Wednesday, 4 December 2024

Join the Ancient Yuletide Carol

 For context I used to go out with a harper, and I look back very fondly on her and the instrument. The best question I asked somebody on a first date was "so on a harp do you get seven notes or all twelve?"

I also have a lot of affection for the Black Sabbath song "War Pigs" because it's taken the general public over 50 years to notice that the cadence of the vocal melody is the same as "Deck the Halls" and now that they have the crossover is epic.

"Generals gather in their masses"
"'Tis the season to be jolly"
"Just like witches at black masses"
"Deck the halls with boughs of holly"

I like it when youtube throws me a curveball. I usually don't like videos of the form "x reacts to y". The real entertainment is in y, and watching x's face change as they watch the video, or listening to x whitter on about it doesn't add anything. However I was absolutely captivated by a classical musician reacting to the heavy metal song "War Pigs". This was a pretty middle aged woman with a harp and a piano behind her listening carefully to heavy metal from 1970 and explaining it. At one point she leaned her harp towards her and picked out the main notes that Ozzy Osbourne was singing to show us that it was an E minor arpeggio. At another she was trying to understand what Tony Iommi was playing and she was playing it on an imaginary air harp.

Richard "Blogger reacts to Classical Musician Reacts to Heavy Metal" B

No comments:

Post a Comment