Musicology lecture with Mark Spicer: influences on the Beatles, and the Anxiety of the Beatles' Influence

Our Musicology lecture series continues with Prof. Mark Spicer, a leading scholar and theorist of rock and popular music The lecture will take place in the third floor colloquium room in CAC, May 15, 4 pm.

For the first part of this talk, I will survey some of the American artists that the Beatles admired and who influenced them as songwriters and performers, with reference to particular songs. For the second part, I will consider two British groups from the 1970s—the Electric Light Orchestra and 10cc—whose music cannot be fully understood without taking the profound influence of the Beatles into account. 

Mark Spicer is Professor and Chair of Music at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. Prof. Spicer specializes in the reception history and analysis of popular music, especially British pop and rock since the 1960s, and his writings have appeared widely in scholarly journals and essay collections. His book Sounding Out Pop, co-edited with John Covach, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010, and he has since edited the volume on Rock Music for the Library of Essays on Popular Music series from Routledge. His article “Fragile, Emergent, and Absent Tonics in Pop and Rock Songs” (Music Theory Online, 2017) won the 2020 Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory.

Prof. Spicer served for ten years (2005–15) as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Hunter College and was the 2015 recipient of Hunter’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, he maintains an active parallel career as a professional keyboardist and vocalist, having worked with several groups in the U.S. and the U.K. since the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he was a founding member of the critically acclaimed group Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks, and can be heard on their first two albums, On the Blank Generation (1991) and World of Fireworks (1994). He continues to take the stage most weekends, both with his own “electric R&B” group, the Bernadettes, and with the Trinity Church Choir in New Haven.