Ritchie Blackmore on “the best composer we’ve had in the past hundred years”
Reverence of the past is par for the course in human society. It’s not just old folks on Facebook bemoaning the good old days, we often pit the feats of a bygone age as far more profound than anything that has unfurled in this era of pop culture and four chords. We might adore The Beatles, but it is generally accepted that musically, they fail to match up to the likes of Amadeus Mozart.
However, it isn’t quite as straightforward as that, and the classical maestro Leonard Bernstein explained how. Speaking about the Fab Four, the revered composer said they were akin to the late Robert Schumann when it comes to ‘She’s Leaving Home’. “This new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language,” he explained as part of his The Twentieth Century Crisis talk at Harvard.
However, he vitally added, “It relies more on the simple triad, the basic harmony of folk music. Never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary; limited harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. But within that restricted language, all these new adventures are simply extraordinary. Only think of the sheer originality of a Beatles tune.”
In effect, with less, they did more—and that is quite an uncanny feat of genius. It is one thing to paint The Creation of Adam when presented with the Sistine Chapel ceiling for a canvas; it is another thing entirely to create a masterpiece from a pencil and a sheet of paper.
In Ritchie Blackmore’s view, the Beatles frequently crafted miraculous pieces from relatively simple parts. At the heart of these works were Paul McCartney’s melodies. Blackmore feels he is due even more respect than he has already been afforded for this. “I was reading the Melody Maker the other day and there was this stuff about Paul McCartney,” he told Metal Hammer in 1987.
At the time, he hadn’t had a hit for a little while, and it was deemed that a touch of dated cheesiness was creeping into his back catalogue. This exposed some rather short memories. “They were just crucifying him,“ the usually stern Blackmore recalled. “The best composer we’ve had in the past hundred years. They were saying that he had too much money and he was overweight with this horrible wife. I can imagine them saying the same thing about Beethoven in his day,” he added.
Perhaps he wasn’t at his coolest, but what has coolness got to do with it? When you’ve written melodies like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Love Me Do’, and, of course, bloody ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’, what does anything have to do with it? As Blackmore opines, McCartney’s innate sense of melody makes him the finest “composer” of the pop culture age. A position that remains unimpeached for another few decades from Blackmore’s lofty remarks.
Even rare Beatles naysayers are often quick to laud the melodies that McCartney effortlessly mustered. As Andrew Bird recently told Far Out when reflecting on the Fab Four’s lauded legacy, “If they appeared on the scene today, they’d be a very good, quirky indie band, though I don’t know any band that’s written so many great melodies. So, no. It’s not their fault they were so adorable”. It’s also not their fault that their tunes were so perfectly hummable, the technical brilliance of such transcendence is often forgotten.
