Eclecticism

"Rock . . . represents a fusion of the restrictive aspects of its stylistic antecedents and a homage to the liberating forces of eclecticism." These antecedents are as far-flung as blues, country and western music, music-hall song, Bach, Elizabethan, Indian and Arab folk music, arid so on. Although one could say that pop owes a lot to the tradition which it is supposed by Lambert to be superseding, it is also true that in recent years 'straight' music has learnt a lot from the way in which pop treats these antecedents, from its electicism. To quote Berio again: "Every epic form is . . . based on the revaluation and the respectful transference into another context of the deja vu. When instruments like the trumpet, the harpsichord, the string quartet and the recorder etc. are used, they seem to assume the estranged character of quotations of themselves". This 'revaluation' of the deja vu is comparable to Stockhausen's use in Hymnen of national anthems as musical objects, as commonplace material for complex yet 'comprehensible' (in Schocnberg's sense) processes of transformation and distortion. The use of extraneous styles for comic effect has become a cliche of American campus music. In the music of the Beatles on the other hand, eclecticism is always used gently and with a touch of melancholy. As Berio says, "the extra instruments are adopted like polished objects from a far-off world reminiscent of the Utopia of the 'return to our origins'".

Joe Cocker

delta lady/A&M 1112

The recorder in Fool on the Hill and the string quartet in Yesterday and, Eleanor Rigby sound in the context infinitely sad because they embody age, remoteness and therefore loneliness. The Beatles' songs are full of an essential, instantly recognisable nostalgia that can only be compared to that of Kurt Weill's songs, which must in a sense have sounded old at the premieres in the twenties and thirties. Weill, too, for sound political reasons, plucked at the listeners' desire for the 'return to our origins'.

The sound of the French horn in Tomorrow never knows or of the Bachian piano in In my Life carries in the context a great weight of musical history. The effect is comparable to that produced by the occasional use of clearly recognisable instrumental sound in a free improvisation group using live electronics. Cardew has described conventional instruments as "thoroughly traditional musical structures ... in each of which resides a portion of musical history".