Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles by Wilfrid MellersReview by: Yvette BaderNotes, Second Series, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Mar., 1975), p. 568Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/896213 .

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of relating principles and practice to the creation of musical works. This is the book's greatest fault, for one has the right to expect an experienced composer to communicate this information. Otherwise we might just refer to the technical manuals produced by the manufacturers of electronic music equipment.

JON H. APPLETON Dartmouth College

Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles. By Wilfrid Mellers. New York: Viking Press, c1973. [215 p., $7.97]

Although scarcely endowed with the magical qualities of the epic figures in Wagnerian opera, as suggested by the awe- some title of this book, the Beatles have exerted a powerful influence on contempo- rary commercial music, and deeply affected the lives of a generation of the young. Now Wilfrid Mellers, the distinguished Professor of Music at the University of York, compos- er and musicologist, has written an extraor- dinarily perceptive study of the Beatles, their lives, their music, and their imprint on social history.

Mellers's biography is no starry-eyed trib- ute to the demigods of fantasyland. It is a serious musical analysis of an important social and cultural phenomenon, and a landmark in the field of musicological in- vestigation. Meller's focus is the music itself, not the folklore surrounding the Beatles, and he comes up with some fascinating findings.

Mellers approaches his subject through analytical commentary on a rudimentary level. He writes that "in reference to Beatle music, as in most pop, jazz and non-Western music, written notation cannot represent improvised elements . . . (or) flexibilities of rhythm which are the essence of music which is orally and aurally conceived . . . (and) not entirely literate." Mellers traces the sources of Beatle music to "black blues and barrelhouse music interfused with dis- tortions of pitch and elongations and el- lipses of rhythm." He regards the music of the Beatles as no less suited to analysis than the music of Beethoven, although the "musical facts are not, compared with those in Beethoven's music, very complicated."

He has appended a glossary of musical terms at the back of the book which claims to "describe the aural effect of the particular technical process" in the Beatle music. But the definitions he applies to the musical qualities of the Beatles' simple folk art are of standard musical textbook terms, such as "diminished seventh" and "lydian mode," which provide the average lay reader with as much enlightenment as a dictionary writ- ten in Sanskrit. Yet despite the weaknesses in projecting the naive lyrical charm of a Beatles song, the author shows great skill in applying the language of traditional analysis to a new idiom. Thus, if Mellers' interpretation of "I saw her standing there" as "pure folk melody and monody with rudimentary African rhythmic affiliations," or "Hold me tight" as a "diatonic tune undermined by mediant transitions," is somewhat bewildering in print, we are re- minded by the author that it would be helpful if the reader took out the albums and actually listened to the songs. This, of course, takes us right back to the old, familiar way of enjoying an art, by experiencing it.

Nevertheless, despite the obvious short- comings of a cumbersome vocabulary, Mellers has pioneered in an important cause-the analytic understanding of a sig- nificant event in musical art. In the years to come, we can look forward to a whole rash of similar erudite studies (including doctoral dissertations) on far less talented musicians than the Beatles. Whether by opening up Pandora's box Mellers has con- tributed to human knowledge, or whether he has simply given respectability to a type of sound which academic theoreticians have scorned for years, is impossible to predict. In any case, Twilight of the Gods is well worth the attention of serious students of music.

YVETTE BADER Kingsborough Community College,

City University of New York

Elliott Carter: Sketches and Scores in Manuscript. A Seclection of Manu- scripts and Other Pertinent Material from the Americana Collection of the Music Division, The New York Public Library, on Exhibition December

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