George Martin became the world’s most legendary producer with the Beatles, the studio wizard who teamed up with four lads from Liverpool to transform music. Now his music has been collected in a lavish new book, George Martin: The Scores, which will be published in April by Curvebender. It’s the first collection of his music manuscripts, opening up his personal archives. The Scores honors the late Sir George Martin on the occasion of his centenary — he was born 100 years ago, on Jan. 3, 1926.
The three-volume book includes dozens of his original handwritten scores for classics like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “A Day in the Life,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Yesterday,” “Live and Let Die,” and more. It also has a foreword from one of his biggest fans and closest collaborators: Paul McCartney.
George’s son Giles Martin, an acclaimed producer in his own right, tells Rolling Stone, “It’s a book of art, if you like, because his scores are very beautiful. There’s a fluidity to it. There’s a vibrancy to looking at that music on a page.”
The Scores is a project that began in the producer’ final years, before his death in 2016. “It was a very poignant project,” Giles says. “It was an idea I had with the Curvebender guys. Actually, when my dad was ill, I thought this would be a good thing to keep him going — let’s do a book of his scores.”
Martin was deeply involved in the project, despite his declining health. “He liked the idea, and then he died. I mean, he was 90,” Giles Martin says. But the producer dug deep into his vaults. “What it is, essentially, is a selection of his scores that we have taken and perfectly reproduced, in the same way that the ‘Yesterday’ score was done all those years ago. It’s a book of his scores with commentary — a deep dive into each arrangement, the history behind it, and a deep dive into how it was done.”
These are the manuscripts Martin saved after the recording sessions. Since they were his working sheet music in the studio, they include his handwritten edits, for an inside look at his creative process. Some have his ideas for alternate arrangements that didn’t make the final cut. The book also comes with an album: orchestral re-recordings of his scores, for a closer listen to his work. They were done in Studio Two at Abbey Road, the room where Martin made so much magic happen with the Beatles.
The Standard Edition includes a USB drive with audio files. The Deluxe Edition comes in a clamshell case with a CD, a conductor’s baton, a stand-alone reproduction of a Martin score, and a Blu-Ray disc with documentary footage of the re-recording sessions at Abbey Road. And for the hardcore collectors, there’s also a limited Signature Edition personally inscribed by George Martin himself — he signed them for this project when work began, though he didn’t live to see the final result. All three editions are available now for preorder, from Curvebender.
Sir George — “Mr. Martin,” to the band — was the producer who signed John, Paul, George, and Ringo. But more than that, he made the bold decision to let them write their own songs — practically unheard-of in the pop world in those days. His background was classical music. “I’m not a rock & roll person,” he once admitted. “I used to like polo neck sweaters. Still do. And I’m partial to the odd blazer. But there was a conscious effort on my part not to conform, by not joining them. I didn’t grow my hair long until after the Beatles were ended.”
But it was his expertise that helped the band evolve and experiment, bringing their craziest ideas to life in Abbey Road. (To pick just one famous example, he composed and played the piano solo in “In My Life,” then sped it up to sound almost like a harpsichord.) From “Yesterday” to “Eleanor Rigby” to “I Am the Walrus,” his orchestrations were a crucial part of their music.
“It’s beautiful to see on the page, in his handwriting,” Giles Martin says. “For a big man, he wrote very little notes.” But those notes helped make history. “When you see it written down, you realize that no one would hear this music, including him, until it was played. And now it’s the other way around — you’re looking at the music that was played.”
