the start of their career but they knew what these things were and how to use them in their songs. Don't be put off by the terminology, he's still talking about the same stuff: music!

I once read a George Harrison article in a guitar magazine which had some of the most interesting notes on chordal theory I've ever read. Trust me, they were well aware what they were doing, they were also extremely interested in the avant-garde classical music, and later on combined the two. Yes they had all the other aspects too, but what was so amazing about them was how they combined the complex theoretical ideas with the impact of a pop song to make something so original

I once read an article by George Harrison on chordal theory and scales that was one of the most interesting articles I've ever read on the subject. They definitely knew what was going on, even if that knowledge came later in their career