Professor Called Led Zeppelin "Musically Simple" — Then the Quiet Student Went to the Board

[00:00:00]Professor called Led Zeppelin musically simple. Then the quiet student went to the board. The Royal College of Music on Prince Consort Road in South Kensington occupied a Victorian Gothic building whose architecture communicated with considerable architectural confidence that serious things happened inside it.

[00:00:21]The building had been training musicians since 1883 and the weight of that history was present in every corridor and lecture hall and the portraits of former directors that lined the walls, in the particular quality of sound that the building seemed to hold even when no one was playing.

[00:00:39]Professor Edmund Carr had been teaching advanced harmony and composition in this building for 32 years. He was 58 years old, had completed his doctorate in musicology at Oxford and had spent his career developing what he considered to be the most rigorous approach to harmonic analysis available in British music education. He was respected by his colleagues, genuinely admired by many of his students and absolutely certain about certain things that he was not, in fact, absolutely right about. One of these things was popular music.

[00:01:14]The February seminar on complexity and sophistication in modern composition was meeting in its usual room on the third floor, a high-ceiling space with tall windows that let in the gray London afternoon and rows of desks that faced a blackboard and a piano. 15 graduate students were arranged around the room with the comfortable familiarity of people who had been meeting in the same space twice a week since October. They were serious musicians, people who could read a Bartok score and hold a discussion about voice leading in late Shostakovich and they had come to trust Professor Carr's teaching even when they sometimes found his conclusions too absolute.

[00:01:58]The door opened quietly about 10 minutes into the session.

[00:02:02]A young man came in and took a seat at the back of the room without making any particular fuss about his lateness. He was wearing plain clothes, a jacket that had been good sometime ago, dark jeans, his hair longer than most of the other students. He carried a notebook that was unusual in one respect. The pages were covered in staff notation, not words, suggesting he thought in musical terms before verbal ones.

[00:02:29]Professor Carr looked up. "Can I help you?"

[00:02:32]"Sorry I'm late," the young man said.

[00:02:35]"I'm auditing. I arranged it with the department yesterday." Carr vaguely recalled an email about an audit request. "Name?"

[00:02:43]"James. James Patterson."

[00:02:46]"Mr. Patterson, please don't make a habit of being late. We're discussing harmonic complexity." "Won't happen again." The young man opened his notebook and picked up a pen. Carr returned to his lecture.

[00:03:00]The session was building toward a central argument that Carr had been developing for most of the autumn term, that harmonic sophistication, the quality that separated music worth serious analytical attention from music that did not merit it, was measurable, demonstrable, and consistently present in the classical tradition in ways that popular music could not match. He was not a philistine. He acknowledged that popular music had social value, emotional resonance, cultural significance. He simply did not believe it had harmonic depth. He was demonstrating this afternoon with a series of examples drawn from both traditions. He had put up a passage from Bartok's string quartet number four and spent 20 minutes walking through the harmonic language, showing the students how the modal scales interacted, how the voice leading created tension through semitonal movement, how the rhythmic displacement created implied harmonies that existed in the listener's ear rather than on the page. It was excellent teaching, clear and precise, and genuinely illuminating. Then he turned to the contrast. "Now let's consider something from the other end of the spectrum," he said. "Led Zeppelin, an enormously successful group. Their album Led Zeppelin IV sold something on the order of 23 million copies worldwide. Their song Stairway to Heaven is played on radio stations every hour of every day." He turned to the blackboard and wrote out the chord structure of the song's acoustic introduction. "A minor, G F G, repeat.

[00:04:40]Then a modulation to a major section.

[00:04:43]That's the harmonic structure of one of the most commercially successful songs in rock history. A minor to G to F to G.

[00:04:52]This is first-year harmony. A competent first-year student at this college could have written this progression.

[00:04:59]He let that sit for a moment. Let me show you another example from the same group." He erased the board and wrote out what he described as the harmonic structure of Kashmir. D modal. The guitar and bass both operate in D Dorian for the verse sections.

[00:05:17]There is minimal harmonic movement. The chorus introduces a contrasting section, but returns to the modal drone. Again, the harmonic sophistication here is extremely limited. This is not composition in any meaningful sense. It is repetition with production values."

[00:05:35]He sat down the chalk. "I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting Led Zeppelin have no musical value. Clearly they connect with an enormous audience, but they connect through elements that are not harmonic, through volume, through rhythm, through the personality of the performers, not through the musical intelligence that we analyze in this room.

[00:05:57]In the back of the room, the young man who had introduced himself as James Patterson had stopped writing. His pen was resting on the page. He was very still in the way that people are still when they are paying closer attention than their stillness suggests.

[00:06:14]The distinction I'm drawing, Carr continued, is between music that rewards harmonic analysis and music that does not because there is not sufficient harmonic complexity to analyze. Led Zeppelin falls into the second category.

[00:06:29]The young man raised his hand.

[00:06:31]Carr looked up, slightly surprised.

[00:06:34]Auditors rarely participated. Yes, Mr. Patterson?

[00:06:38]I don't think the analysis is complete, the young man said. His voice was quiet and unhurried. I beg your pardon? The harmonic structure you've written on the board, it's accurate as far as it goes.

[00:06:51]But it doesn't show what's actually happening in the music. Professor Carr set down the chalk he had picked back up. He had encountered this kind of challenge before, usually from students who had an emotional attachment to popular music and responded to theoretical critique with enthusiasm rather than argument. He gave the young man the smile that experience had made his default response to this situation, patient, slightly indulgent. That's the standard notation. It represents the harmonic structure as it exists.

[00:07:24]It represents one layer of the harmonic structure, the young man said, the surface layer.

[00:07:30]Music theory analyzes the harmonic surface. Classical music theory analyzes the harmonic surface, the young man said, because in classical music the harmonic surface is where much of the complexity lives. In this music, the complexity lives underneath the surface.

[00:07:49]The chord chart is the skeleton. You're analyzing the skeleton and concluding there's no body.

[00:07:55]Several students turned to look at this auditor who was speaking with such precision and such certainty. This was not enthusiasm. This was something else.

[00:08:05]"Mr. Patterson," Carr said, "I appreciate your perspective, but I've been analyzing music for 30 years. I think I understand the difference between surface harmony and deeper structure.

[00:08:18]May I show you something on the board?"

[00:08:20]Carr hesitated. This was not how his seminars typically proceeded, but the young man's confidence was unusual, and there was something in the specificity of his language that made Carr curious rather than simply dismissive. "Go ahead."

[00:08:36]The young man stood and walked to the front of the room. He picked up the chalk, and then he began to write. And what he wrote was not chord symbols or a simple analytical reduction. It was staff notation, four separate staves written quickly and with an accuracy that suggested the ability to transcribe from internal hearing rather than from a score in front of him.

[00:09:00]"This is the opening of 'Kashmir,' the young man said, not the chord chart, the actual harmonic content." He pointed to the lowest stave, the bass in D. "But look at what it's actually doing." He marked several specific notes. "The bass is playing D, C, B flat, A, a descending figure, while the guitar is holding D sus 4. These two voices are in counterpoint. The bass is moving while the guitar suspends. The tension between them is not visible in the chord chart, which just says D modal, but the tension is there. It's creating harmonic movement within a static chord.

[00:09:42]He moved to the next stave, the guitar voicing. The sus4 means the fourth is held above the third. This creates ambiguity. The ear cannot decide if it's major, minor, or neither. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is the point.

[00:09:59]Sustained harmonic ambiguity is one of the most sophisticated tools in modal composition. Debussy uses it constantly.

[00:10:07]So does Ravel.

[00:10:09]Several students had left their seats and were gathered near the front of the room looking at the board. "Here, in measure three," the young man continued, marking the score. "The bass descends to A, while the guitar still holds the sus4. Now we have D sus4 over A. This is an inversion that doesn't exist in the chord chart. It creates a completely different harmonic color. The chord chart says D-modal. The music says something considerably more specific."

[00:10:39]Professor Carr walked toward the board.

[00:10:42]He was looking at the notation with a different expression than the one he had been wearing three minutes ago.

[00:10:48]"Now watch what happens when the rhythm guitar enters," the young man said, drawing on a third stave. "It plays a figure that is rhythmically displaced against the bass line. The downbeats don't align. This rhythmic displacement creates what functions as harmonic suspension, the sense of tension and delayed resolution that in classical harmony would be produced by a literal suspended chord. But here, it's produced by rhythmic means. It achieves a harmonic effect through rhythm."

[00:11:20]He stepped back slightly and looked at what he had written. "The chord chart says this is a simple modal piece with minimal harmonic movement. What's actually happening is multiple independent voices creating harmonic complexity through counterpoint, inversion, and rhythmic displacement.

[00:11:39]These are the same techniques that you just analyzed in the Bartok quartet.

[00:11:43]They're applied differently through performance rather than notation, but the principles are identical.

[00:11:49]The room was very quiet.

[00:11:52]The acoustic introduction to Stairway to Heaven, the young man continued, turning to write on a fresh section of board.

[00:11:59]You said A minor to G to F to G. First year harmony. He wrote out the bassline separately from the chord symbols. The bass descends chromatically. A, G sharp, G, F sharp, F. Against that chromatic bassline, the chords change at different rates. The result is that every beat implies a different harmony regardless of what the chord symbol indicates.

[00:12:26]There are seven distinct harmonic colors produced by four chord symbols. He put down the chalk.

[00:12:33]Carr examined the notation for a long moment. It was correct. It was more than correct. It was the kind of analysis that he would expect from his most gifted students, and it came from someone who had identified himself as an auditor who had arranged his attendance only yesterday.

[00:12:52]Where did you study? Carr asked.

[00:12:55]I didn't. Not formally.

[00:12:57]Then how do you have this level of theoretical understanding?

[00:13:01]The young man looked at him steadily. I don't think of it as theory. I think of it as what I was trying to do when I wrote it.

[00:13:09]The room processed this sentence in parts. When I wrote it. Wrote what? The notation on the board. But the notation on the board was an analysis of I'm sorry, Carr said. You wrote Kashmir, yes. And Stairway to Heaven.

[00:13:26]And the other pieces you've been discussing.

[00:13:29]You wrote them. Yes.

[00:13:31]A student near the front said, very quietly, "Kashmir was written by Jimmy Page." Carr looked at the young man. He looked at him the way you look at something when the context around it has changed and you are trying to see it correctly in the new context. The jacket, the long hair, the notebook full of staff notation rather than words, the quality of certainty in everything he had said.

[00:13:56]"Mr. Patterson," Carr said slowly.

[00:13:59]"My name isn't Patterson," the young man said. "I apologize for that. I wanted to observe the class without the" He paused, choosing the word, "without the complications that come with being recognized." He was Jimmy Page.

[00:14:15]The seminar room at the Royal College of Music on Prince Consort Road, which had seen a great deal in its 90 years, had perhaps not seen quite this. Several students were struggling to reconcile what they were looking at with what they knew about how the world worked. The guitarist of Led Zeppelin, whose music Professor Carr had just described as musically unsophisticated, was standing at the front of the room next to a blackboard covered in his own analytical notation of his own compositions.

[00:14:47]Carr sat on the edge of his desk. He was not a man who embarrassed easily, but he was a man who thought seriously, and he was thinking seriously now about what had just happened. "I've been teaching for 32 years," he said finally, "that popular music cannot achieve harmonic sophistication.

[00:15:06]I've been teaching that specific lesson for at least six of those years. I know," Jimmy said. "Someone who attended one of your lectures told me. That's partly why I wanted to come. To correct me.

[00:15:19]To have a conversation," Jimmy said.

[00:15:22]"There's a difference." He looked at the notation on the board. "You're not wrong about the chord charts. They are simple.

[00:15:28]That's intentional. The simplicity is the architecture. The complexity is what you build inside the architecture."

[00:15:37]Carr was quiet for a moment. "You're saying the simplicity is structural?

[00:15:42]Deliberate?"

[00:15:43]"In classical music, the complexity is in the score. Every layer of what you hear is written down. In this music, the score is a set of instructions. What happens to those instructions in performance, in arrangement, in the relationship between the instruments?

[00:16:00]That's where the complexity lives. The chord chart is what you tell the musicians. The music is what everyone does together."

[00:16:07]The students were sitting down again, notebooks open, though several of them were not writing. They were listening in the way that people listen when something is happening that they understand to be important and they don't want to miss any of it. "Why didn't you say something immediately?"

[00:16:24]Carr asked. "When I said those things about Led Zeppelin?"

[00:16:28]"I wanted to see if the argument held on its own," Jimmy said. "If I'd said immediately that I wrote these pieces, the conversation would have been about authority. I'm famous, you're embarrassed. We don't actually discuss anything. I wanted the conversation to be about the music. Whether the analysis was right or wrong, regardless of who made the music." Carr looked at the board, at the notation that had been produced quickly and accurately by someone who, according to every piece of conventional wisdom Carr possessed, should not have been able to produce it, who had not studied formally, who played electric guitar in a rock band, who had just demonstrated, with some precision, that the music Carr had been dismissing for years contained harmonic techniques that Carr had spent his career teaching his students to admire in other contexts.

[00:17:21]"I have a question for you." Jimmy said.

[00:17:24]"Of course."

[00:17:25]"Why does it matter to you that Led Zeppelin is simple? What does it prove if it is?"

[00:17:31]Carr was quiet for a moment. This was a different kind of question than the ones he was used to being asked. "I think," he said slowly, "I believed that popular success and musical sophistication were incompatible. That the audience for music that sells 20 million records cannot also be the audience for music that rewards serious analytical attention. That you have to choose."

[00:17:56]"We didn't choose." Jimmy said. "We didn't think about it as a choice. We made the music that was in us to make and it turned out that a lot of people wanted to hear it. I don't know what that proves about the relationship between sophistication and popularity.

[00:18:12]Probably nothing general. Just something specific about this music." After the class ended, Carr approached Jimmy before he could leave. He asked, with more tentativeness than his students had ever heard in his voice, whether Jimmy would be willing to return to speak to the students. "Not as a celebrity." he said, "as a composer."

[00:18:33]Jimmy agreed on one condition. Carr would first come to a recording session to see how the music was made before discussing what the music meant.

[00:18:42]Carr came to a session at Olympic Studios six weeks later. He sat in the control room for four hours and watched musicians who had not completed formal degrees make decisions about harmony and arrangement and voicing with a precision and deliberateness that he had not expected. He watched Jimmy stop a take after 16 bars to change a guitar voicing by a semitone, not a chord, a voicing, a single note in a chord because the color was not right. He watched the conversation between musicians who communicated in a language that was partly technical and partly physical and partly something that didn't have a formal name.

[00:19:24]He returned to the Royal College of Music changed in a way that he would describe to a colleague as clarifying.

[00:19:30]Not that he had been wrong about classical music. He had not been wrong about classical music, but he had been wrong about the category he had placed everything else in.

[00:19:40]Jimmy gave a lecture to Carr's graduate students that spring. He sat at the piano because it was easier to demonstrate voice leading at a keyboard than on a guitar and he walked them through the harmonic thinking behind several Led Zeppelin pieces showing the choices and the reasons for the choices in terms that the students could recognize from their classical training.

[00:20:02]He was not performing expertise. He was explaining something he had spent years developing through practice rather than study. And the explanation was clear.

[00:20:12]Carr published a paper in 1981 called Modal Complexity in Popular Music: A Reassessment. It appeared in a British musicology journal and was read by a small but attentive audience of music educators. In the acknowledgements, he thanked an unnamed composer who corrected my assumptions in February 1973 and made me reconsider what I thought I was hearing. The paper was quietly influential in the slow process by which academic music education began to take popular forms seriously as objects of analytical interest rather than sociological phenomena. Jimmy Page never mentioned the Royal College of Music in any interview. He did not describe the seminar or the notation on the board or the conversation with Professor Carr.

[00:21:02]Some conversations in his understanding belong to the people who were in them, and did not require public narration to have been real.

[00:21:11]The notation he had written on the blackboard that February afternoon was transcribed by a student before the room was cleaned. It circulated among Royal College students for several years, passed from hand to hand as an example of analysis that came from inside the music, rather than imposed upon it from outside. At the top of the first page, in a careful hand, someone had written a label, "This is how Kashmir actually works."

[00:21:40]Theory describes music. It does not define it. Jimmy Page walked into a room where his music had been analyzed and found simple, and demonstrated, without anger and without performance, that what looks simple from one angle is sometimes the most sophisticated thing of all. The simplicity is the achievement, not the failure. The chord chart is the architecture. The music is what happens inside. He walked in as an auditor who had given a false name. He walked out having written the most interesting thing on that blackboard all semester, and he left behind a paper with four staves of notation that showed, for anyone willing to look, how much can be happening inside a drone that has not technically moved.