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Courtesy of Daily Telegraph
A Canadian singer has become the first person in the world to graduate with a Masters degree in The Beatles.
Former Miss Canada finalist Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy, 53, was one of the first students to sign up for the course on the Fab Four when it launched at Liverpool Hope University in March 2009.
Twelve full-time students joined the Master of Arts course in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society that year and Mary-Lu is the first from her class to graduate.Dumbing down? Surely not!
And lo! Another article from the same organ:-
Graduate unemployment hits 15 year high
One-in-five students left university without a job last year as graduate unemployment soared to its highest level since the mid-90s.Graduate unemployment hits 15 year high
One-in-five students left university without a job last year as graduate unemployment soared to its highest level since the mid-90s.The Long and Winding Road, Help!
If she’s 53, I’m assuming she’s not doing it for a new career route.
She’s just doing a course in something she is interested in (and paying handsomely for it)
Yeah that’s all well and good…but WHY do they make these kind of subjects degrees? It sullies the work I put into getting my own degree in something useful. Why can’t there just be ‘a course’ in these topics. It belittles what a degree is about.
Who allows people to decide what subject is worthy of degree status? Soon there’ll be BA’s in womens shoes, MA’s about Kylie Minogue’s hotpants….
If the Masters degree had been about Johann Sebastian Bach, Choral Music in the Baroque Period, would our thoughts be any different? Just like the Beatles (well, Lennon & McCartney), Bach was very popular in his day, but not always lauded by the top guys (the religious commisioneres of music). His work obviously lasted well beyond his own lifetime. There are serious people who believe that Lennon/MacCartney will have the same degree of influence as Bach has had in classical music. The Masters degree is just jumping the gun by 250 years.
Howard Goodall chose Lennon/MacCartney as one of four 20th century greats of composition, specifically crediting them for their contribution to advances in
classical
music, in a documentary series made in 2007.
Now Howard Goodall is not just any old body in the world of classical music. His music has been commissioned to mark numerous national ceremonies and memorials, most recently, A Song of Hope for the National Holocaust Memorial Event in London’s Guildhall. He won a Classical BRIT award as Composer of the Year in 2009. His settings of Psalm 23 and Love divine are amongst the most performed of all sacred music in the UK and have featured on numerous platinum-selling CDs. In the Top-selling 100 Specialist Classical CDs of 2009, Goodall occupied the 1st, 4th and 9th positions. His 2009 Enchanted Voices, a setting of the Beatitudes, was no.1 in the Specialist Classical CD chart for 6 months.
He is recipient of the Sir Charles Grove Prize for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, and the Naomi Sargant Memorial Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in Broadcasting.
The music critic Anca Dumitrescu reviewing the documentary written and presented by Goodall about Lennon and McCartney said:
“No wonder Goodall draws a parallel between the Beatles and Mozart. The naturalness and simplicity of the Beatles’ music is reminiscent of Mozart’s tunes, in the same way as their early success emulated the Europe-wide success of Mozart’s early compositions.”
“Using a variety of musical excerpts combined with his own analysis, Goodall shows how the Beatles developed a more complex and elaborated musical composition. Like great classical musicians, they tapped into the existing musical heritage (whether Western classical or popular music, or Asian traditional music) in order to create a unique and inimitable musical style. Not only did they rescue and renew the Western clasical canon, which had reached a stalemate with the Avant-garde movement, but they also reconciled classical music with popular music into the Beatles symbiosis. “
“Goodall argues that the Beatles’ music affected both contemporary and later generations of musicians world-wide, irrrespective of their musical background or allegiance to the canon. Not a single musician composing after the Beatles could ignore the deep changes brought by the Beatles to Western music, just as no classical composer after Bach or Mozart could have ignored the innovations they brought to the classical tradition.”
Sometimes a degree is all about its subject matter, a lot of biology and medicine is like that. Sometimes it is more about the research, analysis and consequential creative production of new knowledge. Maybe this degree was as much about the educational techniques necessary for in-depth study.
Maybe not dumbing down after all.
Howard Goodall chose Lennon/MacCartney as one of four 20th century greats of composition .
Do you know who the others were?
I’d expect any or all of Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter
On the subject of Bach and The Beatles I do recall reading an article that said the latter’s use of Counterpoint in their melodies, whether deliberately intended or not, was very Bach-like and therefore by definition, outstanding
A specific example (apparently) is ‘Girl’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZshCZndWmco
with its "Contrapuntal refrain"
I don’t know what Counterpoint is, but I do know ‘Girl’ is a truly delicious toon
Good post MV
Howard Goodall chose Lennon/MacCartney as one of four 20th century greats of composition .
Do you know who the others were?
One out of threee- not bad. Cole Porter
Goodhall’s criteria for “great” was that they moved composing forward, did something different that other composers then followed. I’m sure that fans of other great composers of the 20th century (and some of my favourites); Puccini, Shostakovich, Jerome Kern, Miles Davis, George Gershwin, John Coltrane, et cetera might argue with his choice. But since his criterion was about a large element of creativity and leadership rather than pure excellence, I can accept his choices. Sorry about the lengthy text, but I thought there ought to be something about WHY he chose those three. The following is a selection from Goodhall’s own website.
COLE PORTER
Popular music had started the century, for the most part, bland, patronising and trite; the gauche, poor relation of classical music. Cole Porter, more than anyone, made it musically sophisticated, emotionally satisfying and subtle. Classical music, after several centuries as the undisputed master of the field, had decided to embark on a journey into dissonant, harsh, complex music that the mainstream audience couldn’t follow, far less enjoy. A vacuum was thus created and popular music seized the chance to take over classical music’s former role as the main provider of intelligent, sophisticated music for the general listener. No one did this with greater effect than Cole Porter. Classically-trained, he could have made a career in ‘art music’. Instead he chose to write in the popular field. His classical background was of great significance, though, because he enriched popular music precisely by using the sophisticated techniques of classical music. But he used them so cleverly that the pop audience didn’t find anything outside or beyond its taste. Porter wrote enduring hits that can stand comparison with the romantic songs of any composer – whether ‘classical’ or ‘popular’ – from any age, and the history of music in the twentieth century was to undergo a sea change.
BERNARD HERRMANN
He wrote some of the most famous film music of the twentieth century, from Citizen Kane to The Day The Earth Stood Still, Fahrenheit 451 to Taxi Driver. He is best known for his scores for Alfred Hitchcock, in particular the masterpieces Vertigo and Psycho. Herrmann completely transformed film music, dragging it out of its reliance on the sounds and textures of nineteenth century Vienna and into the modern age. He used new electronic sounds to score a series of landmark films, from science fiction to horror to suspense. In doing so, Herrmann not only weaned the film audience off the Romantic music it was most familiar with. He introduced many of the most ‘difficult’ elements of mid twentieth century music to a mass audience, who accepted dissonance and even atonality because Herrmann cleverly adapted them to the needs of the drama. Psycho is not only the most imitated and admired film music ever. Its harsh, screaming dissonance was the very sort of music audiences had been turning their back on in concert halls. Thanks to Herrmann, they lapped it up, now in a popular form. Bernard Herrmann was consistently, brilliantly inventive, and he influenced every film composer who came after him. But he also influenced classical concert music. In his works are the seeds of the modern musical movement of ‘minimalism.’ Herrmann himself was ambivalent about his film success. He never received the respect he craved in the classical world. But he did more than anyone else to broaden the musical tastes of the public. Not in the concert hall, but in the crucible of the twentieth century’s own most important art form – cinema.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
He was the composer who, more than anyone else in the twentieth century, embodied the trend we now call ‘cross-over.’ A brilliant musician and conductor, he wrote in the ‘classical’ style, but also wrote some of the best known ‘popular’ music of the century, from On The Town to West Side Story. In mid century you were expected to choose between the two styles, and they were seen as poles apart. Bernstein never accepted this – to him good music was good music – but he was forced to veer wildly between writing for the supposed opposites of popular and classical taste. In 1957 he came at the conundrum from a different direction and finally squared the circle. West Side Story had all the pizzazz and popular appeal of the Broadway musical. But the great advance was that the fun and energy of the musical was underpinned with the subtlety and shape of classical music Here was a hint as to the future direction of music, a way to get the best of both worlds. But not only did West Side Story revitalise the musical. By incorporating Latin American rhythms – most famously in America – Bernstein pointed the way forward for the most important musical trend of our own time – fusion. For him music could and should reflect all the world’s communities, nations and creeds. By his own mixing of European classical, pop and Latin styles, Bernstein may have prefigured the next important phase in the music of our own time – the fusion of Western and Asian styles.
Marginal Value: Smashing original reply re. Bach etc. Some very good points, not altogether sure that I agree with the conclusions but hard to argue with the points you made.
Can’t help wondering if The Beatles music (well, Lennon & McCartney’s music ) would have been quite so revered were it not for the input of George Martin. I’m a big Beatles fan and would argue that the writing of "pop" music is a separate discipline from that of "classical" music – and requires a specific talent. I wonder if some of the great classical composers would have been able to churn out lots of short, catchy melodies. Most probably they could, but they may not have been up to writing the lyrics to go with them. Cole Porter was indeed a master of this discipline.
The study of the Beatles / Lennon & McCartney might well be academically stretching but I would suggest that it’s not the kind of degree course that the taxpayer ought to be funding at this time.
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