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Abbey Road and Let It Be (Fair Use)
MUSIC: Many Beatles fans think the story is clear: here comes the sunny Abbey Road followed by the dreary swan song Let It Be documenting The Beatles’ painful end.

Abbey Road and Let It Be – The Songwriting of The Beatles – Stanford Online

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/05/2022
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Location
Stanford University

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REGISTER TODAY $255 – Live Online Courses: Our traditional on-campus courses have transitioned to live online courses to offer a remote learning experience that resembles the on-campus classroom experience. These classes feature live lectures and discussions with instructors.

  • Date/Time(s): FEB 5—MAR 5, Saturdays, 10:00—11:30 AM (PT) [No class/course on February 19]

Many Beatles fans think the story is clear: here comes the sunny Abbey Road (1969) followed by the dreary swan song Let It Be (1970) documenting The Beatles’ painful end. Reality was vastly different: multiple, intertwined solo and group projects rode a frenzied crest of activity during that period.

This course will show how complex, entangled, and productive the period was, and how these two sonically and conceptually different albums—one designed as a live performance, the other as a glittering, polished studio creation—sprang from the same Beatle source. It’s a great “detective story,” beginning with the band’s 1968 sojourn to study Transcendental Meditation (TM) with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, where dozens of songs were written. We will include recent scholarship by Beatles authority Mark Lewisohn, Peter Jackson’s new documentary The Beatles: Get Back, and the 50th-anniversary box set including Abbey Road, showing that Let It Be was (mostly) recorded first and wasn’t the total debacle many thought, that the recording sessions never stopped as one album ran into the next, that some Abbey Road tracks probably were contenders for Let It Be, and that numerous later solo tracks were initially offered as Beatles songs. It’s a remarkable ride, illustrating that even more than fifty years later there is still much to learn about this band.

Joel Phillip Friedman’s concert, theater, and film music has been performed worldwide at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, on London’s West End, and in Off-Broadway theaters. Friedman has taught at Swarthmore, Georgetown, Stanford, and Catholic University. He received a DMA from Columbia, where he was a President’s Fellow.

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The mission of Stanford Continuing Studies is to share the rich educational resources of Stanford University with adult students, to nurture a vibrant learning community, to nourish the life of the mind, and to promote the pleasures of intellectual exploration.

IMAGE courtesy of Joel Phillip Friedman (Fair Use)

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