A harpsichord that isn’t there
Halfway through “In My Life”, on the Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul, the voices fall silent and a keyboard takes over. It sounds like a harpsichord: bright, crisp, two lines chasing each other. It is not a harpsichord. It is a piano, played by producer George Martin at half speed and then sped up on tape.
John Lennon had asked for something Baroque. Martin gave him something Bach-like. In about fifteen seconds, two centuries collapse into a pop song.
People often say there would be no classical music without Bach, and no pop music as we know it without the Beatles. Is that true? And if these two really did shape everything that came after them, what did freedom mean to each of them: the Lutheran church musician in Leipzig and the four young men from Liverpool?
Origins and reference points
Bach did not invent classical music, and in his own lifetime he was not even fashionable. In 1737 the critic Johann Adolph Scheibe attacked his style as overloaded and unnatural. Younger composers wanted lightness and clear melody, and Bach’s dense counterpoint sounded old-fashioned.
After his death in 1750, the public largely set him aside. Musicians did not. Mozart discovered Bach’s fugues around 1782 through Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s Sunday gatherings in Vienna, and it changed how he wrote. The young Beethoven learned The Well-Tempered Clavier as a boy in Bonn. Bach became a private school for composers before he became a public monument.
That monument arrived in 1829, when the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin. Only then did Bach begin to stand at the head of the tradition, where we now place him.
The Beatles did not invent pop music either. They grew out of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, Motown, skiffle and the British music hall. They worked alongside Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys, who pushed them as much as they pushed back.
Neither Bach nor the Beatles started their music. Both became its reference point, the place later musicians return to when they want to know what the language can do. I find that more interesting than invention. They understood what they inherited so well that they changed what it meant.
Three roads from Leipzig to Liverpool
Bach reaches the Beatles by three roads: through a producer, through a guitarist’s fingers, and through a single sound.
1. The producer’s pastiche: “In My Life” (1965)
The solo in “In My Life” is George Martin’s, not the band’s. Martin was classically trained, and he wrote the passage in the style of Bach’s keyboard writing: two independent lines that answer each other rather than a melody over chords.
To hear the family resemblance, play the song and then one of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions. The A major invention, BWV 783, makes a good partner. Listen for the way the two hands answer each other. The tunes are different and the method is the same, translated for a pop record by a classically trained musician.
2. The musician’s own hands: “Blackbird” (1968)
The most direct Bach connection comes from a Beatle himself. Paul McCartney has explained that the guitar part of “Blackbird” grew out of Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, from the Lute Suite BWV 996. As teenagers, he and George Harrison used to play the bourrée as a party piece to show off.
McCartney kept the idea that caught his ear, a melody and a bass line moving against each other on one guitar, and built a new song on it. His fingers had learned it years before he used it.
3. The borrowed sound: “Penny Lane” (1967)
In early 1967 McCartney watched the trumpeter David Mason play Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 on BBC television. He wanted that bright, high piccolo trumpet on “Penny Lane”. Mason was booked, and the solo he played became one of the most recognisable sounds of the decade.
Nothing of Bach’s structure is in the song. What came across is the colour of his trumpet writing, set in a song about a Liverpool street.
An aside: “Because” (1969)
Not every classical echo in the Beatles is Bach. “Because”, on Abbey Road, began when Lennon heard Yoko Ono play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and asked her to play the chords backwards. Martin added an electric harpsichord; Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sang three-part harmony three times over, nine voices in all. Their classical listening went well beyond Bach.
Two meanings of freedom
The musical links are clear enough. What freedom meant to each of them is a harder question, and here they part ways.
Bach: freedom for something
Bach was a Lutheran, and Lutheran thought gave him a very particular idea of freedom. In On the Freedom of a Christian (1520), Martin Luther set out a paradox. A Christian is completely free and answers to no one. At the same time, a Christian is the willing servant of everyone. For Luther, freedom was an inner liberty that made service possible, and obligation was part of it.
Bach lived inside that idea. He wrote “S.D.G.” at the end of his scores: Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone the glory. He meant his music as an offering more than as self-expression in the modern sense, and the strict rules of counterpoint belonged to that offering. Within those rules he found more room than almost anyone before or since.
He could also be very stubborn. In 1717 he wanted to leave Weimar for a better post in Köthen. The Duke refused to release him, Bach insisted, and the Duke had him locked up for about four weeks before dismissing him in disgrace. In Leipzig, where he worked from 1723 until his death, he quarrelled with the town council for years over money, singers and his duties.
So Bach’s freedom had two layers: inwardly, serving something greater than himself; outwardly, defending his independence as an artist.
The Beatles: freedom from something
For the Beatles, freedom mostly meant getting out from under the music industry and from what people expected of them.
In 1966 they stopped touring. Screaming crowds drowned out the music, and the studio offered more. From then on the recording studio was their instrument, and an album could be a single work of art instead of a set of singles.
In 1968 they founded Apple Corps to run their own business and support other artists on their own terms. Within two years it had descended into chaos, which suggests that independence needs some structure of its own.
They also took stands. In 1964 they refused to play the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, unless the audience was desegregated, and the organisers gave in.
Their politics were less settled. Lennon’s “Revolution” (1968) is openly unsure whether to join the radical movements of the day or stay out of them. The Beatles were symbols of change, but never a unified movement. They disagreed with each other, and Lennon disagreed with himself.
Bach’s freedom pointed upward, towards God, and outward, towards the community he served. The Beatles’ freedom started as escape, from touring and from the idea of what a pop group should be.
Harrison’s way back
George Harrison, the quietest Beatle, took the idea somewhere else. After meeting Ravi Shankar and studying Indian music and philosophy, he came to see freedom as liberation from the ego itself. “Within You Without You” (1967) is built on that idea: the self is small, and real freedom lies in seeing beyond it.
That is surprisingly close to Bach, despite the different religion and the two centuries between them. Both believed you find freedom by losing yourself in something larger, and that discipline helps you get there.
So perhaps Bach and the Beatles are closer than their worlds suggest. Bach found new worlds inside the musical order of his age. The Beatles found them by stretching the boundaries of theirs, and one of them ended up where Bach began.
If you make music, teach or lead a team, there is a practical point here. A Bach fugue and a Beatles harmony work the same way: independent voices, each with its own line, making something none of them could make alone. The freedom comes from knowing the form well enough to play with it.
Listening list
| Order | Piece | What to listen for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Beatles, “In My Life” (1965) | The sped-up piano solo and its two interlocking lines |
| 2 | Bach, Two-Part Invention in A major, BWV 783 | The same dialogue between two voices |
| 3 | Bach, Bourrée in E minor, BWV 996 | Melody and bass on one instrument |
| 4 | The Beatles, “Blackbird” (1968) | How McCartney turns that idea into a song |
| 5 | Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, BWV 1047 | The high piccolo-style trumpet line |
| 6 | The Beatles, “Penny Lane” (1967) | David Mason’s trumpet solo |
| 7 | The Beatles, “Because” (1969) | Nine voices and an electric harpsichord, after Beethoven |
| 8 | The Beatles, “Within You Without You” (1967) | Harrison’s idea of freedom beyond the self |