NABMSA Reviews a Publication of the North American British Music Studies Association
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NABMSA Reviews A Publication of the North American British Music Studies Association Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2016) K. Dawn Grapes, Editor In this issue: Michael Brocken, The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of The Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism • Lewis Foreman and Susan Foreman, eds., Felix Aprahamian: Diaries and Selected Writings on Music • Lee Marshall and David Laing, eds., Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith • John Mullen, The Show Must Go On! Popular Song in Britain During the First World War • Peter Wiegold and Ghislaine Kenyon, eds., Beyond Britten: The Composer and the Community • Sarah F. Williams, Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads • Thomas Schuttenhelm, The Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett: Creative Development and the Compositional Process The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of The Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism. Michael Brocken. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. vii + 236 pp. ISBN 978-1-4724-3399-2 (hardcover). While there is no shortage of Beatles-related scholarship, there are few, if any, book-length studies of Beatles-related tourism. Michael Brocken’s The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of The Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism aims to fill this gap by weaving together three threads: (1) a history of Liverpool that focuses on its musical spaces, tourism, and economy; (2) a theoretical justification of the study of musical tourism; and (3) reports on ethnographic studies of tourist experiences. These three threads provide varying degrees of insight. Most illuminating are the passages on Liverpool’s history. As a native resident, the author has easy access to interviews with locals, and the information they provide reveals facets of the city’s relation to the Beatles that other biographies often overlook. The second chapter, for example, explains why Liverpool’s Cavern Club, where the Beatles regularly performed and where Brian Epstein discovered them, was demolished in 1973 to make room for a British rail expansion. Many present-day fans regard the destruction of this historic site as an outrage, but Brocken shows that, at the time, the decision was logical to Liverpool residents. Many had mixed views of the Beatles, whom they viewed as abandoning their hometown and not representative of their city, and by the 1970s the ever-changing musical landscape of the city had superseded Beatles music, becoming dominated by proto-disco and R&B. NABMSA Reviews Summer 2016 Later chapters recount the various efforts to capitalize on the nascent Beatles tourism industry, efforts that became increasingly important to the city’s livelihood as its industrial economy shrank. Brocken’s access to primary sources again proves highly valuable; the book quotes extensively from interviews with Mike Byrne, an entertainer-turned-entrepreneur who founded the highly successful Beatles Story exhibit. Earlier efforts by other entrepreneurs failed due to a combination of reasons: the city council was slow to recognize the value of the Beatles, the exhibits were poorly curated, and, perhaps, historical interest in the Beatles had not yet grown to the point of supporting them. In Brocken’s telling, Byrne’s success resulted in part from his recognition that a Beatles exhibit must provide a holistic experience, rather than a museum-like collection of artifacts. The success of The Beatles Story exhibit highlights the book’s recurring idea of “thirdspace,” which posits that the meaning of a space results from the interaction of a specific locale and the imagination of the visitor or inhabitant. The book’s valuable historical information is, unfortunately, weakened by a lack of footnotes or citations, except where interviews or sources are directly quoted. In addition, Brocken sometimes slips into a casual tone, mentioning, for example, “city fathers” without identifying specific individuals (e.g., 20). The author clearly has extensive knowledge about Liverpool; more detailed citation would allow readers to reach the same level. The second thread running throughout the book is a theoretical justification for the academic study of tourism. Sprinkled throughout each chapter are passages, occasionally elliptical, that explicate the theory undergirding its historical and ethnographic discussions. Key ideas include thirdspace, as well as the migration of the workforce from industrial to “affective” labor—the latter represented by both the tourism industry and the music of the Beatles themselves. While ideas about forms of labor in Liverpool are thought-provoking, the book’s broad-sweeping claim that the Beatles’s legacy has transformed “the entire raison d’être” of the city (208) is difficult to assess without a comparison of the economy of tourism with other economies in the city. The final thread of Brocken’s book is an ethnographic study of contemporary Beatles-related tours. The author interviewed a tour guide and embedded himself in two different outings: a visit to the childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney (Ch. 7), and a tour of the city of Liverpool by a visiting group of Australians (Ch. 8). Despite the modest scope of these studies, they offer many insightful observations on the tourist experience and demonstrate the value of further research in the same vein. The visit to Lennon’s and McCartney’s homes reveal a master narrative imposing itself on the experience—specifically, a mythologizing account of Lennon, who supposedly lacked love in his childhood and discovered freedom through rock and roll. The book’s account of the Australian tourists deftly ties together the issue of identity and its relationship to space, imagination, and the commerce of the city. The studies would be further strengthened by descriptions of the material objects contained in the exhibits, which have their own potential to communicate history. The book’s final chapter offers a set of recommendations for future heritage-related tourism and scholarly activity in Liverpool. The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of The Beatles raises questions related to the band that are not often asked. In addition, it showcases the author’s admirable role as a public intellectual— someone who uses his scholarly abilities to ask questions about the relations among music, place, and identity, and explore their implications for his local city. One hopes that it spurs its readers to do the same. DAVID HEETDERKS Oberlin Conservatory 2 NABMSA Reviews Summer 2016 Felix Aprahamian: Diaries and Selected Writings on Music. Lewis Foreman and Susan Foreman, eds. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2015. 456 pp. ISBN 978-1-7832-7013-2 (hardcover). Those with an interest in the byways of London’s twentieth century musical life are almost bound to find diversions within. Felix Aprahamian (1914–2005) belongs to a long British tradition of influential amateur critics—amateur in that their musical persona was shaped more by spontaneous enthusiasm than by professional training. As Bernard Shaw’s writings on music had shown, this form of liberation could be conducive to very personal critical stances, and such was the case with Aprahamian, who was to cultivate his own musical passions to full advantage. These interests focused on the organ and its music (as well as the characters of its players), on the French musical repertoire more generally, and on Delius. Lewis Foreman, one of the editors of this volume, in his obituary of Aprahamian for the Independent (18 January 2005), described him as “a showman, an autodidact and a complete one-off,” a summary that reflects characteristics displayed in these writings. Lewis and Susan Foreman conceived this volume in tribute to someone they clearly esteemed. It begins with an extended biographical essay. Aprahamian’s writings are then organized into three sections. The first consists of his diary entries detailing aspects of London’s musical life in the 1930s, which offer a glimpse into a social and musical world that vanished with the Second World War. It is this section that is perhaps the most fascinating, for Aprahamian had a good eye for detail and human quirkiness. The second part reproduces articles, record reviews, and liner notes on works, composers and performers, and the volume concludes with a final section, “Remembering the Great Organists.” What seems so curious in retrospect is the extent to which Aprahamian constructed a career for himself from nothing. His formal education was limited, and he did not achieve matriculation (the official school leaving exam of the day, necessary for university entrance). Later he went to evening music classes at the local Working Men’s College. Aprahamian himself blamed his educational deficit on his discovery of music, which quickly took over his life. Or, perhaps, it was rather the lure of the organ’s sonorities and the lore of the organ loft that made him susceptible to the pleasure of music in the wider sense, and to the acute observation of musicians and their ways. Certainly from the age of seventeen, Aprahamian became an organists’ “gofer” and as such, gained his initiation into the mysteries of that instrument’s craft as Secretary of the Organ Music Society. This role paved his way to contact with the organists’ crème de la crème of players such as Marcel Dupré, André Marchal, George Thalben-Ball, Virgil Fox, and Jeanne Demessieux, and of clearing up the messes of transposed organ pipes and noisy through-the- night practicing that some of them left behind. From what he had glimpsed though this opportunity, Aprahamian saw how he could make himself even more indispensable, and so invested time and trouble in learning French. Clearly, too, Aprahamian’s personality had endowed him with a real knack of getting on with people, and, as he set out to expand his knowledge of music, so too he broadened his range of musical contacts. Always busy, Aprahamian earned his living in the 1930s at the London Metal Exchange and spent his evenings in concert-going.