50 years of Rubber Soul
Rubber Soul was released in 1965. In 2015, we celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Rubber Soul is regarded as a seminal album…and with good reason. It set the scene for many subsequent developments in popular music and continues to be a source of inspiration for those who enjoy listening to music and those who enjoy making music.
Drawing from country and western, cabaret songs, folk rock, and soul music and by adding their own innovative developments, the Beatles create a recording that is both a landmark and a milestone.
This recording, and those that followed, comprise some of the most important musical landmarks of the 20thC. They provide a rich resource which can be exploited as a treasure trove for musical exploration by our students. It seems odd, therefore, that we seem to make so little of this in our music teaching. Why should this be?
Part of the problem is that there are so few resources, or appropriate musical commentaries, which we can use. This is largely due to the tightly controlled copyright restrictions that surround the Beatles output. It is very difficult to publish anything which uses extracts from this canon without large sums of money changing hands – or a downright permissions refusal from the publishers.
Nevertheless this is too important a legacy to ignore so we need to find ways of working with these materials which stay within the law. Tricky, but by no means impossible. And this is exactly what I am preparing to do.
In preparing my materials for a forthcoming course at Higham Hall, I will guide attendees step by step through the really important songs from this collection, helping us to deepen our understanding and appreciation of this music. What it is that makes listening to these songs so enjoyable? How can we develop ways of listening that can lead us to a deeper appreciation of music in general? By playing and performing extracts from these songs, I hope to guide us towards some answers.
This course is for those who love listening to music of the Beatles, those who want to deepen their understanding and appreciation of this music – and for those who may want to teach, perform or create music in this style.
More details at:
http://www.highamhall.com/course/m0315da-50-years-of-rubber-soul/