markus heuger's
beabliography

Beabliography

Abstract 0378

Tolvanen, Hannu (2001), "Do You Want To Know A Secret? The music of the Beatles and the Finnish cover versions." In: Yrjö Heinonen, Markus Heuger, Sheila Whitely, Terhi Nurmesjärvi and Jouni Koskimäki (eds.), Beatlestudies 3. Proceedings of the Beatles 2000 conference. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä (Department of Music, Research Reports 23), 2001, 189-200.

This paper is loosely connected with Tolvanen's research project "The Style History of Finnish Rock Music", which is a part of the wider project "Finnish Popular Music in the Twentieth Century: Style and Production". Here Tolvanen tries to show how Finnish rock / popular musicians (and arrangers) tried to imitate the musical style and the sound world of the Beatles, as well as that a part of the style history of Finnish rock music can be explained through the cover versions of different eras.

There were a bit over fifty Beatles-covers done in the 1960's. The author has selected ten Finnish versions from the years 1964-1969 for a more close analysis. Here he analyses musical aspects (e.g. form, tempo), the sound structure (e.g. instrumentation, sound picture), lyrics (e.g. is there any differences when changing the language from English to Finnish), and the cultural impact of these songs.

The author concludes that in the 1960's Finnish musicians copied the Beatles music as exactly as possible. Besides the cover versions Finnish musicians made their own songs so that they sounded like the Beatles (at least they tried). But, as soon as the musicians learned more on their craft, they started to make versions that did not sound like the Beatles, i.e. their own arrangements of these melodies.

Beatles covers were done in Finland more as learning the craftmanship of rock musicians, not as so called "authentic artistic process". Beatles-era was the time of acculturation in the history of Finnish rock. But of course the impact of Beatles-music was not limited to rock musicians: also musicians from other fields of popular music used these tunes as their material.