The Beatles' Abbey Road Medley Extended Forms in Popular Music [Paperback]

Through his analysis of the music, MacFarlane demonstrates the strong interaction between the music itself, the technology available for creating and recording music, and the personal relationships of the musicians. The well-documented tension between Paul McCartney and John Lennon about the medley approach, in particular, rises to the surface in his discussion, but MacFarlane also presents intriguing musical arguments for a greater level of cooperation and sympathy between the two on this project than is often described elsewhere&.? This information will most likely appeal to an audience of music specialists rather than to the idly curious, though much of MacFarlanes textual and onto-historical analysis will find a welcome audience with nonmusicians. In the long run, the value of this source will be in its careful documentation of the medley as a whole in an age when album tracks are splintered and shuffled into nonserial playlists, often with no respect for the compositional intent behind their original creation and arrangement. By looking at the medley as an extended popular form, MacFarlane makes a case for respecting the album and the compositional process that extends beyond the track level and by doing so encourages closer and more careful listening to Abbey Road.This book presents an analysis of the medley of songs from the Beatles' Abbey Road in order to understand and explain the emergent musical form, and to clarify the relationships between music recording and music composition, drawing conclusions about musical form and practice in the recording process of the 1970s and beyond.In September 1969, the Beatles released their final recorded work, Abbey Road, using a variety of progressive musical ideas that expressed the group's approach to multi-track recording and offering songs that constituted a highpoint in the Beatles' musical corpus. Of particular interest is the concluding sequence of songs (tracks 8-17): seemingly unrelated fragments woven togethelS0