“There is an interesting paradox in The Beatles’ music. Despite their extreme stylistic variety, their songs seem always to bear a distinctive identity,” says musicologist Dario Martinelli, a professor at KTU Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. His recent book, written together with music producer Paolo Bucciarelli, looks at The Beatles’ legacy through cross-disciplinary lenses.
Martinelli describes the “beatlesque” phenomenon as something that we hear and recognise in the tunes by other acts, inspired (like XTC, Elliott Smith or Oasis), paying homage or making parodies (like Utopia, Vinyl Kings, The Rutles) of The Beatles: “Sometimes it is that familiar four-in-a-bar piano accompaniment, sometimes it is the vocal harmonies, sometimes it is a baroque-styled solo played with a wind instrument.”
Through an investigation of the work of the Fab Four, along with George Martin and his team, this book aims to shed light on how studio activity, combined with the band’s creativity, shaped the group’s eclectic but unique sound – and therefore that rich, varied and yet always recognisable style.
“To put it in simpler terms: if a song like “Penny Lane”, with that familiar four-in-a-bar piano accompaniment, those vocal harmonies, that baroque-sounding trumpet solo and the rest, sound intrinsically and unmistakably beatlesque, it is because of the marriage-in-heaven between compositional and studio work,” explains Martinelli.
In Chapter 2, “Style and Sound”, the authors discuss the notions of sound and style and summarise the various sources that forged the style of The Beatles, from rock to roll to experimental music, from Chuck Berry to Bob Dylan, from Motown to Pet Sounds.
While written in mostly academic style, this book is however a unique case within the vast Beatle-related literature. Not a day-by-day diary of studio activity or a song-by-song analysis (the task already covered, and remarkably, by the likes of Lewinsohn, MacDonald and others), The Beatles and the Beatlesque is rather an investigation on the aesthetics, the semiotics and the philosophy behind that fascinating path that goes from the creation to the production of the Fab Four’s repertoire.
