ABSTRACT
This chapter assumes that many fans who had been waiting impatiently for the Beatles' new album thought for the first few seconds that the clerk had accidentally wrapped up a classical album. Classical and psychedelic music delimit the eclectic, multistylistic and multigenre nature of Sgt. Pepper. Psychedelia, in contrast, is associated with altered states of consciousness – hallucinations, dreams, or the supernatural. The Beatles used musical instruments and ensembles associated with the classical world. The selection of instruments and the presence of classical soloists in the Beatles' recording studio have led to an abundance of oft-repeated anecdotes; this is not the place to mention them. If the songs on Revolver constitute a sort of psychedelic-classical mixture, on Sgt. Pepper the psycheclassical synthesis is already at its best. The chapter suggests that in the Beatles' music 'classical' and 'psychedelic' are not separate entities but interactive ones.
