Dr Holly Tessler is Senior Lecturer, Music Industries and Programme Leader for the MA in Beatles, Music Industry and Heritage, based in the Faculty's Music Department.
You can listen to Holly talk about her work and The Beatles in this podcast:
Holly writes:
I returned to the Department of Music in January, 2019, having completed my MBA (Music Industries) and PhD here in the 2000s.
I previously held the post of Senior Lecturer, Commercial Music and Programme Leader, MA Music (Industries) at the University of the West of Scotland, from 2011-2019. I have also held various Music Industries lectureships at Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts), the University of East London and Birmingham City University.
In addition, I have nearly ten years of commercial radio experience, having worked with several commercial and public radio stations in my native Philadelphia, including WXPN-FM (88.5), WIP-AM (610) and WMMR-FM (93.3), as well as serving as Music Manager for Radio Computing Services (RCS) in New York.
Since rejoining the Department, I have created two university record labels: Redbrick Records, for staff research projects and original releases; and Merciful Sound, a fully student-run record label. I have also established the department's new postgraduate taught degree, MA The Beatles, Music Industry and Heritage, launching September, 2021.
I am also founding co-editor of the Journal of Beatles Studies, published by Liverpool University Press.
Whose heritage? The Beatles, Liverpool and the complexities of telling a story the whole world already knows
On the first of October, 2021, I, like so many of us who were relegated to online teaching during the pandemic, was preparing to return to my first in-person lecture as Covid restrictions began to ease. With mask, face shield, hand santizer and a USB stick full of lecture materials at the ready, I made my way to the Rendall Building. I was nervous. Not just about meeting a roomful of students in person for the first time in months, but because it would also be the first lecture in a brand-new MA offered by the Department of Music: The Beatles, Music Industry and Heritage.
As anyone who’s ever been involved in the creation of a new degree programme can attest, it’s not something that can be done on the fly or on a whim; instead, it’s the outcome of a long series of scrutiny panels, amendments, workshops and validations. But one reviewer I hadn’t anticipated was the person sat quietly taking notes at the back of the lecture theatre: a journalist from the New York Times. He had gotten in touch a few days earlier, having heard about the University of Liverpool’s plans to launch an MA about the Beatles and wanting to write about the first class and the people in it. You can read his subsequent article here.
Later that evening, he rang me with details of publication: online edition only. But he did add that if there was enough interest in the story it could make the UK print edition (but probably not). A day later, to his palpable surprise, he told me that interest in his story about the Beatles MA was substantial and we would make it to the print edition after all.
I received several more increasingly astonished phone calls from him over the next few days, as the story’s soaring popularity meant it subsequently made it to the European edition, the North American edition and ultimately the global edition of the New York Times. That initial story about the Beatles MA sparked subsequent media coverage in outlets like Rolling Stone, the CBC (Canada), ABC (Australia), NPR (United States) and to date, stories and features in around 20 or so countries around the world. The MA has even been a TV game show trivia question, which you can watch below.
Whose Beatles studies?
Every time the Beatles make headlines, which is more often than one might expect from a pop group that broke up in 1970, the world’s media come to Liverpool for insight. Somewhere between that first gently bemused article and now, the fact that serious scholarship about the Beatles happens, as evidenced by the Beatles MA and in the peer-reviewed Journal of Beatles Studies, published by Liverpool University Press, is itself less the story than the debate around its very nature: whose Beatles Studies are we talking about?
The Beatles are undeniably one of the most successful of all 20th-century pop music groups. One of the world’s most enduring cultural icons. A band whose music has reached across generations and geographies and politics to endure for more than a half-century. There are around 3000 publications about the Fab Four already in print with an estimated 100 or so or more coming out each year. Yet as many scholars in the arts and humanities can attest, the idea that something is popular, or, even worse, commercially successful, often means it is dismissed and derided as critically unfit for serious study: a so-called ‘Mickey Mouse degree’.
Metaphorical (and sometimes actual) eye-rolling and bad Beatle puns are rife in conversations, meetings and online discussions, sometimes even with other academics who dismiss study of the Beatles as unserious and unworthy, despite the group and its legacy being one of the city’s most valuable cultural and economic assets, worth an estimated £82.5M to the Liverpool City Region (Yates and Jones 2016).
Thus it is a tedious yet wholly predictable kind of snobbery and moral panic, borne of misguided perceptions that Beatles Studies is some kind of academic Schrodinger’s Cat, paradoxically too popular yet not popular enough to justify the high cost of higher education that often sparks debate around questions of to whom and for what purpose Beatles Studies might exist.
Managing fans' expectations
An even more challenging but less expected development, however, has been learning how to manage the hopes, expectations and beliefs of longtime Beatles fans who wish to take up serious scholarship of the group: those people for whom the Beatles and their music have served as lifelong soundtracks and companions.
In developing the original MA and its forthcoming online successor, MA The Beatles, Heritage and Culture, my colleagues and I have elected to focus on what makes us unique in the field. Being based in Liverpool, the city of the Beatles’ birth, means we are exceptionally placed to concentrate research on the nexus of connectivity between the city’s rich cultural and musical roots and the ways in which the Beatles’ legacy within these complex and nuanced histories is presented. Yet to do so means we necessarily have fewer opportunities to discuss other aspects of the Beatles’ career that are significant in the hearts and minds of many fan-scholars, or ‘aca-fans,’ to borrow Henry Jenkins’ term (1992). Moreover, asking students to consider the Beatles not from personal and emotional perspectives but rather from more critical and objective ones can prove confronting to some, creating within them a perceived sense of inner conflict or disloyalty to long-held beliefs and opinions, sometimes linked to deeply cherished memories and experiences.
A third area of complexity within Beatles Studies is that of stakeholders: by whom I mean not only the Beatles and Apple (their management company), but also all the Beatles-based businesses and entities, as well as the tour guides, curators, educators and retailers all of whom interact and drive Liverpool’s Beatles tourism and heritage sector locally and the Beatles as a 21st-century brand globally.
Telling the story of the Beatles to audiences visiting Liverpool from all corners of the world, across a spectrum of ages, interests, political views and musical tastes is no mean feat. Nor is it straightforward work for the city’s Culture Company and its longstanding view that Liverpool’s musical and cultural story should (rightfully) not be just about the Beatles.
At the same time, the Beatles themselves and Apple are faced with the challenge of continually re-energising the Greatest (Pop Music) Story Ever Told, inclusive of engagement with media and musical formats that weren’t even in existence when the Beatles themselves were still together. How and why the Beatles still resonate with young people has as much to do with their perceived social media ‘vibe’ as much as it does their music.
The Beatles, today and tomorrow
So what, then, is Beatles Studies about? The Beatles are today as bound up in British history and heritage and Shakespeare or Jane Austen: their story is told in various parts by English Heritage, the National Trust, the British Museum and the British Library. Beatles artefacts are on display in galleries and museums in Liverpool and beyond. Their images are on postage stamps, their histories on the blue plaques of Historic England, and on commemorative coins produced by the Royal Mint.
About a million people each year visit Liverpool to be where the Beatles were. There are memorials and monuments to the Beatles not just in Liverpool and Britain, but in places as far afield as Cuba, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Their story is continually retold and refreshed and embraced by and for generations young enough to be their great-grandchildren. Their music has more than 22 billion streams on Spotify alone.
Their significance to British popular music and culture, to its history and heritage as well as the contemporary music and creative industries is peerless. Seeking to understand the Beatles through these and many other frameworks is something we at the University of Liverpool are uniquely placed to offer. The question should not be why should Beatles Studies exist, but rather why shouldn’t it?