Leonard Bernstein talks about the Beatles

[Music] i came to these songs naturally through my children but i have a sneaky feeling i would have heard and responded to them anyway after all they are part of music which is my world and a part that is so pervasive is to be almost inescapable many parents do try to escape this music and even forbid it on the grounds that it is noisy unintelligible or morally corruptive i have neither escaped nor forbidden it neither is a musician nor as a father i think this music has something terribly important to tell us adults and we would be wise not to behave like ostriches about it besides as i said i like it of course what i like is maybe five percent of the whole output which pours over this country like the two oceans from both coasts and it's mostly trash but that good five percent is so exciting and vital and may i say significant that it claims the attention of every thinking person okay let's get down to some specific songs to the music itself here is a cheery bit by the beatles [Music] now that's not just cheery it's also very unorthodox for one thing it suddenly if you noticed leaves out a beat so that an ordinary four beat measure becomes a three beat measure listen [Music] you see just one sudden bar of three among all those fours we never used to find that in pop music it's new and then just as suddenly there was that arbitrary change of key good day sort of tart pungent then there was that odd little cannon at the end a sort of [Music] round what a way to fade out in a new key a shifting meter a sudden new counterpoint but that's the beatles always unpredictable a bit more inventive than most you know a remarkable song of theirs called she said she said well in that song which goes nicely along in four there's again a sneaky switch to three-quarter time only this time it's not just for one bar but for a whole passage she said you don't understand what i said i said no no no you're wrong when i was a boy everything was right did you get it if not listen again to the beatles this [Music] one time three one two [Music] two three four and we're back again safely in the old four beat now the point i want to make is 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 and it's not only the beatles who make these inventions for instance pop generation has rejected that old chromatic sound as too sophisticated the sound of an older slicker generation the old-fashioned sound of the cocktail lounge this new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language relies more on the simple triads the basic harmony of folk music never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary limited harmonically rhythmically and melodically but within that restricted language all these new adventures are simply extraordinary only think of the sheer originality of a beatles tune like this one which again uses only the elementary resources of pop music i was alone i took a ride i didn't know what i would drive well that could almost be by schumann it's so expensive and romantic and notice how the range of the melody has been expanded most pop tunes have in the past been restricted to the range of an octave or so owing to the limitations of pop singers vocal ranges but not so anymore our pop generation reaches and spreads itself grasping at the unattainable and this is one of the things i like most about it the straining tenderness of those high untrained young voices and as always the beatles [Music] [Applause] [Music] of course whereas i may call that a straining after falsetto dreams of glory you may call it nothing but a breakdown in gender that same androgynous phenomenon of the pop scene that produces boys with long hair and ruffled shirts and you may be right but back to the music what else do i like about it i like the eclecticism of it it's freedom to absorb any and all musical styles and elements like old blues or a high bach trumpet [Music] that's penny lane or even a string quartet curious then i like the international and interracial way it ranges over the world borrowing from the ragas of hindu music [Music] then i like some of the new sounds purely as sound that are coming out of pop music the arresting impact of a consort of amplified guitars [Music] then i like the astonishing force

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Id: v32U0mjGz6g

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/misterfatmouth]

He certainly was a fan.

“I fell in the love with the Beatles’ music along with my children, two girls and a boy, in whom I discovered the frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation, the utterly fresh lyrics, the Schubert-like flow of musical intonation and the Fuck-You coolness of these Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse, on the Ed Sullivan Show of 1964.”

-Leonard Bernstein, Introduction to 'The Beatles' by Geoffrey Stokes (1980)

I'm not sure if it was this book or another for which he wrote a preface but I remember that he misheard the intro of 'I Saw Her Standing There' as "One, two, three, FUCK!" (his caps)