Mr Duck49's Beatles page

"And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make"

- from "The end" by The Beatles


On this Beatles page you will not find midi's. There are already many good pages of midi files. I have provided links to some at the bottom of this page. This page deals with technical musical knowledge that describes the makeup of certain Beatle songs and how these songs are related to each other. The ideas in this online paper are my own and as such I retain rights to them.

A DISCUSSION OF THEMATIC MATERIAL OF THE BEATLES

(C)1998 by James W. Cheek

When I discuss the motifs or themes in the songs, I'm going to put all of the songs in the key of A for simplicity. I am going to discuss the thematic material for the following songs.

The pentatonic scale in the key of A contains the following notes. A, C,D,E, and G. These notes are ordered as root, b3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th. In the older forms of the blues there is a device called a blue note which is a combination of the b3rd moving to the natural 3rd. This adds one extra note to the scale - that is in this case C#. So the altered scale can be considered to be A C C# D E G.

Consider the theme of A Hard Days Night. C# D C# E E E D E D E G E D E D C#

Now consider the motive from You Cant Do That. A A C# C# C# D D D E G C#

As you can see these two melodies are simply a rearrangement of the notes of the pentatonic with the natural third added and if you listen to these songs you will hear the similarity.

Taking the melody notes from I Feel Fine we get; E G D C# D C# D C# E G D C# D C# D C# D E E

Further, let us consider the thematic material from Shes A Woman. A octave A G D E C(C#) A It can be plainly seen that this too is the same material.

Finally let us consider the opening of the melody of Within You Without You. C# D E G There are also other examples of this repeated motive and variations of it such as George Harrisons lick in Strawberry Fields.

So what does all of this mean?

  1. That the Beatles got a lot of mileage out of a small bit of material.
  2. That part of their musical genius lies in that they were still able to make each song sound fresh and different even though the material was not so different.
  3. That you dont have to know a lot about something to create something of value.
Thank you for reading my paper. Please direct questions or comments to my email address.

This page is dedicated to Joe Gallian.

Try these links to other interesting Beatle sites.

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