Teaching the Beatles

Paul Jenkins, Hugh Jenkins, Paul O Jenkins, Hugh Jenkins, Paul Jenkins, Paul O Jenkins, Hugh Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351333320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Teaching the Beatles is designed to provide ideas for instructors who teach the music of the Beatles. Experienced contributors describe varied approaches to effectively convey the group's characteristics and lasting importance. Some of these include: treating the Beatles' lyrics as poetry; their influence on the world of art, film, fashion and spirituality; the group's impact on post-war Britain; political aspects of the Fab Four; Lennon and McCartney's songwriting and musical innovations; the band's use of recording technology; business aspects of the Beatles' career; and insights into teaching the Beatles in an online format.

Interdisciplinary approaches

1 I’m looking through you: experiments in learning and the Beatles

Gordon R. Thompson

Parallel to Paul McCartney’s declaration at the beginning of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it was over twenty years ago that I offered my first Beatles-themed class. Student requests for courses on popular music meshed with my goal of engaging them in the curriculum, but I also wondered how my colleagues would react. At a previous institution, I had been warned against undermining the ‘true’ purposes of a music department, with the suggestion that questioning the sanctity of the western canon amounted to insubordination.¹ Nevertheless, having students at Skidmore bring me bootleg recordings of the Beatles and relishing their eagerness to discuss the music indicated to me that a wellspring of interest begged tapping. In deciding to bring the Beatles into the classroom, the story of this band and its music began to seep into my teaching and led me to explore how I taught.

Three factors informed my decision. First, Skidmore College (in Saratoga Springs, New York) is a four-year liberal arts undergraduate institution where students had clearly demonstrated an interest in the subject. They were familiar with Beatles recordings through their parents and grandparents, but they had only a vague idea who these musicians were and what made the music special. They wanted to know more or, as one student told me, he wanted to know why they were so important. Second, with students interested in the subject, the task of getting them to embrace core liberal arts educational goals—critical thinking and effective oral and written communication—found a happy vehicle. They wrote essays on something that had more relevance for them than old white guys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; moreover, students could see themselves in the Beatles and their teenaged followers in the sixties. Third, like our Liverpudlian protagonists in the studio, I began to see the classroom as a place to creatively explore pedagogy.

The Beatles Seminar

The path that led me to bring the Beatles into the classroom began somewhat serendipitously. My doctoral research had focused on South Asia and I taught classes exploring Indian classical music (and in particular the role of culture in patronage), as well as related ethnomusicological topics such as a class surveying musical traditions from around the world; however, an opportunity unexpectedly arose to teach in London in the spring of 1996. A dean asked if I could develop a course taking advantage of this location and suggested a couple of fairly obvious choices.

Ethnomusicologists have long considered the importance of cities in the fostering of music traditions (e.g., Nettl’s Eight Urban Musical Cultures). After some thought about what might attract students, and also inspired by the announcement that a ten-part video history of the Beatles would be shown in November 1995, I hit upon the idea of a course that would survey sixties British rock and pop.

Collecting recordings and books and developing lectures, I began the task of understanding the remarkable development of this music culture, and my classes at Regent’s College forced me to put this material into a coherent story. The preparations revealed a paucity of critical sources and spurred my own research and writing. (See Thompson, Please Please Me.) The Beatles played a significant role in launching British popular music from a largely domestic market onto an international stage; but it would be another year before I would offer a class that focused on them alone.

My first opportunity to explore the Beatles as a subject in a Skidmore classroom came in the form of a topics seminar in the spring of 1997. The students were mostly juniors, although a few seniors and sophomores also found their way onto the class list. As I planned our course of study, I began to realise that the popularity of the Beatles had a particular pedagogic advantage: a wealth of relevant materials in the form of recordings, biographies, and other publications.

Given that developing critical-thinking skills in our students stands as one of the central goals of a liberal arts education, having them compare biographies and analyses would be one way to start a conversation about authorship and the reliability of sources. What did an author bring to their work? What was their background? What did they use for sources? How convincing were their research, arguments, and writing? Writings on the Beatles offered a wide variety of quality and questionable examples. I began by outlining a series of topics that students could compare across sources. With twelve weeks of classes (plus two weeks of individual student paper presentations), I needed around 96 topics, including musical analyses.

Over the next few years, the seminar’s population ranged between 16 and 20 students that I subdivided into groups of four or five. Each group had the responsibility of tasking individual members and organising how the team would collaborate in the presentation of their findings. Seminar meetings lasted an hour and twenty minutes, which meant a little less that twenty minutes per team presentation, including the time I needed at the beginning of each session to discuss assignments and schedule.

The first time I led the course, we focused on some of the best-known published current sources on the Beatles. These included biographies by Hunter Davies, Allan Kozinn, and Philip Norman, as well as Mark Lewisohn’s chronology, and the musical transcriptions by Fujita, Hagino, Kubo, and Sato. We later added Walter Everett’s two-volume The Beatles as Musicians for analyses of the music and the book and the video series, The Beatles Anthology.² And, as the Internet emerged and expanded, discussions about the reliability of online sources became a seminar topic, too.

I offered the seminar every other year, slightly modifying the topics and structure each time, always finding different ways to address important elements of student learning. For example, to address writing skills, each student submitted short (400-word) biweekly essays, a length that allowed close reading and return within a few days.³ This structure produced clear results with student writing understandably improving over the semester.

Beatlemore Skidmania

As with many other campuses, the September 11, 2001 attacks deeply affected us, especially with a significant number of our students coming from the New York City area. For the Beatles Seminar, the death of George Harrison at the end of that November provided an additional sombre note. Mid-semester, some of the students made a simple request: could they put on a concert? As a department, we regularly linked classroom topics and concert programmes, so the question did not arise randomly.

I agreed to help them navigate their way through the administrivia, given that ours would not be a traditional department-approved ensemble. Unsurprisingly, we immediately ran into a scheduling obstacle: the department’s concert calendar had no official time slots available in the closing weeks of the semester. I did, however, see one empty date: a study day between the end of classes and the beginning of exams when nothing official was supposed to happen that could distract students. We posted no flyers or email announcements, but word of mouth meant that the hall was far from empty on Saturday, 15 December, 2001.

I also soon learned that I needed to take a larger role organising the event than I had originally anticipated. Student soloists and bands made up six of the seven programme entries with a faculty–staff band playing our own three-song set while anchoring the finale. The repertoire of student favorites ranged from rock tunes (e.g., ‘Taxman’, ‘Drive My Car’, and ‘Day Tripper’) to ballads (e.g., ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘For No One’, and ‘Blackbird’).

We ran a sound-check in the afternoon to anticipate problems, of which there were many, beginning with a system that had clearly not been set up to deal with rock bands.⁴ Faculty members also joined one singer-guitarist to provide backing vocals and emotional support for his performance of ‘Across the Universe’. Taking the model of a music-hall performance, we included the campus improvisatory comedy troupe (the Ad Libs) to offer short skits while musicians set up equipment. The concert closed with everyone participating in a performance of ‘All You Need Is Love’, a precedent that has made this song the most common closer of the past seventeen years.

Given the mood of the country and the campus in those months of 2001, the concert had somewhat of a cathartic effect on the students and those who attended. For the students, however, the concert legitimised their musical efforts and provided opportunities to experiment with music they had been listening to for most of their lives.

The next year, I did not offer the Beatles Seminar, but some of the students who had participated in the 2001 concert (and a few who had not) asked if we could do it again. As in the previous year, the Music Department’s ensembles and student recitals had previously booked all of the preferred dates and we were officially limited to either the weekend before Thanksgiving or unofficially to the study day before exams. Again, we plotted a clandestine concert, but this time around the idea of doing an album_ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. If we were going to do a concert of Beatles music separate from the seminar, I hoped a theme would push students to learn new material and not just the songs they knew.

Given the scope of that album (thirty-five years old in 2002), we had to be creative in how we pulled together some of the performances, which proved to be an added educational bonus. In addition to the usual student bands attempting close covers, an a cappella group sang an arrangement of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and a student actor gave a dramatic rendering of ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ with a turntablist adding clips of three celebrated Mr. Ks: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Nikita Khrushchev. We also included period-related music in the form of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (sung operatically by a soprano and a baritone) and a brass quintet performing an arrangement of ‘I Am the Walrus’.

The event remained unofficial, but this time students made and posted flyers around campus, and faculty members told friends in the local community who also now turned up, such that in our second unofficial year we came close to filling the hall. The concert’s popularity in the Saratoga region and on campus continued to grow to the extent that by the fourth year people began arriving hours before the show, staking out seats while we were still doing the sound check. In 2009, over 120 musicians performed in a hall that officially held 220, but that had over 300 in the audience. Fortunately, the fire marshal never closed us down.

The concert’s reputation led to people calling the department secretary to find out the date and time, such that she began listing the show as ‘Beatlemania’ on our concert schedule, a name that I modified to ‘Skidmore Beatlemania’ to avoid suggesting any connection between our performance and the Broadway show. In 2005, I further distanced us by transposing the syllables, calling our production ‘Beatlemore Skidmania’ (or sometimes just ‘Beatlemore’). We continued to perform on the Saturday before exam week until 2008, when a dean finally forced us to find another date. No one else had wanted the weekend before the Thanksgiving break, largely because neither department ensembles nor student recitals were quite ready. It became ours.

The change in the date ultimately had advantages, particularly in the concert’s role as a vehicle for fund raising. No longer was the concert simply an opportunity to explore the music; students now were participating in a service-learning experiment.

In January 2010, Skidmore opened the Zankel Music Center with classrooms, offices, studios, rehearsal spaces, and importantly a 600-seat concert hall with wonderful acoustics and, notably, a box office. The concert had always been free, but now for the first time we began selling tickets for a nominal fee online and, when we announced the concert that September, the concert sold out within a day. So we added a second concert. Eventually, because students often waited until the last minute to decide whether they would attend, we reserved a third concert specifically for the Skidmore community.

Realising that this now very well-known regional concert that had grown very big was about to get bigger, I saw an opportunity to introduce students to topics directly relevant to the performing arts. In addition to my freshman seminar reading about the relationships between performers and audiences, we also discussed how to plan and run a concert. They learned how to recruit performers, to structure a programme, to market and advertise, etc., and in learning about Beatlemore’s history as an educational experience, they hit on a new idea: turn it into a benefit concert.

For the first deca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Interdisciplinary approaches
• Traditional approaches
• Pedagogical approaches
• Appendix: The Beatles: will you read my book?
• Index