ABSTRACT
Revolver is the first Beatles' album showing the combined marks of the group's experimental period. The compositions exploit the sound and feel of classical and Indian instruments, the mood of nostalgic and drowsy, psychedelic lyrics and the impact of subtle studio sound effects. In the harmonies the authors find a real flood of flat-sevenths. Looking at the harmonic technicalities of 'the Revolver compositions the authors show how the Beatles successfully put the fiatseventh chord to full use in that album: harmonically to underpin their surprising melodies, and semantically to stress the meaning of their lyrics. In the songs of the Beatles the flat-seventh often will shift back and forth between its folk and blues variants. The system of diagonal substitution thus accounts for most of the Beatles' chord and song characteristics. Along the diagonal lines, chords are treated as substitutes for the subtonic, tonic and dominant.
