Get your master's degree in Beatles studies!

What will a person do with a master's degree in Beatles studies? No one knows, but that's not stopping Liverpool's Hope University from offering the world's first MA in "The Beatles, Popular Music and Society". Students of the Fab Four will explore the origins of rock and roll — blues, country music, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley — along with Broadway musicals and the British music-hall tradition. The Complete Beatles Chronicles and The Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn will be at the top of the reading list.

Allan Kozinn, who taught a course on The Beatles at New York University last year, says that Hope University's big advantage is that many of the places where the Beatles lived and worked (or sang about, like Penny Lane) are still there. "If you study the Beatles there, the geography of their early years becomes real," he wrote in The New York Times.

Hope University expects that social scientists doing the Beatles MA will look at the 1960s revolution the group helped create and ask if it was for the best. Musicians will concentrate on Lennon and McCartney's writing of lyrics and melodies and look for the secrets of their success.

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