The Beatles intellectual acclaim

I've been having an argument with someone who's been claiming the
Beatles are no good cause Schubert's better than them. A nonsense
argument, firstly cause he's not and secondly, if you go down that
route then you have to dismiss all popular music ever, including, jazz,
folk, musical and Gilbert and Sullivan come to that.

But I was needing help on his second accusation, that The Beatles have
no respect in amongst the "serious musical community". Thing is, I

Andrew...

Colin-

If by "serious musical community" you mean professional musicians and
academics, I've never heard anything but respect from the people I know
in that community.

I play Schubert I've arranged for my 8-string guitar, and Beatles too.
Lot's of other composers as well.

Schubert's songs were great, not all of them but most. Same with the
Beatles, Dowland, Gershwin, etc.

When I was in college in the early 70's, at Stony Brook University, our
theory professors, and we had an excellent faculty, loved what the
Beatles were doing. They loved Schubert too.

There is a Mozart letter to his father where he writes about one of his
operas that had just been premiered. He said something to the effect
that the musically illiterate loved it and didn't know why, and the
music professors loved it and knew exactly why. One of my professors
read this quote to us and said the same thing applied to the Beatles.

Here is a book you can recommend to your friend: "The Beatles as
Musicians": Revolver through the Anthology", Oxford University Press,
1999

Best regards,
Andrew Schulman

know there is a stack of intellectual support for The Beatles. There
was a fantastic review in The Times reviewing With The Beatles I seem
to remember and Tony Palmer called them "the best music since Bach" and
Leonard Bernstien was a huge fan wasn't he?

So basically, I know this stuff is out there but I don't have any
quotes to hand. Any quotes from highbrow music critics or classical
musicians saying how fantastic Beatles are would be terrific.

Any help much appreciated.

Dimitrios Paskoudniakis...

Also, Stanley J. Krammerhead, III, Jr., Occasional Visiting Professor of
Applied Narcotics at the University of Please Yourself, California, had this
to say:

"Listen, looking at it very simply musicologically and ethnically, the
Beatles were essentially empirical mélangisse of a rhythmically radical, yet
verbally passé and temporally transcended lyrical content, welded with
historically innovative melodical material, transposed and transmogrified by
the angst of the Liverpool ethic experience which elevated them from
essentially alpha exponents, of, in essence, merely beta potential harmonic
material, into the prime cultural exponents of Aeolian cadenzic cosmic
stanza form."