INTRODUCTION
WHAT DO THE BEATLES and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra have in common? Besides high musical quality, both groups relied on collaboration to an extraordinary degree. Their collective methods were the primary reason for the high quality, which just seems to loom larger and larger as the decades pass. One could even say that they were the two greatest collaborations in music history.
Ellington misled the public by exaggerating his own role, keeping collaborators out of sight and off the credits on record labels. Today the situation is much clearer than it used to be, thanks to research on Billy Strayhorn and increasingly honest assessment of the entire phenomenon. To emphasize collaboration runs counter to Ellington’s elite status. His exceptional standing has been strong for a long time, but at what cost? Today more value is placed on collaborative creativity than used to be the case, so the time may be right for recognizing Ellington as a genius collaborator.
The Beatles, on the other hand, embraced a communal image. Lennon and McCartney grew so close that they decided to sign their compositions jointly, no matter who wrote what. The movie A Hard Day’s Night cemented the image of a tightly knit ensemble, “the boys” bantering around like a family of brothers—like the Marx Brothers, to whom they were compared—with the same haircuts and suits, the same weird accents, the dry humor, and the tight rock-and-roll fun. Deliberate obfuscation about collaboration did not come until after the group broke up, the source being Lennon, who aggressively puffed up his own role. Though he later acknowledged the distortions (“I was lying”), his revisionist account was massively influential. More than a few found it agreeable to identify the politically aware innovator as the Beatle worth glorifying the most. Some of the finest writers on the Beatles’ music were misled into thinking that the two principals collaborated as composers only during the early years.
The first step toward understanding how these two bands worked is to locate their methods within the African American musical vernacular. Jazz had its origins in music-making by former slaves and their descendants. The funky wind bands of uptown New Orleans emerged as a stylized and professionalized transformation of interactive music-making. By the 1950s those connections seemed remote, as musicians explored how far and in how many directions they could take improvisational virtuosity. As if on cue, rock emerged to reset a participatory paradigm. The debt of rock and roll to music-making in the African American church was obvious to insiders. Rock and roll differed from early jazz in featuring the electric guitar instead of the wind instruments of New Orleans, and in being a song idiom, blended with dance music. Yet its origins in communal music-making were similar.
Ellington and the Beatles worked at the nexus of vernacular practice, where creativity from all participants was welcomed, and commercial pop, which required a single-minded focus on compositions that can be filed for copyright. You could say that these groups shared an ability to impose compositional vision on collaborative music-making. Or to put that in a slightly different way, they each found ways to tap into creative fields opened up by collaboration and to use that resource in the service of compositional definition.
In his landmark study Art Worlds, sociologist Howard Becker demonstrates how it takes a village to create a work of art—any artwork, not just the collectively generated compositions of Ellington and the Beatles. Becker begins with a story about novelist Anthony Trollope, who depended on a butler to wake him up, bring him coffee, and get him to his desk by 5:30 a.m. every day, so he could knock off a handsome chunk of prose before breakfast. Trollope would not have been able to do what he did without his butler. The story is a small demonstration of a universal truth—what Buddhists call interdependence—as it plays out between internal creativity and external conditions. The dynamics between the two are infinite. Becker argues that all art is collaborative in some sense, that it is virtually impossible to say where creative roles end and where the roles of passive “supporters” begin. Still, there are distinctions. We could even imagine quantifying them. If Trollope’s butler tips him off to a character or a theme, then the meter goes up a notch. Ellington and the Beatles light up the far end of the spectrum. Their results simply could not have been achieved by a solitary composer, no matter how much coffee he drinks or how early he gets out of bed.
What I am addressing is relationships designed to promote collective creativity. The different arts follow different trends, and they change according to context. Painting workshops, for example, were well established in Renaissance Italy. A team of artists led by Domenico Ghirlandaio, including his young apprentice Michelangelo, set to work on elaborate frescoes for the church Santa Maria Novella, in Florence. Ghirlandaio’s participation would have been spelled out in a contract: the patrons did not want him turning over key features of design and execution to anyone else. If a helper got too good, he had little choice but to break off on his own. The system was conceived in terms of design (articulated through a drawing) and execution (the painted realization of the drawing), and the master painter was expected to make the design and render the primary figures. This resembled a composer handing carefully crafted products of creative genius to performers, whose job it is to follow directions.
Becker highlights the serialized market for novels in nineteenth-century London, where books unfolded chapter by chapter, month after month. The product was heavily monitored by the businessman’s close readings of sales, something like a record company tracking the Top 40, except that in this case the feedback determined a product that had already begun but was not yet finished. Editorial intervention in literature varies a great deal. Literary works positioned on the artistic side of the social spectrum may benefit from creative collaboration, though that often remains hidden. The large investments required for mass production mean that corporate control is taken for granted. In music this kind of intervention entered surprisingly late. A strong role for editors did not emerge until around the mid-twentieth century, as recording studios started to manage their products with an iron grip.
What we find with Ellington and the Beatles is an unusually strong ebb and flow of ideas. The collaboration is face to face (rather than sequential) and it is music-music (rather than music-dance, music-literature, and so on). As a rule, this is rare in classical music. The differences are structurally determined: classical music relies on notation instead of the unnotated “head arrangements” that make it easy to constantly exchange and adjust; classical music highlights a division of labor between specialized composers and specialized performers, in contrast with performer-centered creativity in the African American vernacular; and in classical music, emphasis on weight of authority accrues to a specialized work of art while the popular marketplace is much looser.
“Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight,” wrote McCartney as a sort of sad farewell to his fellow Beatles, in the grand medley on side two of Abbey Road, his way of saying that the four individuals would never be able to achieve apart what they had accomplished together. Less poetically he might have said, “Boy, you’re never gonna be able to match, by yourself, this harvest we have reaped from vigorously creative interdependence.” Ellington understood this fully. His response was to rarely fire anyone and to subsidize salaries out of his own pocket, doing whatever it took to sustain the most stable swing band in history.
To the point of view being argued here, that Ellington and the Beatles were unrivaled composer collectives, there are two immediate obstacles. One, already alluded to, involves evidence: the historical record was deliberately obscured, with some principals exaggerating their own importance. There will always be controversies since the details were never documented fully. Still, over time, clarity emerges.
The other obstacle involves a conceptual problem: in popular music, what, precisely, does it mean to identify the “composition”? In a general sense this question applies to all kinds of music, but it is acute in popular music. At the center of the problem stands copyright. The legal definition of what the composition is and what it isn’t saturates the entire system of popular music so thoroughly that everyone, not just the businessman, has been conditioned to think in the terms it defines.
To illustrate the problem, consider the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever, one of their most celebrated recordings.
In the fall of 1966, Lennon traveled to Spain for six weeks to try his hand at acting in the film How I Won the War. During the downtime in filmmaking he composed a song that he called Strawberry Fields Forever. The reference was to a place in Liverpool, a woodsy garden where he liked to hang out as a child. He had been experimenting with LSD for many months. Earlier, in the spring of 1966, he had led the fab four in a search for musical manifestations of those experiments with startlingly fresh songs like Tomorrow Never Knows, Rain, and She Said She Said. Strawberry Fields Forever was the next step.
Lennon brought his acoustic guitar to Spain, and with it he composed a contemplative song, with simple melody and chords that support interesting lyrics, a casual atmosphere that is slightly disorienting. The singer invites the listener to join him as he goes “down” to Strawberry Fields. We might resist. The implications are uncertain, especially because of the way he delivers the word “down,” with slight and mysterious hesitation and heavy, varispeed (manipulation of a tape recorder) distortion. He says that Strawberry Fields is a place where nothing is real, and he assures us that there is no reason to worry. As the lyric wanders through a reticent stream of consciousness, the singer tries to articulate an inner search, an “awareness,” as Lennon put it, carried by the drifty melody. Gentle harmonies support the tune without claiming too much attention. One can appreciate this dreamy song without any thought of psychoactive drugs, as Beatles producer George Martin did, as an invocation of the slippery allure of childhood memory. Back in London, Lennon picked up a guitar and sang the song for his bandmates and Martin. A demo tape issued on Anthology 2 (1996) must carry the spirit of this first hearing.
On one level, the compositional identity of Strawberry Fields Forever is defined by this demo. This was how Lennon worked out the song in his head, feeling his way forward with guitar and voice. The demo is very close to the composition as it would eventually be defined for copyright. Had the commercial recording released in February 1967 remained faithful to this simple conception, I doubt that Strawberry Fields Forever would have reached the status it enjoys today. What can definitely be said is that as the band worked and reworked the song over many sessions, it became something Lennon never could have imagined in Spain and, indeed, no single member of this creative alliance could have imagined by himself.
Inside the studio the Beatles and Martin (with help from engineer Geoff Emerick) expanded the song into a breathtakingly original recording. Not only do words, melody, and chords work together in beautiful synthesis, so does what we could call, for lack of a better word, the “arrangement,” which dramatically extends the expressive core. The recording released in 1967 is the product of diverse creative forces working together in the service of a single compositional vision, which is never an easy trick and nowhere realized more spectacularly than here.
The four Beatles first developed a backing track that reflects years of playing together by ear in the ensemble tradition of rock and roll, with areas of responsibility predetermined by tradition while still granting a range of choices. Starr’s role, easily missed in the heady Beatles mix, is notable. McCartney created a haunting introduction that in a simple stroke gave the mood more musical richness. His flutelike line is hard to identify because it was created on a Mellotron, a primitive synthesizer new to the group. George Harrison introduced the swarmandal, a zither-like instrument from India. He was deepening his interest in Indian music in the fall of 1966 thanks to tutorials with sitar master Ravi Shankar. The touch of India directs the disorienting lyric away from hedonistic drug entertainment and toward a genuine spiritual tradition. It did not take much in late 1966 to do that, since the connection between Indian spirituality and psychoactive drugs had been dramatically advanced by Timothy Leary and colleagues in The Psychedelic Experience, which explicitly took an ancient Buddhist text as a resource for how to use LSD. Lennon quoted Leary in Tomorrow Never Knows, where Harrison made aural connections to India with sitar and tamboura.
McCartney’s ears were impressively open in 1966. It is hard to imagine the range of his curiosity being matched by any other composer of the moment, no matter what idiom they were working in. He was keeping up with current pop and rock, of course, and he was listening to classical music by Vivaldi (which shaped Eleanor Rigby) and J. S. Bach (which shaped Penny Lane). It was McCartney who brought in high-modern techniques from composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. While Lennon holed up at his suburban estate, dazzled by LSD, McCartney hopped around central London like a king, dipping at will into avant-garde circles of electronic music, movies, and paintings. Starr summed up the comparison: “Paul was mixing with an unconventional crowd, but he was very conventional, while John was being unconventional at home.” McCartney had introduced electronic composition with backward tape loops in Tomorrow Never Knows, and Strawberry Fields Forever was the perfect opportunity to go further.
At one point during the fifty-five hours of studio time, Lennon and the others listened to what George Martin and his staff thought was a finished product. Lennon stumbled to articulate his sense that the piece could become greater. McCartney suggested orchestral instruments and a sonic collage started to form, with a wide range of musical signifiers drifting in and out of the dreamworld—Stockhausenian fragments of slide guitar, swarmandal, the rock band, the hard-to-identify Mellotron, prepared piano, backward cymbals, trumpets, and cellos. In the normal world these instruments do not belong together, and some of them don’t even exist. They communicate different kinds of expression, different states of mind, different parts of the globe. Lennon’s simple song began to float, with all the little touches occupying discrete moments of consciousness. Varispeed tape manipulation bent the sounds even further. As McCartney said in December, he was keen to discover how “to take a note and wreck it and see in that note what else there is in it, that a simple act like distorting it has caused.” The arrangement is conceived dynamically rather than statically: each time the chorus returns there is more momentum and greater urgency, putting the formal parts in constant motion.
The dynamic arrangement includes a serendipitous moment about one minute in. Lennon liked part of one take and part of another, so he asked Martin to fuse the two. Since they were in different keys and different tempos this seemed unlikely, but with speed adjustments in the tape recorders the engineers matched them up fairly well. You can hear a slight dislocation, an oozy slither into a slightly brisker tempo and brighter sound compared with the opening section, which is slower, slightly slurred, and darker. The transition is felt rather than measured. The fade-in at the end infuses everything with added doses of electronic weirdness, and the song melts from solid to liquid to vapor.
Martin compared Strawberry Fields Forever to a tone poem by Debussy, and fifty years later the comparison holds up. Debussy, with a lot of theoretical training, commitment to musical notation, and the sustained focus of a single composer, reached a certain kind of musical achievement. The Beatles reached comparable value without notation and through extraordinary synergy between multiple creative forces. Lennon’s song moved from one to two to four to five to six, a collaborative hierarchy where everyone understood his place.
In his fitful, post-Beatle years Lennon distanced himself from the complexities of the end product, which he blamed on McCartney and Martin. If he had those concerns in the fall of 1966, he wisely kept them to himself. It had long been clear to him—he probably had some sense of it from their very first meeting, back in 1957—that McCartney’s musical skill far exceeded his own, and that they could be of great benefit to each other. By late 1966 the creative process of making Beatles music included, by default, a huge opening for McCartney’s interventions.
To return to the question: if we think of Ellington and the Beatles as composers working collectively, how, precisely, do we define their compositions? This can be answered only by ignoring the narrow definition of copyright and splitting the stages of composition. Lennon composed a good song; based on that, the creative team composed a tremendous recording. The recording preserves a finished product that is a composition in every meaningful way. The phonograph was essential for shaping, documenting, and transmitting the collaborative practices that concern us in this book.
Lennon’s song functioned something like a script in a movie. The script is the movie’s foundation, though it is not necessarily the most important ingredient in the movie’s success. The director, not the scriptwriter, is usually the one who receives the most creative credit. The director may rewrite the script, reject it, or ask for revisions. It is easy to distinguish the script from the movie and to understand its role without diminishing it or inflating it. With Strawberry Fields Forever, the analogy clarifies the role of the original song, which forms one but not the only basis for success of the recorded composition. Lennon composed the script but he shared the role of director and yielded many decisions, large and small, to his colleagues.
A division of creative labor became standardized in popular music in much the same way that it did in movies, though it took longer to settle into place. By the 1950s, composers, performers, arrangers, singers, and producers all had roles in making records, with varying creative expectations. To take a small example: George Harrison added a riff at the beginning of McCartney’s song And I Love Her. In a legal sense Harrison is not co-composer and the riff is not part of the song, but it is very much part of the song’s identity, as McCartney himself acknowledged. There are countless examples of this in jazz and rock.
Art music traditionally excludes this kind of flexibility. I am not saying that it has never happened, just that it is not traditional. The concept of the artist is simply too grand. A “script” produced by an artist is supposed to be loaded with genius and it is supposed to be complete, not dependent on anyone else’s intervention or subordinated to someone else’s vision. Collaboration is accepted across disciplines, with a librettist supplying words to an opera composer, for example, the two of them staying out of each other’s way as much as possible. This is why it is still challenging for many to accept how heavily Ellington’s accomplishments were dependent on creative collaboration. If Ellington was the greatest composer in the history of jazz, perhaps even the greatest composer in the history of the United States—many think that he was—then he has to call the important shots. Ellington was practical and accepted good results however they came. Yet it was also useful for him to be thought of as a great composer, so he was not always forthright about routine reliance on communal creativity.
The point is not to advocate one method over another, but to understand the differences. Nothing like the Beatles and Ellington collaborations has ever existed in classical music, nothing even remotely close. Musicologist Richard Taruskin argues that the central role of musical literacy is what makes classical music cohere as a tradition. What are the consequences of so much emphasis on notation? What are the social implications, and how does it shape the range of expression? We could form parallel questions for the collaborative and unnotated traditions of the African American vernacular. Ellington knew how to notate music, but that was a small part of a multidimensional approach that privileged unnotated music; the Beatles never bothered. The expressive markers of the African American vernacular, as impossible to notate as the singing of birds, were central for both groups, and so was the creative back and forth that the ring shout was designed to promote. What Ellington and the Beatles achieved would simply not have been possible if most of the creative process had to be written down. The easy flow of ideas would have become cumbersome. Each method carries its own set of advantages.
Of course many jazz and rock musicians foreground the African American vernacular, not just blue notes and rhythms but also creative interaction. Jazz musicians, especially, cultivate responsive ears. Ellington and the Beatles aimed not for improvisational spontaneity but crafted compositions. More typically the two realms are kept apart, with specialists staking out their respective territories. What can be achieved by bringing them together?
The phonograph was their indispensable aid. Classical composers adapt to the limitations and benefits of notation, while the phonograph made it possible to capture a much fuller range of the African American vernacular. This meant that a recording could define a composition, including details that could not be notated. Without the phonograph, the Beatles and Ellington would have come up with wonderful material, but they would not have participated in music history as they did, with massive distribution bringing financial reward, fame, portfolios that could be studied and imitated, and legacy. With the phonograph, they made their marks on the twentieth century. The African American vernacular provided the lifeblood of commercial genres like jazz and rock. That commercial entry, in turn, linked the music to recording technology, which made compositional histories like these possible. This is similar to movies, where the technology of film documents collaborative creativity in a way that writing cannot.
Ellington and the Beatles were hothouse collaborations that grew under particular conditions, but the starting point for what each accomplished was the cultural-economic nexus where the African American vernacular, orally based and communally purposeful, met the commercial expectations of popular music. It was an epoch-making collision, contradictory and fitful, with collateral damage everywhere you looked. Tension was unavoidable. In order to have compositional definition, you have to have someone making decisions, and in order to succeed commercially, you have to have someone pushing for high standards. The process more or less guaranteed conflict between balanced group dynamics and individual vision. That problem did not emerge in the ring shout, and solo composers never have to worry about it. But for the two greatest collaborations in music history, it was inevitable.