More NY Times Articles

[JoJo]

First, I remember this from an article that Valis posted, but this talks further of the planned "Beatles western" that never came to be. (next stop, the MMT bus)





Interesting five page article about Dick Lester:











Light article about Help!



Ringo: "We will continue to perform"



Beatles finances:



And an article mentioning something interesting, Paul's musical writing style, saying he "doesn't limit himself to conventional 4 and 8 bar melodic units." Obviously I ask the expert here, (you know who you are) is that something that changed "later"?



(The dates are part of the filenames)

[JoJo]

The Beatles, A study in paradox

From July 3, 1966:

www.jojoplace.org/Shoebox/NyTimes_misc/NYT7-3-66.pdf

A good read, they are already making noises about wanting to quit. This caught my eye, near the end:

Paul's mind is in a ferment. "People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great," he said, "and I must know what people are doing." He takes music lessons; he is facinated by the work of the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. He loves the plays of Alfred Jarry*. He would like to paint, to write, to compose, to direct films. He sees no limit to his own possibilities.

"I vaguely mind people knowing anything I don't know," he says.

* Came up with the concept of "pataphysical".

[TotalInformation]

His most celebrated article is "... wie die Zeit vergeht ..." (". . . How Time Passes . . ."), first published in the third volume of Die Reihe (1957). In it, he expounds a number of temporal conceptions underlying his instrumental compositions Zeitmaße, Gruppen, and Klavierstück XI. In particular, this article develops (1) a scale of twelve tempos analogous to the chromatic pitch scale, (2) a technique of building progressively smaller, integral subdivisions over a basic (fundamental) duration, analogous to the overtone series, (3) musical application of the concept of the partial field (time fields and field sizes) in both successive and simultaneous proportions, (4) methods of projecting large-scale form from a series of proportions, (5) the concept of "statistical" composition, (6) the concept of "action duration" and the associated "variable form", and (7) the notion of the "directionless temporal field" and with it, "polyvalent form".

Other important articles from this period include "Musik im Raum" ("Music in Space", 1958, Texte 1,152–75), "Musik und Graphik" ("Music and Graphics", 1959, Texte 1, 176–88), "Momentform" (1960, Texte 1, 189–210), "Die Einheit der musikalischen Zeit" ("The Unity of Musical Time", 1961, Texte 1, 211–21; Stockhausen 1962), and "Erfindung und Entdeckung" ("Invention and Discovery", 1961, Texte 1, 222–58), the last summing up the ideas developed up to 1961. Taken together, these temporal theories

suggested that the entire compositional structure could be conceived as "timbre": since "the different experienced components such as color, harmony and melody, meter and rhythm, dynamics, and form correspond to the different segmental ranges of this unified time" [Texte 1, 120], the total musical result at any given compositional level is simply the "spectrum" of a more basic duration—i.e., its "timbre," perceived as the overall effect of the overtone structure of that duration, now taken to include not only the "rhythmic" subdivisions of the duration but also their relative "dynamic" strength, "envelope," etc. . . . Compositionally considered, this produced a change of focus from the individual tone to a whole complex of tones related to one another by virtue of their relation to a "fundamental"—a change that was probably the most important compositional development of the latter part of the 1950s, not only for Stockhausen’s music but for "advanced" music in general.