The Beatles, Duke Ellington and the Magic of Collaboration

This course addresses collaboration in visual arts, literature and especially music, with focus on the Beatles and Duke Ellington. We also look at Picasso and Braque, Dutch workshops in the seventeenth century, Hip Hop, architectural studios, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Warhol, and movies. Along the way we'll learn about jazz and rock during the period 1920 through 1970. The ethics of collaboration plays out very differently in these two ensembles. The musicians helping Ellington were largely hidden: the goal was to establish the image of him as a genius composer who did it all by himself. The Beatles, in contrast, carefully cultivated the image of an egalitarian musical collective; they were so successful that this ideal came to dominate rock during the 1960s.