Change arrives and the world we’ve taken for granted shifts, and we feel a loss of unexpected magnitude.
This is how the death this week of musician and Beatles producer George Martin has found me. He was 90. He lived a long life, more productive and beautifully prolific than most.
I didn’t know George Martin as a person, of course, but he was a friend. He made a personal connection with every note, every phrase, every emotion he helped bring to life through the music he touched.
The Beatles were omnipresent in my house growing up in the 1970s. Mom’s Beatles records shared time with dad’s Elvis LPs and his Chuck Berry cassettes. My brother and I had our “own” songs — he had “Love Me Do” and I had “Don’t Bother Me.”
The tiny smudgy heart I drew under George Harrison’s photo on the back cover of mom’s “Meet the Beatles” album in red felt pen is still there.
I tried to get my piano teacher to let me play Beatles songs, but we stuck to classical pieces. But my autoharp teacher — whose other job was being the one-man-band at the nearby Six Flags — taught me to finger pick “When I’m 64” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
Those original Beatles records are now on my record shelf, thanks to my generous mom, who understands their importance. My husband is a musician, among many other talents, and we are a Beatles household.
George Martin’s talent was to make genius better. He added, subtracted, pushed and challenged some of the world’s most amazing musicians. He heard what others could not, and he was a major advocate for music education. He brought music to people, and people to music.
It’s easy to overlook people, like Martin, whose passion is the work, not the spotlight. Artists who create not in the flash of fame, but because they must feed the human need to connect — because they possess ideas and creations that cannot remain hidden.
The method of creation, and what is even considered creation, also changes over time. It’s not always for the good. True creativity doesn’t come from outside, from a formula. Popularity isn’t a measure of substance.
Contrast the joy of transformative music with the hopelessness and division engrained in today’s barrage of daily media noise. Politics, celebrity culture, movies, music, video games — it’s all about tearing each other down, creating and fighting enemies. The only way to win is to take something away from someone else.
George Martin, in his way, helped to create the soundtrack of change, of social progress, of a time of possibility.
George Martin used his gifts to make those around him better.
He will be missed.
