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McCartney's Orchestra in the Dark
By Joe Riley
Liverpool Echo
August 23, 1996
Paul McCartney is in a wistful mood. "I'm not afraid to shed a tear watching a sad film", he admits.
Is this, at last, the soft underbelly of historic Cavern man? Not really. It's just that these things take time to surface. "When I was younger, I would try to hide my emotions," he tells me. "I used to have a problem with it, but these days, I'm more than happy to show them. I remember being in Africa, hearing 30 musicians play music in a style I'd never heard before. The power and emotion of it made me weep. And I mean, really cry. I was gushing tears. It was such a good feeling for me. It was a release."
As a world audience converges on Liverpool for Beatle Week, Macca talks about the feelings behind the other music, the classical stuff. Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio is coming home for its 100th performance next month.
The subject matter ranges from birth, marriage and death to sagging off from school and complaining about a late evening meal! And Paul will be in the audience at the Philharmonic Hall -- a place he first knew for school speech days -- on September 21.
Despite everything else that has filled Paul James McCartney's [sic] eventful 53 years, he still finds that particular prospect amazing: "I've never got over the shock that people will actually sing my work," he confided.
"I wrote the oratorio because I was asked to for the Phil's 150th anniversary. I'm not sure I would have dared to otherwise, so I'm pretty encouraged that it's been performed in more than 50 cities around the world. I'm delighted that, by sheer accident, I'm in this incredible position that people will listen to what I do without me having passed any exam."
That said, he ended up with a Fellowship of the Royal College of Music handed over by Prince Charles, a certificate worth sticking on any wall.
To Paul. It's as if classical music is something grown-ups do, and not having a grown-up musical training, it still fills them with wonder. "I've not come to this style of composing in the accepted way. I'm not academic, and I don't have any academic training. I didn't pass any music exams at school, but then I couldn't have done because there wasn't actually a lesson.
"For us, studying music was just being a bunch of boys in a room for 45 minutes listening to a classical record. The teacher would put on the record and leave the room being lads, that was fatal, because we just turned the music down and talked among ourselves."
Consequently, when Paul composed this oratorio, he would hum or play whatever came into his head, and the conductor, Carl Davis -- now director of Liverpool's classical summer pop session at the King's Dock --would write it down.
It was a brave new world. And as Paul readily admits, he didn't know what an oratorio was until he read the definition in Newsweek. "That's true", he said with a grin, "and when I wrote it, I just ad-libbed my way through making up tunes. Not that tunes have ever been a problem. I've always loved melody, and I've always had an easy time writing it. It may well be that a lot of modern British composers aren't writing melody, and that may be my role if I want to get out of rock and roll.
"But I don't know where that ability comes from. It seems to come from nowhere. In fact, my most successful song, 'Yesterday,' came to me in a dream. I woke up with a whole tune in my head. I remember thinking, 'let's see what key it's in'. And it was G. I didn't plan it that way."
He immediately adds in a self-mocking way, "Perhaps I shouldn't have said that. Maybe I should have said that it took me four months to write it in Tibet or somewhere. The thing is that the best melodies are often from the simplest, and for a long time, I suffered from the belief that if something was simple, it was therefore naive, and naivety implies some sort of stupidity."
Hardly. "Yesterday" happens to be the most played music track in the world. "I use the term orchestral to describe my work these days", says Paul. "I don't actually like to use the word classical or call it serious music. That infers that the whole Beatles repertoire was a complete joke." At last mention of the Beatles, and now he brought it up. "There were enough classical influences there to fill a book," says Paul. "With the Beatles, we had this ballad called 'For No One', and because I always loved the sound of the French horn, I asked George Martin (the recently knighted Beatles record producer), if he could get a French horn on the song.
"So there I was sitting in George's house, showing him the chords and I hummed the tune, but when we got to this one note, George said we'd gone off the range for the French horn, but that was the game. We stuck it in. And of course, the best players could reach that note. "
There was also the ending of 'A Day in the Life' on the Sgt. Pepper album, when Paul and John Lennon set out to use an orchestra in such a way that it broke all the rules. Says Paul, "For me, it's interesting to see how musicians react to what you write for them. With 'A Day in the Life', John and I really got into the challenge of being very complex with that big swirling orchestra thing. We wanted to use a whole symphony orchestra, but George Martin was a little nervous about what we were asking them to do, to start playing the lowest note on their instrument and to reach the highest note in the space of 23 bars without any music written for it.
" That taught me a lot about orchestras. The strings did not like the idea at all, so they all stuck together and went up their scale together. However, the brass section was very happy. They liked the avant-garde put together. It gave us this great crunch of sound, and that was what I wanted to do, what you shouldn't do."
Well, Bach did the same, so did Mozart, so why not McCartney? "I do like to break the rules", said Paul, "but that's how I tend to do things. I just fall in love with an idea, whether it's right or wrong."
The Liverpool Oratorio has led to other classical pieces. A study called Leaf for Piano and a commission to mark the century of EMI records next year. "I'm very excited about that", says Paul. "It will be about an hour long and for a big orchestra, and ultimately, for any orchestra and any conductor in the world. The word 'symphony' is intimidating for me, because I feel then that I am stacking up against all the real symphonies.
"So I think of it as writing a functional evening's music. I realized that what we would call classical music was always turned on its head throughout history. I was pleased to learn that Stravinsky was booed at first, which gives me some encouragement, because his work is so accepted now."
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