Wilfrid Mellers

May 26 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IN THE pomp of his days, Paul McCartney once observed that the pop music of today would be the classical music of tomorrow.

At the time, this was regarded as a controversial statement by rather dull people, perhaps fearing that Pinky and Perky would be required to sing the Hallelujah Chorus.

But the professor of music, with the billowy, white hair and big spectacles, had a keen ear for a prophetic utterance.

Indeed, he thought, there was much of merit in the work of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and others, emerging from the high-tide of pop and rock in the 1960s.

Before Wilfrid Mellers and a few other writers started giving consideration to compositions, music had been rigidly separated – classical on one side and pop on the other.

Then Mellers began speaking about Beethoven, Bach and the Beatles, as though they could rub shoulders in the same sentence.

As a composer, critic and teacher, Mellers had detected that the traditional dismissal of popular music had been based on snobbery.

And, on the day in 1967 that the Beatles issued their Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band album, he gave a lecture about it at York University, where, in his founding of the music department three years earlier, he had included pop on the curriculum.

So the man, whose jackets and shirts mixed the pastel and primary shades favoured by end-of-the-pier comics, added respectability to what had become the strongest cultural influence on young people.

Criticism came only from the classical wing. Many popsters resented the cloak and gown brigade encroaching on their territory.

But Mellers was an amiable chap and his book, Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (1973), was a serious analysis of their work, three years after they had split, and drew a new public to them.

A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (1985), examined the extraordinary imagery in the singer’s songs.

In addition to his profound knowledge of the great European composers, Mellers followed the development of American musical styles in his brilliant, Music in New Found land (1964).

Mellers, married three times with three children, was born in Leamington Spa. He studied at Cambridge University and was professor of music at York University until 1981.

Wilfrid Mellers, musicologist; born April 26, 1914,died May 16, 2008.