Проект по английскому языку «Влияние группы Битлз на мировую культуру»

Project
«The influence of the greatest band “The Beatles” on the world»

Aim of the project: To find out the secret of success of “The Beatles”; to learn why the band’s music has become popular all over the world.

Project objective: To get acquainted with the biography and discography of the musical group; to understand the essence of the songs of the group; to conduct a survey.

Introduction

Music is the greatest thing, which connects people over the world. It hasn’t nationality or citizenship. It’s common human property. For most part of people listening to music is very enjoyable way of leisure. And each of us has own musical preferences, favorite music styles, groups or singers. Today I want to tell you about my favorite music band. Everyone is sure to hear of them. This group’s name is «The Beatles».

Surely, they are four boys from Liverpool, who decided to play and sing together. None of them got any special musical education. Each of them has his own strong and sometimes strange individuality. 15 years of joint life and work, several concerts at the greatest TV-studios, concert-halls and stadiums all over the world, about 200 songs, - and the super-popularity, which doesn’t fade away after so many years of their break-up.    

1957-1959: Before They Were Beatles

John Lennon was just 17 when he formed his first band, The Quarry men. They played skiffle music, a mixture of folk, jazz, and blues, which was popular in England at the time.

In the summer of 1957, The Quarry Men were setting up for a performance in a church hall when another member of the band introduced Lennon to Paul McCartney, then a 15-year-old self-taught left-handed guitar player. He auditioned for the band when they finished their set, and was immediately invited to join, which he did in October, 1957.

By February 1958 Lennon was moving increasingly away from skiffle and toward rock 'n' roll. This prompted the band's banjo player to leave, giving McCartney the opportunity to introduce Lennon to his friend and former classmate, George Harrison.

The band, which then consisted of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and other members recorded a demo consisting of Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day" and a Lennon-McCartney original, "In Spite of All the Danger."

The name of the group

The pseudonym «The Beatles» appeared in April 1960. There is no answer who has invented this name. According to memories of band’s members, John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe are regarded as the authors of the pseudonym. They wanted to create the word that has two different meanings.Lennon said that the name of the group he created in the dream: «I saw a man on the burning pie, he said: « Let them be the “Beetles”». However, the word “Beetles” didn’t have any double meaning. They replaced the letter «e» on «a» and the unique pseudonym has appeared. If you say it, you will hear “Beetles” but if you write it, you will see that the root of the word is “beat” like the genre “beat music”.

The composition of the group

John Lennon

John Winston Ono Lennon(9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter, and peace activist who co-founded the Beatles,the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. He was born in Liverpool, where he became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. The rest of his childhood and adolescence, Lennon lived at Mendips, Woolton, with aunt and her husband George Smith.

In 1957, he formed his first band, the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960.

George Harrison

George Harrison (25 February 1943 – 29 November 2001) was an English musician, singer-songwriter, music and film producer who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles. Harrison was born in Wavertree, Liverpool, on 25 February 1943. He was the youngest of four children in his family.  

Harrison embraced Indian culture and helped broaden the scope of popular music through his incorporation of Indian instrumentation and Hindu-aligned spirituality in the Beatles' work.

After the breakup of The Beatles, Harrison began a successful solo career. He has released about 10 studio albums and many singles hit the top of the charts in the US and UK.

James Paul McCartney

Sir James Paul McCartney (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. McCartney is one of the most successful composers and performers of all time. More than 2,200 artists have covered his Beatles song "Yesterday", making it one of the most covered songs in popular music history. Wings' 1977 release "Mull of Kintyre" is one of the all-time best-selling singles in the UK.  Liverpool, England, where his mother, Mary Patricia, had qualified to practice as a nurse. His father, James ("Jim") McCartney, was absent from his son's birth due to his work as a volunteer firefighter during World War II.McCartney has one younger brother named Michael and a stepsister, Ruth. The children were baptized in their mother's Catholic faith, even though their father was a former Protestant, who had turned agnostic. Religion was not emphasised in the household.

Sir Richard Starkey

Sir Richard Starkey (born 7 July 1940), known professionally as Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the Beatles. He occasionally sang lead vocals with the group, usually for one song on each album, including "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Yellow Submarine", "Good Night", and their cover of "Act Naturally". Starr was afflicted by life-threatening illnesses during childhood, and he fell behind in school as a result of prolonged hospitalisations. He briefly held a position with British Rail before securing an apprenticeship at a Liverpool equipment manufacturer. Soon afterwards, he became interested in the UK skiffle craze and developed a fervent admiration for the genre. In 1957, he co-founded his first band, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, which earned several prestigious local bookings before the fad succumbed to American rock and roll by early 1958. When the Beatles formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. After achieving moderate success in the UK and Hamburg, he quit the Hurricanes and joined the Beatles in August 1962, replacing Pete Best.

Pre-Beatlemania: 1960-1963

In 1960, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were joined by drummer Pete Best (whose mother owned The Casbah Coffee Club where the three had played many times) and bassist Stu Sutcliffe, a friend of Lennon's from the Liverpool Art School. They went through a lot of names -Long John and The Beatles, The Silver Beetles, The Beat Brothers - before settling on The Beatles.

After touring Scotland the group was invited to play the first of a series of club dates in Hamburg, Germany. They returned to Hamburg twice more in 1961 and 1962, after which they became increasingly popular on the Liverpool club circuit.

Soon Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his art studies so it was Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Best who met and auditioned for Parlophone Records producer George Martin in June 1962, at the Abbey Road Studios where they would eventually do most of their recording.

Martin liked everything about the band except Best, who by this time was not on the best of terms with the other band members either. Ringo Starr, the drummer for another popular Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, was recruited to replace Best.

In September, 1962, the band's first single, "Love Me Do" was released, eventually reaching #17 in the UK. It would be almost two years until the song was released (and became a #1 hit) in the USA.

Their first album, Please Please Me was released in the UK in March 1963. The singles, "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You" received scattered, limited airplay in the US. The teen audience reacted to "She Loves You" by laughing at the band's "mop top" haircuts.

After their second album, With The Beatles became only the second album ever to sell a million copies in the UK, Vee Jay Records, obtained the US rights to most of the songs from Please Please Me, and released them on an album titled Introducing. The Beatles in January 1964.

Beatlemania: 1964-1965

A booking on Ed Sullivan's popular CBS network variety show in February 1964 (watched by an estimated 73-million people) and the fact that the band had two #1 albums in the UK the previous year, finally convinced Capitol Records to sign The Beatles to a US record deal.

By April, 1964, the band's singles occupied the top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That summer, they toured New Zealand and Australia, where their arrival was greeted by a crowd estimated at more than 300,000. The first Beatles movie, A Hard Day's Night was released in 1964.

Beatlemania was responsible for the concept of the stadium concert. More than 55-thousand screaming fans - at the time, the most ever to have attended a single concert - packed New York's Shea Stadium in August 1965. Two months later, the Fab Four became Members of the Order of the British Empire, one of the highest honors bestowed in the UK, usually to military and government officials.

The Beatles' second movie, Help! Came out in 1965, and the soundtrack was one of the four albums the band released that year.

Beginning of the End: 1966-1968

The band released just two albums in 1966. One of them, Revolver, is considered to be one of the Beatles' best albums; the sands beneath the Beatlemania behemoth were obviously beginning to shift.

In the summer of 1966 the band was attacked by an angry crowd in the Philippines after turning down an invitation to breakfast at the Presidential Palace. That disastrous tour had no sooner ended when Lennon set off a huge wave of record burning protests when he suggested in an interview that "Christianity is dying" and that the Beatles "are more popular than Jesus now."

In August 1966, the band made what would turn out to be its last public performance - at Candlestick Park in San Francisco - lasting barely over a half hour. The decision was made to stop touring and concentrate on writing and recording.

Although they had lost some of their luster, The Beatles continued to produce critically and commercially successful albums: in 1967, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the soundtrack from their third feature film, Magical Mystery Tour.

The band spent the first part of 1968 in India, studying transcendental meditation under the tutelage of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. When they returned, they announced the creation of their own label, Apple Records, and went to work on the double album, called The White Album which was released in November 1968.

The End and beyond: 1969-present

Disputes, disagreements and disharmony among band members had been gradually increasing, become especially apparent during the White Album recording sessions. The band's last performance together outside the studio came in January 1969. Their last recording session (for Abbey Road) followed in August.

In September 1969, Lennon told the band that he was leaving. The others persuaded him not to go public until they made one more effort to get an acceptable version of their final album, Let It Be, which had been recorded several months before Abbey Road but shelved after two attempts by producer George Martin to put it in final form.

The band's breakup was announced in April 1970, a month before Let It Be was released. Documents filed on December 31, 1970 officially ended the legal entity known as The Beatles.

After the Beatles broke up, each of the band members followed separate creative paths. Paul McCartney formed a band called Wings with his wife, Linda; they recorded numerous hit songs, including "Live and Let Die". John Lennon achieved great success as a solo artist, with classic songs like "Imagine." Tragically, he was killed by an obsessive fan, Mark David Chapman, in 1980. George Harrison recorded many solo albums over the years, and died of cancer in 2001.

Survey

We have interviewed the students of 11^th grade to learn if The Beatles influence the young people now. For the first question, “Do you know The Beatles?”. 90 percent of students answered “yes” and only 10 percent answered “no”.

For the second question, "Do you like this band?" 60 percent of students answered that they like the music of The Beatles.

For the third question “Сan you tell some popular songs? “, most of students mentioned the most popular songs: "Yesterday", "Let it be", "Come together".

The following question was “How does the music influence on you?” About 95 percent of students said that The Beatles help them to relax and give positive emotions. 5 percent of responders answered that the music of the group gives them unpleasant emotions.

Well, the final question was “How long do you listen to them?”. 7 percent of students said that listen to the band’s music about 2-3 years and still interested in it. However, 93 percent of responders answered that do not listen to this music at all.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the majority of teenagers like The Beatles and listen to their songs. Music of the group have good influence on young people. Unfortunately, few responders listen to The Beatles regularly.

Conclusion

The Beatles are widely acknowledged as one of the world's most influential bands, and are frequently played on classic rock radio stations today. More recent bands, including Oasis, have achieved great success by copying the Beatles' sound. Though often imitated, the creativity and skill that the Beatles brought to rock music has never been replicated.

Sources

https://nsportal.ru/ap/library/drugoe/2015/03/31/educational-research-project-the-beatles-the-fabulous-four-who-were

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Леннон,_Джон

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ринго_Старр

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Харрисон,_Джордж

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Маккартни,_Пол

Адрес публикации: https://www.prodlenka.org/metodicheskie-razrabotki/456516-proekt-po-anglijskomu-jazyku-vlijanie-gruppy-