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Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Early life and career
- Joining the Beatles
- Solo career: music, acting, and photography
- Personal life and honors
References & Edit HistoryQuick Facts & Related Topics
Quizzes
Related Questions
- What was Beatlemania?
- What is rock music?
- How did rock music influence the emergence of folk rock?
- What are some of the major film festivals?
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Also known as: Sir Richard Starkey
Written by
Patricia Bauer
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Feb 3, 2025 • Article History
Quick FactsByname of: Sir Richard StarkeyBorn: July 7, 1940, Liverpool, Merseyside, England (age 84)Awards And Honors: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (2015)Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (1988)Grammy Award (1970)(Show more)
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Ringo Starr Admits He’s Never Eaten Pizza in His Life • Jan. 30, 2025, 6:25 AM ET (Billboard) …(Show more)
Ringo Starr (born July 7, 1940, Liverpool, Merseyside, England) is a British musician, singer, songwriter, and actor who was the drummer for the Beatles, one of the most influential bands in rock history. He also found success in a solo career.
Early life and career
Starkey was born in a working-class area of Liverpool. His parents, both bakery workers, divorced when he was a small child. Frequently ill, he spent a year in the hospital with complications from a burst appendix when he was six years old and a further two years in a sanatorium after he acquired pleurisy at the age of 13. During the latter episode he was introduced to the drums by a health worker who gave children musical instruments to amuse them. Starkey did not return to school after his release from the sanatorium but worked at various jobs, eventually becoming an apprentice joiner for an engineering company, where he and other employees formed a skiffle band. In 1959 he became the drummer for another skiffle band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and adopted his stage name. The band became quite popular, and it was during a shared 1960 engagement in Hamburg, West Germany, that Starr became acquainted with the Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best).
Joining the Beatles
In 1962 Starr replaced Best as drummer for the Beatles. He underpinned the band with a straightforward steady beat and won over fans with his engaging personality. Though his vocal skills were limited, he did take the lead on a handful of songs, including “Boys” on the band’s 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, and its first American release, Introducing the Beatles (1964); “Honey Don’t” on Beatles for Sale in the United Kingdom and Beatles ’65 in the United States (both 1964); “Act Naturally” on Help! (1965); “Yellow Submarine” on Revolver (1966); and “With a Little Help from My Friends” on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). In the late 1960s Starr began songwriting, contributing “Octopus’s Garden” to Abbey Road (1969).Britannica QuizPop Culture Quiz
Solo career: music, acting, and photography
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nevdSt_2PIM?rel=0The members of the Beatles had all launched separate careers before the band officially broke up in 1970. Starr appeared in films, including The Magic Christian (1969), and his first two solo albums, Sentimental Journey, consisting of standards from the 1930s and ’40s, and Beaucoups of Blues, a collection of country music, were both released in 1970. He also had several hit singles during the 1970s, notably “It Don’t Come Easy” (1971), “Back Off Boogaloo” (1972), and “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen” (both 1973). Starr continued to release albums and to play on solo records for Lennon and Harrison, but his successes became more modest as time went on.
Starr later played the Conductor in the children’s television series Shining Time Station (1989–93) and was nominated (1989) for an Emmy Award. He published two books of photography, Postcards from the Boys (2004) and Photograph (2015). He formed his first All-Starr Band in 1989 and embarked the following year on the first of a continuing series of tours with various incarnations of the All-Starr Band, enjoying a thriving if low-key career punctuated by appearances at Beatles retrospectives. Among the musical luminaries who have performed with the All-Starr Band were Todd Rundgren and Levon Helm. Solo studio albums featuring tracks written and recorded by Starr and members of his All-Starr Band include Choose Love (2005), Postcards from Paradise (2015), Give More Love (2017), and What’s My Name (2019). In 2025 Starr returned to the country genre with Look Up, which was critically acclaimed.
Personal life and honors
From 1965 to 1975 Starr was married to Maureen Cox, with whom he had three children. In 1981 he married actress Barbara Bach. Starr was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, first with the Beatles in 1988 and again in 2015, receiving the Award for Musical Excellence. He was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1965, and he received a knighthood in the 2018 New Year Honours.
Table of Contents
- Introduction & Top Questions
- Early years
- First success: Brian Epstein, George Martin, and “Please Please Me”
- Beatlemania and A Hard Day’s Night
- Reinventing rock music: “Yesterday” and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Apple and Abbey Road
- The dream is over: the Beatles’ breakup and the death of John Lennon
- Life goes on: solo projects
- Legacy
References & Edit HistoryQuick Facts & Related Topics
For Students
Quizzes
Phenomenon From Across the Pond
Related Questions
- What was Beatlemania?
- Who is Paul McCartney?
- Who was Paul McCartney’s first wife?
- What is rock music?
- How did rock music influence the emergence of folk rock?
Read Next
Behind the Scenes: 7 Historical Figures in Beatles Lyrics
The Birth of Beatlemania: Observing a Fifty-Year (1963–2013) Milestone
10 Musical Acts That Scored 10 #1 Hits
Did the Beatles Really Say They Were More Popular than Jesus?
All 119 References in “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Explained
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10 Great Sports RivalriesEntertainment & Pop CultureMusic, Contemporary GenresRock Music
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Also known as: Fab Four, the Silver Beetles
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James E. Miller
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Quick FactsFormerly called: the Quarrymen or the Silver BeetlesByname: Fab FourAwards And Honors: Academy AwardGrammy Award for best new artistGrammy Award (2025)Grammy Award (2024)Grammy Award (1996)Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (1988)Grammy Award (1967)Grammy Award (1964)(Show more)Notable Works: “Abbey Road”“Beatles for Sale”“Let It Be”“Please Please Me”“Revolver”“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”“The Beatles”(Show more)Role In: British Invasion Show More
Top Questions
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The Fab Four. John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The Beatles were four young musicians from the working-class seaport city of Liverpool, England, who accomplished nothing less than changing the course of rock and roll and transforming youth culture. From 1962, the year that Ringo Starr joined up with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, until 1970, the year the quartet split up, the Beatles served as the global polestar for the hopes and dreams of the generation that came of age in the 1960s.
Making their name with traditional, perfectly crafted pop songs such as “She Loves You” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” they soon began experimenting with more challenging instrumentation, introspective lyrics, and music genres ranging from folk and country to chamber ballads and psychedelia. As such, the Beatles were rock music’s leading innovators in the 1960s. Songs such as “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” not only became immortal pop songs but also changed the nature of songwriting.
Perhaps more remarkable than the Beatles’ phenomenal success during the band’s short run is their enduring popularity with generations born decades after the band’s breakup. One of the most profoundly influential musical acts in history, the group inspired too many rock and pop artists to possibly list.Britannica QuizThat Swinging ’60s Quiz
Principal band members
- John Lennon (born October 9, 1940, Liverpool, Merseyside, England—died December 8, 1980, New York City, New York, U.S.)
- Paul McCartney (born June 18, 1942, Liverpool)
- George Harrison (born February 25, 1943, Liverpool—died November 29, 2001, Los Angeles, California, U.S.)
- Ringo Starr (born July 7, 1940, Liverpool)
Other early members
- Stuart Sutcliffe (born June 23, 1940, Edinburgh, Scotland—died April 10, 1962, Hamburg, West Germany)
- Pete Best (born November 24, 1941, Madras [now Chennai], India)
Early years
Formed around the nucleus of Lennon and McCartney, who first performed together in Liverpool in 1957, the group grew out of a shared enthusiasm for American rock and roll. Like most early rock-and-roll figures, Lennon, a guitarist and singer, and McCartney, a bassist and singer, were largely self-taught as musicians. Precocious composers, they gathered around themselves a changing cast of accompanists, adding by the end of 1957 Harrison, a lead guitarist, and then, in 1960 for several formative months, Stuart Sutcliffe, a promising young painter who brought into the band a brooding sense of bohemian style. After dabbling in skiffle, a jaunty sort of folk music popular in Britain in the late 1950s, and assuming several different names (the Quarrymen, the Silver Beetles, and, finally, the Beatles), the band added a drummer, Pete Best, and joined a small but booming “beat music” scene, first in Liverpool and then, during several long visits between 1960 and 1962, in Hamburg, West Germany—another seaport full of sailors thirsty for American rock and roll as a backdrop for their drinking and carousing.
First success: Brian Epstein, George Martin, and “Please Please Me”
In autumn 1961 Brian Epstein, a local Liverpool record store manager, saw the band and fell in love. Unshakably convinced of their commercial potential, Epstein became their manager and proceeded to bombard the major British music companies with letters and tape recordings of the band, finally winning a contract with Parlophone, a subsidiary of the giant EMI group of music labels. The man in charge of their career at Parlophone was George Martin, a classically trained musician who from the start put his stamp on the Beatles, first by suggesting the band hire a more polished drummer (they chose Starr) and then by rearranging their second recorded song (and first big British hit), “Please Please Me,” changing it from a slow dirge into an up-tempo romp.
Beatlemania and A Hard Day’s Night
Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1963, the Beatles continued their rise to fame in England by producing spirited recordings of original tunes and playing classic American rock and roll on a variety of British Broadcasting Corporation radio programs. In these months, fascination with the Beatles—at first confined to young British fans of popular music—breached the normal barriers of taste, class, and age, transforming their recordings and live performances into matters of widespread public comment. In the fall of that year, when they belatedly made a couple of appearances on British television, the evidence of popular frenzy prompted British newspapers to coin a new word for the phenomenon: Beatlemania. In early 1964, after equally tumultuous appearances on American television, the same phenomenon erupted in the United States and provoked a so-called British Invasion of Beatles imitators from the United Kingdom.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rYDWYcpdMAQ?rel=0Beatlemania was something new. Musicians performing in the 19th century certainly excited a frenzy—one thinks of Franz Liszt—but that was before the modern mass media created the possibility of collective frenzy. By the summer of 1964, when the Beatles appeared in A Hard Day’s Night, a movie that dramatized the phenomenon of Beatlemania, the band’s effect was evident around the world as countless young people emulated the band members’ characteristic long hair, flip humor, and whimsical displays of devil-may-care abandon. Indeed, their transformative social and cultural influence was even recognized among the upper echelons of political power. In 1965 each of the four Beatles was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), having been recommended for the honor by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (and despite a brief storm of protest by some previous recipients, mainly military veterans, against what they perceived as a lowering of the dignity of the royal order).
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Reinventing rock music: “Yesterday” and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
The popular hubbub proved to be a spur, convincing Lennon and McCartney of their songwriting abilities and sparking an outpouring of creative experimentation all but unprecedented in the history of rock music, which until then had been widely regarded as essentially a genre for juveniles. Between 1965 and 1967 the music of the Beatles rapidly changed and evolved, becoming ever more subtle, sophisticated, and varied. Their repertoire in these years ranged from the chamber pop ballad “Yesterday” and the enigmatic folk tune “Norwegian Wood” (both in 1965) to the hallucinatory hard rock song “Tomorrow Never Knows” (1966), with a lyric inspired by Timothy Leary’s handbook The Psychedelic Experience (1964). It also included the carnivalesque soundscape of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (1967), which featured stream-of-consciousness lyrics by Lennon and a typically imaginative arrangement (by George Martin) built around randomly spliced-together snippets of recorded steam organs—a tour de force of technological legerdemain quite typical of the band’s studio work in this era.
In 1966 the Beatles retired from public performing to concentrate on exploiting the full resources of the recording studio. A year later, in June 1967, this period of widely watched creative renewal climaxed with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album avidly greeted by young people around the world as indisputable evidence not only of the band’s genius but also of the era’s utopian promise. More than a band of musicians, the Beatles had come to personify, certainly in the minds of millions of young listeners, the joys of a new counterculture of hedonism and uninhibited experimentation—with music and with new ways of life. Various members of the band in these years flirted with mind-expanding drugs such as LSD and also with spiritual exercises such as transcendental meditation, a technique taught to them by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a barnstorming guru from India.
In those years the Beatles effectively reinvented the meaning of rock and roll as a cultural form. The American artists they admired and chose to emulate—Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, the pioneering rock composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the influential soul songwriter Smokey Robinson, and, after 1964, folksinger and topical songwriter Bob Dylan—became widely regarded as canonic sources of inspiration, offering “classical” models for aspiring younger rock musicians. At the same time, the original songs the Beatles wrote and recorded dramatically expanded the musical range and expressive scope of the genre they had inherited. Their close vocal harmonies, subtle arrangements, and clever production touches, combined with an elemental rhythm section anchored by Starr’s no-nonsense drumming, created new standards of excellence and beauty in rock music.
Apple and Abbey Road
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/45cYwDMibGo?rel=0After 1968 and the eruption of student protest movements in countries as different as Mexico and France, the Beatles insensibly surrendered their role as de facto leaders of an inchoate global youth culture. They nevertheless continued for several more years to record and release new music and maintained a level of popularity rarely rivaled before or since. In 1968 they launched their own record label, Apple; hoping to nurture experimental pop art, they instead produced chaos and commercial failure, apart from the work of the Beatles themselves. The band continued to enjoy widespread popularity. The following year Abbey Road went on to become one of the band’s best-loved and biggest-selling albums.
The dream is over: the Beatles’ breakup and the death of John Lennon
Meanwhile, personal disagreements magnified by the stress of symbolizing the dreams of a generation had begun to tear the band apart. Once the collaborative heart and soul of the band, Lennon and McCartney fell into bickering and mutual accusations of ill will. By now millions of dollars were at stake, and the utopian aura of the performers was in jeopardy, given the discrepancy between the band’s symbolic stature as idols of a carefree youth culture and their newfound real status as pampered plutocrats.
In the spring of 1970 the Beatles formally disbanded. In the years that followed, all four members went on to produce solo albums of variable quality and popularity. Lennon released a corrosive set of songs with his new wife, Yoko Ono, and McCartney went on to form a band, Wings, that turned out a fair number of commercially successful recordings in the 1970s. Starr and Harrison, too, initially had some success as solo artists.
In 1980 Lennon was murdered by a fan-turned-stalker outside the Dakota, an apartment building in New York City known for its celebrity tenants. The event provoked a global outpouring of grief. Lennon is memorialized in Strawberry Fields, a section of Central Park across from the Dakota that Ono landscaped in her husband’s honor.
Life goes on: solo projects
In the years that followed Lennon’s death, the surviving former Beatles continued to record and perform as solo artists. McCartney in particular remained musically active. In the pop field he produced new albums every few years. In the field of classical music he completed Liverpool Oratorio in 1991; in 1997 he supervised the recording of another symphonic work of large ambition, Standing Stone; and in 1999 he released a new classical album, Working Classical. McCartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997. Starr was also very visible in the 1990s, touring annually with his All-Star Band, a rotating group of rock veterans playing their hits on the summertime concert circuit. Beginning in 1988 Harrison recorded with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison in a loose amalgam known as the Traveling Wilburys, but, for most of the 1980s and ’90s, he had a low profile as a musician while acting as the producer of several successful films. After surviving a knife attack at his home in 1999, Harrison succumbed to a protracted battle with cancer in 2001.
Early in the 1990s McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had joined to add harmonies to two previously unreleased vocal recordings by Lennon. These new songs by “the Beatles” served as a pretext for yet another publicity blitz, aimed at creating a market for a lavishly produced quasi-historical series of archival recordings assembled under the supervision of the band and released in 1995 and 1996 as The Beatles Anthology, a collection of six compact discs that supplemented a 10-hour-long authorized video documentary of the same name. A compilation of the band’s number one singles, 1, appeared in 2000 and enjoyed worldwide success, topping the charts in several countries.
Legacy
The afterglow of Beatlemania may have disappeared, but the iconography of an era of youthful tumult had been reverently preserved for posterity. The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and Lennon (1994), McCartney (1999), Harrison (2004), and Starr (2015) were also inducted as individuals. In September 2009 specially packaged digitally remastered versions of the Beatles’ entire catalog and a Beatles version of the popular electronic music game Rock Band were released simultaneously. After it was reported in February 2010 that the financially troubled EMI was soliciting buyers for its Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles made the great majority of their recordings, the British Department for Culture, Media, and Sport declared the recording complex a historic landmark. EMI subsequently announced that it would retain ownership of the iconic studio while seeking outside investment to improve its facilities.
James E. MillerThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Also known as: rock ’n’ roll
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Greg Kot
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Last Updated: Dec 20, 2024 • Article HistoryAlso called: rock ’n’ roll or rock & rollKey People: Elvis PresleyPaul McCartneyJohn LennonChuck BerryBuddy HollyRelated Topics: rock
rock and roll, style of popular music that originated in the United States in the mid-1950s and that evolved by the mid-1960s into the more encompassing international style known as rock music, though the latter also continued to be known as rock and roll.
Rock and roll has been described as a merger of country music and rhythm and blues, but, if it were that simple, it would have existed long before it burst into the national consciousness. The seeds of the music had been in place for decades, but they flowered in the mid-1950s when nourished by a volatile mix of Black culture and white spending power. Black vocal groups such as the Dominoes and the Spaniels began combining gospel-style harmonies and call-and-response singing with earthy subject matter and more aggressive rhythm-and-blues rhythms. Heralding this new sound were disc jockeys such as Alan Freed of Cleveland, Ohio, Dewey Phillips of Memphis, Tennessee, and William (“Hoss”) Allen of WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee—who created rock-and-roll radio by playing hard-driving rhythm-and-blues and raunchy blues records that introduced white suburban teenagers to a culture that sounded more exotic, thrilling, and illicit than anything they had ever known. In 1954 that sound coalesced around an image: that of a handsome white singer, Elvis Presley, who sounded like a Black man.
Presley’s nondenominational taste in music incorporated everything from hillbilly rave-ups and blues wails to pop-crooner ballads. Yet his early recordings with producer Sam Phillips, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black for in Memphis were less about any one style than about a feeling. For decades African Americans had used the term rock and roll as a euphemism for sex, and Presley’s music oozed sexuality. Presley was hardly the only artist who embodied this attitude, but he was clearly a catalyst in the merger of Black and white culture into something far bigger and more complex than both.
https://d3292e629aa9e05ee17f5cfdf4c07a6e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.htmlBritannica QuizSound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz
In Presley’s wake, the music of Black singers such as Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley, who might have been considered rhythm-and-blues artists only years before, fit alongside the rockabilly-flavoured tunes of white performers such as Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, and Jerry Lee Lewis, in part because they were all now addressing the same audience: teenagers. For young white America, this new music was a soundtrack for rebellion, however mild. When Bill Haley and His Comets kicked off the 1955 motion picture Blackboard Jungle with “Rock Around the Clock,” teens in movie houses throughout the United States stomped on their seats. Movie stars such as Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) oozed sullen, youthful defiance that was echoed by the music. This emerging rock-and-roll culture brought a wave of condemnations from religious leaders, government officials, and parents’ groups, who branded it the “devil’s music.”
The music industry’s response was to sanitize the product: it had clean-cut, nonthreatening artists such as Pat Boone record tame versions of Little Richard songs, and it manufactured a legion of pretty-boy crooners such as Frankie Avalon and Fabian who thrived on and who would essentially serve as the Perry Comos and Bing Crosbys for a new generation of listeners. By the end of the 1950s, Presley had been inducted into the army, Holly had died in a plane crash, and Little Richard had converted to gospel. Rock and roll’s golden era had ended, and the music entered a transitional phase characterized by a more sophisticated approach: the orchestrated wall of sound erected by Phil Spector, the “hit factory” singles churned out by Motown records, and the harmony-rich surf fantasies of the Beach Boys. By the mid-1960s this sophistication allowed the music greater freedom than ever before, and it fragmented into numerous styles that became known simply as rock.
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Liverpool
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Liverpool, city and seaport, northwestern England, forming the nucleus of the metropolitan county of Merseyside in the historic county of Lancashire. The city proper, which is a metropolitan borough of Merseyside, forms an irregular crescent along the north shore of the Mersey estuary a few miles from the Irish Sea.
The first significant date in the history of Liverpool is 1207, when King John of England granted a charter for a planned new town there. The town’s medieval growth was slow, but in the 18th century it expanded rapidly as a result of profitable trade with the Americas and the West Indies and became the second most important port in Britain. A major element in the general trading pattern was the Liverpool Triangle—the exchange of manufactured goods from the Mersey hinterland for slaves in West Africa who were in turn traded for sugar, molasses, spices, and other plantation crops in the West Indies.
The first dock in Liverpool was built in 1715. By the end of the century, four other docks had been established along the Mersey, so that the port outranked even London in dock space. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first in England to link two major cities, was opened. A rail network providing easy and cheap access to all major British industrial centres was soon created, and steam ferry links between Liverpool and the Wirral, across the Mersey estuary, were established. This growth was accompanied by high levels of immigration from surrounding areas and from Ireland, especially during and after the Irish Potato Famine (1845–49).Britannica QuizAnother Great British Vocabulary Quiz, Innit?
By the beginning of the 20th century, Liverpool had become the centre of 7 miles (11 km) of docks extending along the Mersey from Hornby (1884) in the north to Herculaneum (1866) in the south. Additional improvements were made to the docks, but after World War II Liverpool declined as an exporting and passenger port. That change can be attributed mainly to the decreasing significance, in the economic life of Britain, of Liverpool’s industrial hinterland and its traditional trade with the United States and West Africa. Low capital investment and unemployment in the docks intensified the situation.
Liverpool continues to exert a great degree of dominance over the surrounding metropolitan region. Although the traditional activities of transport, communication, distribution, and shipping have declined, they are still important in the economic life of the city. The port, in addition to handling general cargo, has developed as a major facility for containerized shipping, and in 2012 it became a terminus for cruise ships. The docklands and several areas of the historic centre of the city collectively were named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. However, that designation was rescinded in 2021 because of developments that have caused “the irreversible loss of attributes.”
Paramount among Liverpool’s important contributions to 20th-century popular culture were the Beatles, who emerged from the Cavern (a nightclub that was part of the city’s musical scene in the 1960s) to become the world’s best-known rock group. Local “performance” poets such as Roger McGough, Adrian Henri, and Brian Patten helped popularize poetry in the 1960s. And from the heyday of the music hall to the radio comedy of Tommy Handley in the 1940s, Liverpudlians contributed to the British comedy tradition. Tourism has grown in importance and includes a rise in interest for visiting locations associated with the Beatles.
Architectural landmarks include the 18th-century Town Hall and the 19th-century St. George’s Hall; the Neo-Gothic Anglican cathedral, founded in 1904 and completed in 1978; and the Roman Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral (1967), of strikingly modern design. Tate Liverpool (a branch of the national Tate galleries), Merseyside County Museum and Library, the Walker Art Gallery, the Picton Library, the International Slave Museum, and the University of Liverpool (chartered 1881) are among the many cultural institutions. Liverpool also has a well-known symphony orchestra, and the city is home to two world-class professional football (soccer) teams (Everton and Liverpool FC). Area 43 square miles (112 square km). Pop. (2001) city, 439,473; urban agglom., 816,216; (2011) city, 466,415; urban agglom., 864,122.
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.
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Article HistoryKey People: Benjamin BrittenCosima WagnerElizabeth Penn Sprague CoolidgeRelated Topics: rock festivalNewport Folk FestivalBBC PromsLollapaloozaBonnaroo Music and Arts Festival(Show more)
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music festival, usually a series of performances at a particular place and inspired by a unifying theme, such as national music, modern music, or the promotion of a prominent composer’s works. It may also take the form of a competition for performers or composers.
Series of religious services associated with a given feast early established the idea of the music festival in the church. The term festival in its modern sense, however, was first used in England. The Festival of the Sons of the Clergy, originally an annual charity sermon, was first given at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 1655; it took on a musical character in 1698. The famed Three Choirs Festival was established in 1724 (an earlier form existed in 1715) and continues to take place annually and in rotation at the cathedral cities of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford. Harp festivals were held in Ireland toward the end of the 18th century.
Festivals of secular music in England came into being in the 18th century; the first devoted to George Frideric Handel was held in 1784 in Westminster Abbey, London. Handel festivals continued almost without interruption well into the 20th century, including the triennial Handel Festivals held at the Crystal Palace, near London, from 1857 until the building burned in 1936. The Birmingham Festival (1768, triennial from 1769 until 1912) was originally devoted to Handel’s music but was extended to include that of other composers in the 1800s. During the 18th and 19th centuries, festivals, mostly choral, were developed in various cities in England; they include the Leeds Festival (triennial). The Glyndebourne Festival (for opera) was established in 1934 in Sussex, and the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama was inaugurated in 1947; the Cheltenham Festival, initiated in 1945, is devoted to modern music.Britannica QuizSound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz
In the United States, several large-scale choral festivals on the English model were held in the 19th century. In 1869 and 1872 the celebrated bandmaster Patrick Gilmore organized two Peace Jubilee festivals, featuring choirs of 20,000 and orchestras of 1,000, plus artillery firing and bells. Annual chamber-music festivals, performing specially commissioned works, were established by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (Pittsfield, Mass., 1918), and more specialized ones followed in the 20th century. In 1937 the conductor Serge Koussevitzky inaugurated the Berkshire Festival at Tanglewood, near Lenox, Mass. The annual Newport, R.I., jazz festival (1954) also became prominent. Many rock-music festivals were held in the 1960s and ’70s. In Puerto Rico the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals established a noted festival in 1957. Other Latin-American festivals have been held in Caracas, Venez.; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Arg.
Numerous festivals were held annually in German cities during the 19th century. The Bayreuth Festival was inaugurated by the German composer Richard Wagner in 1876 to present his operas and music dramas in a specially built opera house. In Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birthplace, the first Mozart festival was held in 1877. Later including works by many composers, it became an annual summer event from 1920. Especially important among European opera festivals is that held in Munich (established 1901), devoted mainly to the work of Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Wagner. Other prominent European festivals include the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (Florence Musical May), held annually from 1933; the Spoleto, Italy, festival, inaugurated by the composer Gian Carlo Menotti (1958); and the festivals held at Besançon and Aix-en-Provence, Fr., from 1948. Adventurous modern works, including electronic music, are heard each summer at the Darmstadt, Ger., festivals (1946).
The International Society for Contemporary Music promotes modern works of novel nature; formed in 1922, it has held summer festivals in various European and U.S. cities. The first festival of music and drama at Ōsaka, Japan, was held in 1958.
Contests of artistic skill, including music, are ancient; musical competitions were part of the 6th-century-bc Pythian Games at Delphi. The eisteddfod in Wales—originally a festival for bards (poet-singers), but now including other arts—had its beginnings in the 12th century or earlier, and in the 12th century the troubadours held musical competitions, the puys, at Puy Notre Dame, near Saumur, in France. The song contest organized by the Meistersingers at Wartburg, Ger., dates from the 13th century.
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In 18th-century England local singing competitions were held by groups of singers at taverns. In the 19th century, singing and brass-band competitions between amateur musicians became popular and were adjudicated by prominent figures.
In the United States in 1790, singers from Dorchester and Stoughton, Mass., competed at Dorchester. Similar amateur activity among students was later encouraged; and in the 20th century, band, choral, and orchestral competitions among schools and colleges were organized on a large scale.
In the 20th century a new form of international competition was organized to promote the careers of professional performers. Such competition festivals include the Chopin International Competition for Pianists (begun 1927, Warsaw); the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium prize for violinists, pianists, and composers (begun 1937, Brussels); and the Tchaikovsky competition for pianists, violinists, and cellists (begun 1958, Moscow).
This article was most recently revised and updated by Heather Campbell.
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British Invasion
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Last Updated: Jan 23, 2025 • Article History
Quick FactsDate: 1964 – 1967Location: United StatesKey People: DonovanDusty SpringfieldOn the Web: University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo – The Original British Invasion (PDF) (Jan. 23, 2025)
British Invasion, musical movement of the mid-1960s composed of British rock-and-roll (“beat”) groups whose popularity spread rapidly to the United States.
The Beatles’ triumphant arrival in New York City on February 7, 1964, opened America’s doors to a wealth of British musical talent. What followed would be called—with historical condescension by the willingly reconquered colony—the second British Invasion. Like their transatlantic counterparts in the 1950s, British youth heard their future in the frantic beats and suggestive lyrics of American rock and roll. But initial attempts to replicate it failed. Lacking the indigenous basic ingredients—rhythm and blues and country music—of rock and roll, enthusiasts could bring only crippling British decorum and diffidence. The only sign of life was in the late 1950s skiffle craze, spearheaded by Scotland’s Lonnie Donegan. Skiffle groups (like the Beatles-launching Quarrymen) were drummerless acoustic guitar-and-banjo ensembles, jug bands really, who most often sang traditional American folk songs, frequently with more spirit than instrumental polish.
By 1962, encouraged by the anyone-can-play populism of skiffle and self-schooled in the music of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, James Brown, and Muddy Waters, some British teens had a real feel for the rock-and-roll idiom. Blending that with such local traditions as dancehall, pop, and Celtic folk, they formulated original music they could claim, play, and sing with conviction. Young groups with electric guitars began performing and writing up-tempo melodic pop, fiery rock and roll, and Chicago-style electric blues.Britannica QuizPhenomenon From Across the Pond
Liverpool became the first hotbed of the so-called “beat boom.” With the Beatles, other exuberant male quartets such as the Searchers, the Fourmost, and Gerry and the Pacemakers—plus the quintet Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas—launched “Merseybeat,” so named for the estuary that runs alongside Liverpool. The Beatles first reached the British record charts in late 1962 (shortly after the Tornados’ “Telstar,” an instrumental smash that sent word of what was in store by becoming the first British record to top the American singles chart); the rest joined the hit parade in 1963.
Rock swept Britain. By 1964 Greater London could claim the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Kinks, the Pretty Things, Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, and Manfred Mann. Manchester had the Hollies, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Herman’s Hermits. Newcastle had the Animals. And Birmingham had the Spencer Davis Group (featuring Steve Winwood) and the Moody Blues. Bands sprang up from Belfast (Them, with Van Morrison) to St. Albans (the Zombies), with more inventive artists arriving to keep the styles moving forward, including the Small Faces, the Move, the Creation, the Troggs, Donovan, the Walker Brothers, and John’s Children.
While the beat boom provided Britons relief from the postimperial humiliation of hand-me-down rock, the Beatles and their ilk brought the United States more than credible simulations. They arrived as foreign ambassadors, with distinctive accents (in conversation only; most of the groups sang in “American”), slang, fashions, and personalities. The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), further painted England as the center of the (rock) universe. American media took the bait and made Carnaby Street, London’s trendy fashion center in the 1960s, a household name.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yxrz00XSOAo?rel=0From 1964 to 1966 the United Kingdom sent a stream of hits across the Atlantic. Behind the conquering Beatles, Peter and Gordon (“A World Without Love”), the Animals (“House of the Rising Sun”), Manfred Mann (“Do Wah Diddy Diddy”), Petula Clark (“Downtown”), Freddie and the Dreamers (“I’m Telling You Now”), Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders (“Game of Love”), Herman’s Hermits (“Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”), the Rolling Stones (“[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction” and others), the Troggs (“Wild Thing”), and Donovan (“Sunshine Superman”) all topped Billboard’s singles chart. These charming invaders had borrowed (often literally) American rock music and returned it—restyled and refreshed—to a generation largely ignorant of its historical and racial origins. In April 1966 Time magazine effectively raised the white flag with a cover story on “London: The Swinging City.” Peace quickly followed; by the pivotal year 1967 a proliferation of English and American bands were equal partners in one international rock culture.
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The term British Invasion has been resurrected to refer to succeeding waves of British artists who have swept American rock charts, beginning in the early 1980s with the pop and new-wave bands that made up the “Second British Invasion,” such as the Police, New Order, Duran Duran, Wham!, Culture Club, and the Eurythmics.
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