Despite occasionally tenuous links to the Fab Four, Changing My Scene: Art Music and the Beatles, a three-CD set of non-pop music (classical, avant-garde, electronic, jazz, comedy) that formed the cultural backdrop to their work and especially the studio experimentation in the second half of their career, is fascinating. It’s a vast collection, with a wealth of interesting and often beautiful music that anyone might enjoy. However, from the point of view of the framing concept, the more familiar you are with the work of the Beatles, the more echoes you will hear in it. Little of the music dates from the ‘60s, and yet those who know the Beatles’ recordings well will hear all kinds of details, connections or even just atmospheres that recall their work. Scholarly liner notes put it all into the context of specific Beatles recordings and reproduce key quotes from contemporary sources.
The three discs are broadly thematic, but with lots of overlaps. Disc one features avant-garde experimental composers like John Cage, Luciano Berio, Stockhausen and Edgar Varèse. There are also the less alien Sibelius and Chopin, plus some figures outside what was then called ‘serious music,’ like famed writer of film scores Bernard Herrmann and the electronic pioneer Delia Derbyshire. The second disc focuses on major modernist composers like Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Holst and Erik Satie, while the third features jazz, Indian traditional music and a bit of poetry and comedy. For those with a taste for and knowledge of modern, non-pop music, big swathes of the set may be familiar; compositions like Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring are cornerstones of modern music rather than obscurities. Yet in this context, their strange beauty is reaffirmed.
Listening to the album in order is a profoundly disorienting experience. The opening track is a lovely, short and lucent performance by the classical guitarist/lutenist Julian Bream of English renaissance composer Robert Johnson’s lute music. Bream was a major musical star of the ‘60s, as was Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose 13-minute “Gesang der Jünglinge” follows. The piece is an apparently shapeless but highly evocative composition featuring disembodied children’s voices, sometimes singing, sometimes chanting, which skitter in and out of hearing amid bubbling electronic eddies. It’s immediately reminiscent, not only of “Revolution 9,” but of the unearthly background noises in “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the run-out groove of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The comparison is heightened by the sequencing, where Stockhausen is sandwiched between Bream’s harmonious lute performance and an even more abstract John Cage piece, “Fontana Mix.” “Revolution 9“ has often been cited to accuse the Beatles of dabbling amateurishly in a world they didn’t understand, but it seems in every way comparable with “Fontana Mix,” which is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. Contrastingly, an excerpt from the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’ “Metastasis” is thrilling, both for its dramatic, proto-drone texture and because it seems so tantalizingly related to “A Day in the Life” and yet so timeless. Meanwhile, the babbling voices of Luciano Berio’s homage to James Joyce feel almost stereotypically 1960s, even though it dates from the ‘50s. Mahler’s “In ruhig fliessender Bewegung: Symphony No. 2 in C minor” feels unabashedly romantic, as it’s recognizable as orchestral music. In this modernist company, the appearance of a piece by Bach — “Allegro assai” from the Brandenburg Concertos — should perhaps feel incongruous, yet the almost squeaky piccolo trumpets immediately bring “Penny Lane” to mind.
The album feels oddly like the soundtrack to a dream about the Beatles that the band itself is mysteriously absent from. Sometimes the transitions are jarring, especially the one from Herrmann’s music for the murder scene in Psycho to Delia Derbyshire’s beautifully delicate “Time On Our Hands,” which then leads more organically on to Daphne Oram’s mysterious “Ursa Major.” More often they feel oddly apt, disc one ending with Chopin’s meditative “Nocturnes Op.15 No.3 in G Minor: Lento” followed by “Looking Glass Insects,” an excerpt from a dramatization of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass that features the actress Jane Asher, Paul McCartney’s mid-‘60s girlfriend who, with her family was a significant influence on his artistic life.
At first glance, the second disc, dominated by the work of various well-known composers, seems less eclectic and random, but it reflects the Beatles’ work in unexpected ways. Stravinsky’s jaunty “Royal March” is heavily redolent of the spirit of the band’s output during the psychedelic era, silly and nostalgic, where American psychedelia was more often blues-rock inflected and lent itself to extended jamming. The largest part of the disc is taken up with Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. Beautiful though it is in its own right, now and then a passage or even just a chord will unexpectedly resonate with something from the Beatles canon. To turn from Stravinsky to disc three and Nat King Cole’s gorgeous “Nature Boy” is far less jarring than expected, as the song’s lush orchestration forms a stylistic bridge between the classical and Beatles world. The same is true of some of the jazz included, though in some cases it’s more that the artists were similarly expanding the scope of popular music than any direct kinship with the Beatles’ records.
Both the Ornette Coleman Quartet’s blithely unorthodox reading of “Embraceable You” and the John Coltrane Quintet with Eric Dolphy’s powerful version of “My Favorite Things” hint at the kind of flexibility that the Beatles brought, in their different way, to the idea of the pop song. By comparison with Coleman and Coltrane, British jazz revival trumpeter Humphrey Lyttleton and his Band’s “Bad Penny Blues,” though enjoyable, seems hopelessly retrograde — except that it was the musical starting point for “Lady Madonna,” providing one of the most identifiable moments of Beatles inspiration on the album. From there on, the anthology becomes far more scattershot, though no less relevant. The three Indian pieces, Ravi Shankar’s “Kafi-Holi (Spring Festival Of Colors)” and “Raga Marwa” (1948 78rpm version) and the excerpt of Ali Akbar Khan’s “Raga Pilu Baroowa” are just as prescient for the Beatles’ work as the jazz tracks. Like Coltrane’s work, they feel timeless, despite the ’48 Ravi Shankar recording, which feels relevant to the late ‘60s. Its hauntingly mysterious atmosphere, heightened by the shortcomings of the 1940s production, and its moments of near dissonance make it feel like something that could be found in a dusty corner of The White Album. That’s not coincidental, instead illustrating the extent to which the Beatles’ taste as much as their music shaped the era. Ali Akbar Khan doesn’t have the profile of Ravi Shankar in the West. Still, he was an important figure for bringing Indian classical music to the West, and his recording was presumably chosen for its striking similarities to George Harrison’s “Love You To” and “Within You, Without You.” It’s gloriously atmospheric, making the transition to the Goons’ silliness even more jarring.
The Goons, and their characters Bluebottle and Eccles (portrayed by Peter Sellars and Spike Milligan) were an influence on the Beatles, but one that seems far more relevant to the fast-talking nonsense of their Beatlemania-era press conferences and Christmas records than the studio years from ’66 onwards. The problem with the Goons’ version of “Unchained Melody,” despite being produced by George Martin and therefore definitely of Beatles interest, is that it’s excruciatingly unfunny, though presumably not at the time. Humor of a far fresher kind is inherent in the perfect poise of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli’s beautiful “Tears.” For its last section, the compilation opts for a disjointed but rewarding White Album-like randomness. One of Albert Ayler’s more punishing experiments with saxophone tones sits between an enlightening recording of Aldous Huxley discussing the history of mind-altering substances and a typically overripe reading by Dylan Thomas of his poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Proceedings draw to a delicate, dramatic and romantic close with a harmonious excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet: Fantasy Overture.”
Large parts of Changing My Scene don’t really cohere, but the eclectic nature of the Beatles’ influences is the whole point. It’s an eye-and-ear-opening glimpse into the rich and varied musical backdrop that informed their most experimental work and captures in an oblique way that brief period when the world’s foremost mainstream rock band was also its foremost alternative act.
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