An Esteemed Classical Music Critic’s Endorsement
In 2018, I went to my first “academic” music conference as a presenter. The event, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ controversial untitled double album, now known as the White Album, was held at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey, where my posse of music-first fellow St. John’s University professors gathered for fun and frolic and delivering not-too-academic papers.
My topic was how the White Album made rock criticism necessary at the mainstream magazine and daily newspaper level. One could have said this about every Beatles’ album since Rubber Soul (December 1965), constructed from beginning to end as a cohesive artistic statement, not dependent on hit singles, promotional added value for live concerts or films.
The Monmouth University Beatles’ intelligentsia is also behind “Everything Fab Four: Celebrating Rubber Soul" in nearby Asbury Park, NJ, Nov. 6 – 8, 2025. It appears to be a bit of a crossover conference, in that featured speakers include Max Weinberg and Jake Clemons of the E Street Band; it is billed as “The Inaugural Fab Four Fest” to be presented by the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, which are housed at Monmouth University.
But let’s back up here, because given the constraints of time when I presented my White Album paper at Monmouth in 2018, I ditched my main purpose. That was to give some applause to the Beatles’ most unlikely fan: The chief music critic for The Times of London, the voice of Britain’s ruling class, a classical music and opera expert named William Mann. Thanks to the Beatles Bible website for providing Mann’s articles online.
When the Beatles were still mostly a British phenomenon, Mann tipped his turban (an eccentric, flamboyant touch; he was once reprimanded by his editor when he wore such headgear to an opera opening) to the Liverpool quartet. He declared in his annual year-end column of Dec. 27, 1963, that:
“The outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the talented young musicians whose songs have been sweeping the country since last Christmas [1962] whether performed by their own group, the Beatles, or by the numerous other teams of English troubadours that they also supply with songs.”
Reading that prescient praise must have resulted in much spilled coffee and choking on bacon in the estates of the fussy Tories, reading their Sunday Times for confirmation of their own elite tastes. After all, Benjamin Britten, England’s esteemed classical composer, had released new work in 1963: “Nocturnal After John Dowland,” and the Melos Ensemble released Reflections on a Theme by Benjamin Britten, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies, in honor of the British Britten’s 50th birthday. John Barry’s score for the film From Russia with Love was released, and the prolific composer Richard Rodney Bennett released his first opera, The Mines of Sulphur.
Mann wrote books about the operas of Mozart, Wagner, and Strauss, although he did have a subversive streak: He wrote the libretto for Let’s Fake an Opera, (music by Franz Reizenstein), a mash-up of phrases from 40 different operas, in 1958.
What was it that a musical intellectual like William Mann, who’d been The Times of London's music critic since 1948, and its chief critic from 1960 – 1982, heard in the Beatles? Many things, although you’d not only need to be a musicologist but an etymologist to comprehend some of the language Mann used.
First, let’s note that the Beatles pricked up Mann’s ears streaming, that is, coming from a turntable from the bedroom of his young teen daughters. Also, he was not a phlegmatic phenomenologist, turned on by “handbags, balloons and other articles bearing the likenesses of the loved ones, or in the hysterical screaming of young girls whenever the Beatle Quartet performs in public,” as he wrote.
What he’s hearing from his daughters’ rooms are the original compositions of Lennon and McCartney, which to his delight are “distinctly indigenous in character, the most imaginative and inventive examples of a style that has been developing on Merseyside during the past few years.”
He is impressed not only by the fact that “three of the four are composers,” but he thinks they handle covers with “idiosyncratic” aplomb. Mann calls McCartney’s vocal on “Till There Was You” from The Music Man “a cool, easy, tasteful version of this ballad, quite without artificial sentimentality.” Which certainly is more generous than my take as a 14-year-old, who found the sentimentality on that tune quite authentic.
Mr. Mann has good ears for detail. Working without a press kit, I’m sure, is his perception of the Beatles’ trademark of “a firm and purposeful bass line with a musical life of its own.” Maybe he’s being coy here, but also insightful as he continues, “it is perhaps significant that Paul is the bass guitarist of the group.” He also notices the lesser sophistication in the George Harrison song, “Don’t Bother Me,” which compared to Lennon and McCartney’s tunes is “harmonically a good deal more primitive, though it is nicely enough presented.”
He likes what the Beatles do with their voices: “the exhilarating and often quasi-instrumental vocal duetting, sometimes in scat or in falsetto, behind the melodic line; the melismas with altered vowels (‘I saw her yestereday-ee-ay’) which have not quite become mannered.” I’d never thought about “She Loves You,” that way, but Mann is obviously right about those melismas and altered vowels: They are what made the song tick, and stick, sound so fresh to American ears, and never wore out its welcome.
Mann’s words became notorious among young American Beatles’ fans. We read of some of his descriptions of techniques used by the band, as if they had not made Beethoven roll over. Mann notes that “glutinous crooning is generally out of fashion these days, and even a song about ‘Misery’ sounds fundamentally quite cheerful.”
He’s not crazy about “This Boy” (come to think of it, neither was I), which Mann declares “unusual for its lugubrious music,” but: He finds “This Boy” intriguing “with its chains of pediatonic clusters.” Someone call the midwife! Mann digs the uptempo stuff more, if anything, because “one gets the impression that they think simultaneously [my italics, because why not?] of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of ‘Not a Second Time’ (the chord progression which ends Mahler’s Song of the Earth).”
Uh-oh. My friends and I, who talked Beatles extensively, feared the pedants with their pediatonics were going to ruin everything! We didn’t want to understand the musical underpinnings of music that moved us so viscerally, to put a brainiac label using terms the Beatles themselves probably didn’t understand. (In later interviews, John Lennon, who wrote the song, said he had no idea what “Aeolian cadence” meant.)
We feared such descriptions would make the Beatles self-conscious, or worse: If we could have elbowed their music into our junior high music classes, they would teach it using this presumptuous language. Imagine flunking a class on the Beatles because we didn’t understand these signifiers!
What really stuck in the craw was “Aeolian cadence.” What did this have to do with the Star-Club in Hamburg, the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the big beat of R&B that the Beatles were feeding back to us for our musical nourishment?
So last year, I asked an expert. In the summer of 2024, my wife and I began taking piano lessons from the luminous Edmund Arkus. Edmund could rock Rachmaninoff and knock the shoes off Schubert. He’d performed with orchestras around the world, and done command private performances for the Emperor of Japan. He didn’t flinch when I asked him to start me off with “Louie Louie” and the Latin piano vamp from Pete Rodriguez’s “I Like It Like That,” the chassis on which Cardi B.’s hit “I Like It” was built.
Edmund began studying at Julliard in a pre-college program when he was eight years old. When he graduated, he studied with Wolfgang Rosé, the nephew of Gustav Mahler. One day at the house, I asked him what William Mann meant by “Aeolian cadences.” Edmund looked baffled. Other musicologists have been just as perplexed. Mann might have been confused himself, maybe just a mental lapse or brain freeze when he typed “cadences” when he meant something else.
The phrase was an invention of Mann’s, according to Aaron Krerowicz in his Beatles blog of March 28, 2013. Others, like Wouter Capitain, writing in the journal Rock Music Studies in 2018 (where I had been a mostly honorary member of the editorial board until earlier in 2025, having retired from college teaching) say it’s not entirely accurate description of the resolution of “Not a Second Time.” It is sometimes described as where “the dominant chord resolves to submediant chord instead of the tonic.” Another place where I am told it is heard: The Super Mario Brothers video game theme.
Edmund Arkus, to our continuing sadness, did not live long enough to explain that to me. He died unexpectedly on Feb. 14, 2025, age 83. The day before, at our lesson, he seemed robust, as I almost nailed the first verse of “Blues in the Night.” I didn’t expect to become a piano player; I just wanted to expand my tool kit to be a more articulate critic. But he was so encouraging: knowing I wrote lyrics, he said, in two years I could be on the road with my own songs. I said, “yeah, as Randy Newman’s incompetent idiot brother.”
The important thing is that Mann gave intellectual acceptance to the Beatles music, even with only two albums out in England at the time (Please Please Me and With the Beatles). With such an attention-getting phrase, it was easy for the informed listener to understand that something entirely new was happening with rock music, and that the Beatles had more going on beneath the surface that any group of its time. It increased the velocity at which the Beatles were accepted by the musical establishment as being quite special. Which turns out to have been true, even if with “Aeolian cadence,” Mann was just messing with our heads, goofing on us: Not only young fans, but self-regarding musicologists as well.
This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack: https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Metjovi.
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