Introducing the Beatles

Catalog description

The influence and achievement of the Beatles as artists focusing on their recordings and films as sociocultural artifacts. INART 205 Introducing the Beatles (3) (GA) INART 205 is composed of eight unites of study that trace the lives and work of the Beatles. The course's chronological design is arranged in order to capture the band's artistic trajectory from two-track recording and the relatively primitive Please Please Me album through the sonic heights of Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, and Abbey Road. This course examines the group's wide-ranging sociocultural influence in terms of music, fashion, film, gender, consumerism, and politics. The thrust of the course is interpretive in nature, with the Beatles' songs and albums receiving considerable scrutiny in terms of their composition, production, and attendant musicianship. Developments in recordings and instrument technology are germane to our understanding of the Beatles' evolving aesthetic, as is the bandmates' development as songwriters who eventually eschew issues associated with romance in order to address larger and more prescient subjects such as loneliness, oppression, nostalgia, ethics, and redemption in their music. Each unit of study will be accompanied by the analysis of key examples from the Beatles' massive recorded corpus. More than 100 songs will receive consideration, as will the group's five forays as feature-film stars. Grades in INART 205 will be determined by two objective examinations- a midterm and a final. Class participation will be a key ingredient in student performance, as will students' work on two papers. The first of such assignments will involve a shorter paper in which students address a particular aspect of the band's sociocultural emergence during their early years. The longer term paper will be researched, argumentative essay in which students will be assigned to discuss any aspect of the Beatles' career - a particular album (or series of albums), their musical influence, or their cultural impact, among other topics - and construct a mature, expansive thesis about its meaning.