Did the Beatles know music theory?

That’s the subject of this video by David Bennett, who has done a number of posts analyzing music by the Beatles:

What’s music theory and why does this question matter? Let’s start with the second question.

The Beatles created a substantial body of original and compelling music, easily one of the most significant bodies of popular music in the 20th century. But they did not have much formal training in music, and didn’t even know how to read and write music notation. Much of music theory implies knowledge of music notation, which the vehicle for expressing much of music theory. Does one have to know music theory in order to write (good and interesting) music? Perhaps not.

As for music theory itself, Marvin Minsky (the AI pioneer, who was also quite interested in music), has remarked that there is nothing particularly theoretical about so-called music theory; rather, it is mostly a bunch of recipes one uses to to achieve music effects. Walter Piston, a 20th century composer whose books Harmony and Counterpoint are classic texts in music theory, observed the music theory is a post-facto systemization of prior music practice. That implies, for example, that someone who knows music theory very well could tell you things about a Beethoven symphony that Beethoven himself could not have done. Or, to move to a different tradition, that someone versed in music theory can tell you things about a Louis Armstrong improvisation that Armstrong himself could not have told you. Moreover, one can know quite a bit about music theory without being a particularly good composer or improviser.

There is a “gap” between musical practice and music theory. Bennett is exploring this gap in this video. He has looked at lots of written and recorded material by and about the Beatles to get a sense of how they articulated what they were doing. The discussion of key changes (c. 8:39 to c. 12:31) is particularly illuminating. Yes, they knew what they were doing, but, no, they couldn’t explicate it in standard terms. He suggests that McCartney had the most sophisticated capacity to explicate and talk about their practice. Bennett also talks about the role their producer, George Martin, who had standard conservatory training, played in their process. He helped them translate their intuitive ideas into specific practice – I’m reminded of Plato’s metaphor of the philosopher as midwife.

This gap between practice and “theory” is hardly unique to music. It exists across a wide range of human activity. One doesn’t have to know linguistics in order speak and write coherently nor do you have to know literary criticism in order to appreciate literature or to create it. I suspect that the same is true for chess, to take a somewhat different example. Though I don’t play the game myself, I do know that there is a large literature about the game, a literature discussing openings, endgames, the middlegame, various moves and tactics and, of course, analyzing game after game after game, just as texts in music theory analyze specific compositions. I can’t imagine anyone becoming an expert player without knowledge of at least some of that literature, but that knowledge would be useless without having played hundreds or thousands of games. That literature gives you a way of thinking about and talking about what happens in those games, but the mechanisms one uses to play the games are not fully captured and explicated in the concepts in that literature. The concepts of chess-itself are different and the relationship between them and the concepts explicit in the chess literature is obscure, as is the relationship between music practice and music theory.