The Professor Said Led Zeppelin Couldn’t Read Music — He Hadn’t Seen Who Was at the Back D

October 19th, 2016, London, Marylebone. The Whitmore Institute of Contemporary Music occupied a Georgian terrace building on Wyndham Place, 5 minutes from Baker Street. From the outside, it maintained the particular reserve of London institutions that have been doing what they do long enough to feel no need to advertise it.

A polished brass plaque, a heavy door, a reception desk staffed by someone who had worked there since 1997 and remembered everything and forgot nothing. Inside, the smell was the universal smell of music schools everywhere. Rosin, old carpet, the particular staleness of practice rooms where the same four bars have been played 10,000 times.

The lecture theater on the first floor held 60 seats, tiered with a small platform at the front and a pair of tall windows that let in the gray October light from the street. A whiteboard dominated the front wall. On the platform beside the lectern, a demonstration guitar, a mid-range acoustic, nothing special, sat on a stand.

It was used occasionally for illustration, more often ignored. The 2:00 p.m. session on popular music and technical literacy was listed on the board outside as optional for second-year students and compulsory for third-year students specializing in music history. 23 students had arrived by 5:00 past 2:00, which was considered a good turnout.

If stories like this, stories about music, about what gets dismissed and what deserves better stay with you, please subscribe and turn on notifications. Every week we go looking for moments worth remembering. Professor Richard Holt had taught at the Whitmore for 22 years. He was 58 with the build of a man who had once been energetic and had channeled that energy over time, entirely into his opinions.

He wore a brown tweed jacket in the way of someone who had worn brown tweed jackets for so long that the question of wearing something else had simply stopped being available to him. He was a genuine scholar. His doctoral thesis on modal harmony in post-war jazz was cited regularly, and his survey of British folk music’s influence on the rock canon was considered the standard text in three universities.

He was also, as frequently happens with genuine scholars, more comfortable with the analysis of things than with the things themselves. He had not played an instrument since 1986. He had not missed it. His approach to popular music was the approach of a man who applies real tools to a subject he does not quite believe deserves them, and who has arrived, through the application of those real tools, at a set of conclusions that confirm his initial belief.

He was not dishonest. He was simply using a very good microscope to look at the wrong slide. Sophie Reeves was in her third year. She was 21, with the particular intensity of a musician who has spent her formative years trying to make the things she loves legible to people who require it to be legible before they will take it seriously.

She had been playing guitar since she was nine. She had spent three years at the Whitmore being told, in various ways and with varying degrees of directness, that the music she loved most, the tradition of British rock that had produced her, formed her, given her the language she thought in, was interesting as a cultural phenomenon, but limited as a musical one.

She had learned to argue back carefully, to cite sources, to demonstrate rather than assert. She had gotten very good at it, and it had made her sharp, and it had also, in the way of being repeatedly required to justify what you love, made her slightly tired. There is a particular exhaustion that comes not from arguing badly, but from arguing well repeatedly against people whose minds are already made up.

An exhaustion that has nothing to do with being wrong. The October 19th lecture began with a slide. The title, “Technical Literacy and the Myth of Intuitive Genius.” Professor Holt stood at the whiteboard with a marker and spoke for 20 minutes about the relationship between formal musical training and artistic achievement, citing Mozart, Bach, Coltrane, Miles Davis.

All of this was accurate and reasonably argued. Then he advanced to a second case study. Have you ever sat in a room while someone reduced something you love to a set of deficiencies? While they listed, precisely and with evidence, everything it lacked without once touching what it had? Tell me in the comments.

I need to know I’m not the only one who has felt that particular specific frustration. “Let us consider Led Zeppelin,” Professor Holt said, in the tone of a man opening a door onto a familiar room. He wrote the name on the whiteboard in his careful block letters. “An instructive example, one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of recorded music.

Also an act that demonstrates quite clearly the difference between intuitive facility and formal musical understanding.” He turned to face the room. “Jimmy Page did not read music. Robert Plant did not read music. The rhythm section, Bonham and Jones, Jones could read, which is reflected in the greater structural coherence of the bass lines, but the guitar work and the vocal approach were built entirely on imitation and instinct. He paused.

What they produced was viscerally effective, enormously so. But let us be precise about what it was. It was the result of talented people working within severe technical limitations and finding, through repetition and experimentation, sounds that worked. That is craft. It is not composition. He wrote on the board, “Craft not equal to composition.

” The structures are simple. The chord vocabulary is narrow. The sophistication that critics attribute to their work is largely the product of texture and volume, the sheer physical impact of the sound, which is a production achievement rather than a musical one. A pause. Led Zeppelin success had nothing to do with musical literacy.

They were loud, theatrical, and in the right place at the right time. Sophie’s hand went up. Professor Holt looked at it. He had the expression of a man who has been interrupted by a hand he recognizes. Yes, Ms. Reeves. “The song remains the same opens in a modal structure derived from Mixolydian harmony.

The transitional passages in Achilles Last Stand use a metric modulation that most formally trained composers would find challenging to execute. And Kashmir is written in a polyrhythmic pattern. The guitar and drums in 4/4, the bass and melody in 3/4 simultaneously, which is not a simple structure by any technical definition.

” A few students turned to look at her. Holt considered this for a moment. It was not, he knew, a wrong answer. It was a precisely constructed response, which was Ms. Reeves’s characteristic approach. He had the particular difficulty of a man who cannot be defeated on the facts and has therefore learned to operate slightly above them.

The examples you cite are notable. He said carefully, but facility with a specific technique is different from comprehensive literacy. Page stumbled onto these structures through experimentation. He could not have written them out in notation, derived them theoretically, or taught them systematically.

What you’re describing is the result of a very good ear and a great deal of time, which I would not dismiss, but which I would not call composition in the full sense of the word. Sophie started to answer. Holt raised his hand slightly, a small teacher’s gesture, the kind that closes a discussion without appearing to.

Let’s move on, he said. Subscribe and turn on notifications if you’re here for the student with her hand up, and for what was about to happen in the back row. We find these stories. We will keep finding them. In the back row of the lecture theater, in a seat that had been there when the previous occupant of the chair had arrived 8 minutes late and taken the last available place, an elderly man with long silver-white hair was listening.

He had come to the Whitmore that afternoon for a different reason, a meeting with the head of the guitar department that had finished early, a conversation about archiving some recordings, nothing that required him to be anywhere in particular. Passing the lecture theater, he had heard the words Led Zeppelin through the door and had paused, and then sat down in the available seat at the back in the way of someone who finds they are curious what will be said next.

He was wearing a dark coat and a black collarless shirt, silver rings on both hands. He had been very still since the lecture began, with a particular quality of stillness that belongs to people who are accustomed to listening carefully. He had a small spiral notebook in his pocket that he had not opened.

He had not raised his hand when Sophie spoke. He had watched her. He had watched Holt’s response. He had watched Sophie’s face when Holt said, “Let’s move on.” Then his hand went up. Holt looked toward the back row. The older man sitting in the last seat, hand raised with the unhurried patience of someone who is not in a hurry to be heard.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I don’t have you on the register. Are you auditing today?” “I came in from the hallway,” the man said. His voice was quiet, British, the precise English of a particular kind of South London boyhood educated without the performance of education. “I hope that’s all right.” Holt’s expression was the polite impatience of a man managing a room.

“Of course. What is your question?” “Not a question, exactly,” the man said. He had already risen from the seat, which Holt had not anticipated. “Would you mind if I used the guitar?” Holt looked at the demonstration guitar on its stand on the platform. He looked at the older man walking down the aisle from the back row with the same unhurried pace he had maintained since rising. Silver-white hair, dark coat.

He could have been a donor, a parent, a visiting academic. The Whitmore occasionally had all three. “Be my guest,” Holt said with the tone of someone extending a courtesy they do not expect to be taken far. The man reached the platform. He looked at the guitar on the stand, a mid-range acoustic that had no particular history, and picked it up in the way that immediately told anyone who knew what they were looking at something important about who was holding it, not examining it, not performing the act of examining it, simply picking it up as a natural extension of what he was going to do next. He sat on the edge of the platform, not the stool, and held the guitar across his lap. The posture of someone who is not performing the act of sitting, but simply finding the most useful position for what they are about to do. He looked at the whiteboard where Holt had written Craft not equal to

composition. He looked at the room. 23 students were looking back at him. Holt stood to the side with the marker still in his hand. Have you ever watched someone sit down with an instrument and understood, before they played a single note, that something was about to change? Tell me in the comments.

I think that recognition has a feeling that is unlike anything else. “The student was right.” He said simply. “Kashmir is written in simultaneous time signatures. Let me show you why that matters.” He did not begin with Kashmir. He began with a phrase, a short, deliberate sequence of notes that established the rhythmic framework he was about to explain.

Then he played the guitar part of Kashmir, slowly enough that every student in the room could follow the meter. Then he shifted, mid-phrase, to the bass line’s time signature and played both patterns alternating, demonstrating what the ear hears when they are sounded together. He did this without notation, without a whiteboard, without anything except the guitar and the knowledge of 50 years inside his hands.

Each transition was deliberate and unhurried, and the students who were leaning forward in their seats were leaning forward because something was happening that did not require explanation. It was simply audible, the way certain things are audible only when demonstrated by someone who built them. Then he stopped and looked at Holt.

“That’s not a structure you arrive at by accident.” He said. “You arrive at it by knowing exactly what you want the listener to feel and working backwards from that feeling to the mathematics that will produce it. Whether or not you can write it in notation is a separate question from whether you understand it.

The lecture theater was very quiet. Holt had his marker in his hand. He had not moved to the whiteboard. Sophie Reeves in her third row seat was looking at the man on the platform. She had been looking at him since he sat down. She was a guitarist. She had spent 3 years studying at a music institution.

She knew what it looked like when someone handled a guitar who had been doing it their entire life and what she was looking at was that and something beyond it. A quality of relationship with the instrument that she had heard described but had not until now seen. She reached for her phone under the desk. She opened an image search.

She looked at the screen. She looked at the man on the platform. She looked at the screen again. She said nothing for a moment. Then she leaned to the student beside her and showed her the screen. The word moved through the room in the way words move through a room when they are too large for whispers.

Quietly at first, then arriving everywhere at once. That’s Jimmy Page. Holt heard it. He looked at the man on the platform, the silver-white hair, the silver rings, the hands on the guitar, the particular way the instrument had ceased to be a prop and become something else entirely the moment he picked it up. He looked at the notebook he had open on the lectern, at the bullet point that read, “Page, no formal training, worked by instinct and ear.

” He had written this sentence this morning at his desk at home. It had seemed accurate at the time. He was not entirely sure what it seemed now. He looked at the man on the platform. Jimmy Page set the guitar back on its stand. He stood. He looked at Holt and the look contained no anger, no triumph, no desire to humiliate, only the clear regard of a man who has listened carefully and has something accurate to say.

“The question of whether a musician can read notation is a technical question,” he said. “The question of whether they understand music is a different question. They are sometimes the same, often they’re not.” A pause. “The student asked the right question. It was worth more time than it got.” He looked at Sophie directly.

And Sophie, who had spent 3 years constructing careful arguments and citing sources and demonstrating rather than asserting, found that she had nothing she needed to say because the thing she had been trying to say had just been said in 4 minutes without a single footnote. Page reached into the inside pocket of his coat and took out the spiral notebook.

He opened it, wrote something on the first page, tore it out, and left it on the front edge of the platform. He put on his coat, nodded once to the room, and walked up the aisle and out through the door at the back. The piece of paper sat on the platform edge. Holt walked to it eventually. He picked it up and read it.

He turned it so that no one else could see. He put it in his jacket pocket. He never said what was written on it. But at the beginning of his next lecture, he changed the slide that read craft not equal to composition to a new one that simply read, “What is the right question?” He did not explain why. Sophie stayed in the lecture theater after the other students had left.

She sat in her seat for a while without doing anything. Then she took out her notebook and opened it to a fresh page and wrote, from memory, the rhythmic demonstration she had just watched, the two simultaneous time signatures, the way they interacted, the feeling produced when they were sounded together.

She had been trying to explain this to Professor Holt for 3 years. She had not, until now, been able to show it. She stayed until the caretaker came to unlock the room for the 5:00 session. On the way out, she passed the demonstration guitar on its stand on the platform. She stopped.

She picked it up the way you pick up something that has recently been significant. She played a chord, listened to it fade, set it back on the stand. Outside on Windham Place, the October afternoon was already going dark. She stood for a moment on the pavement and thought about what she was going to play when she got home.

She knew what it was going to be. On this channel, we make videos to pass on the beautiful things that have moved through the hands of the people who shaped music because those things deserve to be remembered. If you’re not already with us, please subscribe and turn on notifications. Every story we find is a story worth keeping.

Let’s close with something Jimmy Page has said about the music he created. I knew what I wanted to hear, and I knew how to get there. Whether that fits someone else’s definition of composition is their problem, not mine. If there is a piece of music that someone once told you was too simple, too loud, too unsophisticated, and that you knew from the inside was none of those things, tell me which one in the comments.

I read every single one, and I’ll see you in the next story.