By Audra Woehle
To any casual listener of the Beatles, the thought of classical influence on the band may seem strange. The band pushed the boundaries of the growing rock genre in the 1960s with electric guitars and drum beats and couldn’t even read music, and thus one would assume that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were only influenced by the likes of Elvis, Chuck Berry, or the Everly Brothers. But for a band so culture-defining and revolutionary, inspiration could never come from a singular place. As Paul McCartney said, “Bach was always one of our favorite composers” (Deutsch, 2019), and a deeper dive into the Beatles’ discography reveals where Bach was hiding all along. Johann Sebastian Bach’s influence can be seen in the latter half of the Beatles’ repertoire from songs like “In My Life,” “Penny Lane,” and “Blackbird.”
The Beatles’ earliest step into playing with classical influence came in 1965 with their first experimental album, Rubber Soul, which included the song “In My Life.” While written mainly by John Lennon, it was producer George Martin who created the bridge when extra musical color was requested. A bridge was created by drawing upon Baroque, especially Bach’s, style. A piano takes on the plucky, staccato style of the prototypical harpsichord, and the tune itself uses counterpoint. In music theory, counterpoint is the combination of multiple voices. Refer to Figure 1, where the bass line is also relatively melodic and not just there to support the main melody. In the case of this piece, counterpoint is also used to create an invention-style piece. In music, inventions, of which Bach is considered king, are short, simple compositions based around a counterpoint of two voices (“Invention Musical Form: Structure and Examples”, 2021). Listen to, for example, Bach’s “Invention No. 12 in A Major” and note the similarity between the piece and what appeared in “In My Life.”
Figure 1. The piano solo from “In My Life”.
As George Martin, the Beatles’ notorious producer, said of this piece, “I quickly composed a little section, for a piano, but I couldn’t play it! I couldn’t play it because it was too intricate, at the speed I wanted it done. So, I said to Geoff, ‘Let’s use the wound-up piano technique, which is what I used to do with Billy J. Kramer, drop the speed of the tape down to half what it is, so you hear everything an octave down, and it’s half the speed. And then I could play the piano, exactly the notes I wanted, quite effectively. The two-part, counterpart, it’s rather like a Bach two-part invention. And then when you bring the tape back up to normal speed, the octaves come back again and the speed comes back again and it sounds rather like a harpsichord. We did this while the Beatles were absent and I played it to John when he came back and he was knocked out” (Bennett, 2022). Where they may instead have been just another guitar solo, Martin’s inventiveness with the piece both in writing and producing certainly set the stage for the band to continue experimentation with Bach’s classical influence.
Two years later, Bach would make a reappearance in the single “Penny Lane.” Paul McCartney later explained the influence Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto had on the song’s solo. “With ‘Penny Lane,’ I’d come into the studio and the night before I happened to be watching on television the Brandenburg Concerto . . . There’s a little trumpet, very high little trumpet that Bach uses. And I came in the next day, I said to George [Martin], . . . ‘What was that?’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s a piccolo trumpet.’” Martin booked acquaintance and trumpeter David Mason to play the solo, and in the studio they all worked alongside each other to create a solo on the spot. “And so I went and put, like, an impossible high note. And David Mason turns to me, he says, ‘Well, that’s officially out of the range of the piccolo trumpet even.’ And I kind of give him a look like, ‘Yeah.’ Like, ‘You can do it,” you know. He goes, ‘Okay.’ So he plays it and it haunted him for the rest of his life, you know” (Heinzerling, 2021).
Figure 2. The piccolo trumpet solo from “Penny Lane,” written for trumpet in Bb.
The Beatles, Paul McCartney in particular, once again pushed the boundaries of pop music by deriving from something centuries old—and quite literally pushing the boundaries of the piccolo trumpet. Though coming from no Bach song in particular, the solo is quite clearly Bachesque. Had McCartney not caught the Brandenburg Concerto that fateful night, “Penny Lane” and the Magical Mystery Tour album as a whole may not have had the same fantastical and playful mood characteristic of the artistic era.
Bach would once again appear on the Beatles’ next self titled album in 1968 on one of their most well known songs, “Blackbird.” Paul McCartney later recalled playing Bach’s “Bourrée in E Minor” alongside fellow Beatle George Harrison. “We had a little piece which was like a party piece to show people that, you know, we weren’t as stupid as we looked.” He explained what they liked about the piece was the anacrusis, or preceding pick-up notes into the song and the flowing melody paired with the bass line. “That was kind of harder to do than anything we did . . . we just truncated it and did it short like that (refer here to Figure 3, where they would end the song halfway through the measure on the D#). That bit I kind of always liked so then I ended up adapting that years remembering this little thing we used to . . . and just looking for all those little shapes so it had a melody on the top and a little baseline” (Bennett, 2020). Once again remembering Bach’s own use of counterpoint, McCartney used such inspiration for adapting the tune into his song “Blackbird,” which remains one of the most beloved song by many fans.
Figure 3. A measure from Bach’s “Bourrée in E Minor.”
While the newer song is in part an adaptation, McCartney certainly makes the song so much its own that a connection between the two may not be noticed without knowing the backstory. For one, Blackbird takes the key of G Major, the relative major to the key of Bourrée’s E Minor. See in Figure 4 how the progression from B to C# to D# turns into B to C to D. The songs share the same key signature, but the difference results in a happier, more hopeful mood in “Blackbird” to the darker, more somber sound of “Bourrée.” Once again the old traditions strengthened by Bach in his era influence the progress of new music. Respects are paid to the musicians who came before, but not outright copied and instead altered into something new.
Figure 4. McCartney’s adaptation of “Bourrée” into the first measures of “Blackbird.”
“In My Life,” “Penny Lane,” “Blackbird,” and countless other Beatles songs would not have been the same without the influence of Bach. Bach’s Inventions influenced the sound of the piano solo in “In My Life,” starting a whole trend for the band into Bach’s sound. The tradition was furthered in “Penny Lane,” where boundaries were pushed further on the piccolo trumpet and added to the playful, mystical sounds of Magical Mystery Tour. “Blackbird” tied the Beatles’ dabbling with Bach back to their years playing their guitars at parties while also adapting it into one of their best known songs. Without the influence of Bach, where would the influence the Beatles’ had on the past decades of music be? While half a century has passed since the heyday of the Beatles, if there’s one thing the band has taught us, it’s that some music will never elapse with time. Just as the Beatles took centuries-old creations from Bach and shaped the course of pop music, artists like Nirvana, Oasis, and Radiohead were inspired by the Beatles to shape music into what we know today. Even as rock loses its hold on popular music, the Beatles’ experiments with classical music will never be forgotten, ensuring that Bach’s work from hundreds of years before will never be contained to one period or genre.
Bibliography
Bach, Johann Sebastian. 2017. Bourrée In E Minor. Online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIW0BrrA5LE.
Bach, Johann Sebastian. 2007. Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. Online. EuroArts Music International GmbH. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC24gV1o7XQ.
Bach, Johann Sebastian. 1985. Invention No. 12 In A Minor. Online. Decca Music Group Limited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkeUfWf_FXI.
Bennett, David. 2022. “14 Songs Based On Classical Music”. Youtube.Com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E8HUjxroFA.
Bennett, David. 2020. “Songs Inspired By Bach”. Youtube.Com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E8HUjxroFA.
“Blackbird Guitar Score”. 2022. Score Exchange. https://www.scoreexchange.com/scores/219894.html.
Deutsch, Otto. 2019. “Bach And The Beatles”. Medium. https://medium.com/@ottodeutsch/bach-and-the-beatles-6435f2881367#:~:text=%E2%80%9CBach%20was%20always%20one%20of,hate%20Bach%2C%E2%80%9D%20wrote%20Elie.
Heinzerling, Zachary. 2021. Mccartney 3, 2, 1. Video. Hulu.
“In My Life Solo”. 2022. Musescore.Com. https://musescore.com/user/6933571/scores/5339932.
“Invention Musical Form: Structure And Examples”. 2021. Masterclass. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/invention-musical-form.
J.S. Bach ‘Bourree In E Minor’ (BWV 996). 2014. Image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourr%C3%A9e_in_E_minor#/media/File:J.S.Bach-Bourree-in-E-minor.jpg.
Lennon, John, and Paul McCartney. 1965. In My Life. Online. Universal Music Group. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBcdt6DsLQA.
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