Channel 4 - Howard Goodall's Twentieth Century Greats (2004) Part1 Lennon and McCartney

Howard Goodall's Twentieth Century Greats This series aims to show people what the constituent parts of music do: melody, harmony, rhythm – and how the pieces fit together. It’s for anyone who’s ever tried to learn their favourite song at the piano, or who’s tried to pick up the guitar or the trombone, for every kid who’s starting out with music, or the merely curious to know why one piece of music might resemble another.

Part 1: Lennon and McCartney

When people look back in 200 years' time at Western culture, whose music will have survived from the 20th century? Who will be our equivalent of Bach and Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner? There are big classical names from the last 100 years, including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Stockhausen, but, believes composer Howard Goodall, in dismantling the traditional keys and harmony, the building blocks of Western music, classical music lost touch with its audiences. 'The big story of 20th century music,' he says, 'is the way that classical and popular music collided with each other to create a new musical mainstream. In the 1960s, with classical music at its lowest ebb, the most important composers in the world were without doubt The Beatles.'

Howard Goodall