Leonard Bernstein on the “sheer originality” of The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’
Leonard Bernstein was steeped in the heritage of classical music, the theatre and the more traditional popular music forms of George Gershwin and Cole Porter before him. He directed the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted at some of the world’s great concert halls.
But this didn’t isolate him from the pop music revolution happening around him at the height of his career. Quite the contrary. “I think this music has something terribly important to tell us,” he said in Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, the 1967 documentary he made with David Oppenheim. “We would be wise not to behave like ostriches about it.”
The pop musicians Bernstein seemed most taken with were The Beatles, whom he called “always predictable” and “a bit more inventive than most”. In fact, the great composer dedicated several minutes of his one-hour documentary to one Beatles album alone.
When discussing the group’s 1966 album Revolver in the wider context of pop and rock’s “highly limited musical vocabulary”, he gushed, “These new adventures are simply extraordinary.” He chose to focus on several of the album’s songs, in particular, to emphasise the range and versatility of The Beatles’ “inventions”.
For instance, he played the last section of Paul McCartney’s composition ‘Good Day Sunshine’, including its fade-out, to show that the piece is “not just cheery but also very unorthodox”. He points out that when transitioning to the fade-out, the piece suddenly changes the time signature and key and begins a harmonic round. “What a way to fade out: in a new key, a shifting metre, a sudden new counterpoint… But that’s The Beatles.”
He linked these sudden changes to a similar dynamic shift in the middle eight of ‘She Said She Said’, which he called “a remarkable song of theirs”. In this case, the “switch to 3/4 time” lasts “for a whole passage”.
Moving onto ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, he appeared blown away by the “sheer originality of a Beatles tune like this one”. Comparing the piece’s melodic range to the Romantic-era composer Robert Schumann, he admired how the tune “reaches and spreads itself, grasping at the unattainable” with McCartney’s high note. “And this is one of the things I like most about it,” Bernstein added. “The straining tenderness of those high, untrained young voices.”
He pointed to the “eclecticism” of Revolver as one of his other favourite things about it. It seemed as though The Beatles felt the “freedom to absorb any and all musical styles and elements”. He found the use of an elegiac string quartet in the pop single ‘Eleanor Rigby’ especially “curious”. And used the example of George Harrison’s ‘Love You To’ to praise “the international and interracial way” The Beatles’ music “ranges over the world, borrowing from the ragas of Hindu music”.
Leonard Bernstein would have felt an affinity for this eclecticism and openness to the music of other cultures. He himself borrowed from Cuban “guajira” rhythms in his famous composition ‘America’ from the musical West Side Story.
In the case of The Beatles, Bernstein was keen to stress that “such oddities as this are not just tricks or show-off devices. In terms of pop music’s ‘basic English’, so to speak, they are real inventions.”
Years later, in a Harvard lecture, he would go on to name three Beatles songs, including Revolver’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ as pop songs worthy of being counted among the “great works” of the 20th century. High praise indeed from one of the century’s finest composers.