RIME OF THE ANCIENT HARPER
Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 3:00pm by Vince NeilsteinOur bromance love kittens over at Metal Insider — in response to the fake Necrophagist ukulele cover — dug up a video of some dude covering Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” on a harp. Here’s to hoping this dude’s the one greeting me at the pearly gates or wherever I end up.
-VN
That’s so fucking brutal!
Not such a good idea, this re-working of metal songs on classical instruments. Tends to point out how simplistic and repetitive the vast majority of metal is, even the good stuff like Maiden.
cool story bro
Agreed, but it also show how influential classical music is to metal. The harp is so difficult to play and to play a melodic metal song from Iron Maiden is freakin sweet. There is also a cool acoustic cover of a black dahlia murder tune here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7gp8syqCBo&feature=related
I’ve seen this a long time ago.. thank you for letting me watch it again!
now THAT is badass
Sick.
I’m of the mind that clips like this are good because they illustrate the complexity of metal and the links it has to classical music, something which is lost on most people.
I completely agree. A lot of people don’t realize the influences of classical on metal.
Its true. The vast majority of people have no understanding of the influence that classical music has in metal.
Agreed. Metal really had a huge influence on classical music.
How? I see this claim made often here – please elaborate.
Well, metal requires alot of technical skill, as if it were a Bach Sonata or any other difficult work of classical music. Not just any noob can be good at metal. I especially find the connection in stuff like Opeth, Ensiferium, Alestorm, Dimmu Borgir, Ect. In fact, if you need to see a huge metal/classical correlation example, look up Progenies of the Great Apocalypse by Dimmu Borgir, featuring the Prague Symphony Orchestra. The form of good metal is often based off of lots of difficult concepts, involving recapitulating the melody, and using chordal progression modes, commonly with phases that take up 4 or 8 bars. This is excluding our math metal of groups like Meshuggah, but you get the basic idea.
Metal is most commonly in a minor key in European metal, because it is based on folk roots. The cousin of the minor scale, the blues scale, is found in a lot of the American heavy metal (God forbid I mention this band on this site, but Avenged Sevenfold comes to mind as ones who use lots of blues scales.) We also have the punk influence in American metal, so I would say that European metal had this closer correlation. Groups like Nile use harmonic minor scales, which is seen just as often in classical composers, such as Georges Bizet.
One last thing that makes metal very similar is that it is one of the frontiers of the progression of all music. One hundred years ago, Maurice Ravel was writing piano pieces that got him booed off of stages, and his music was considered completely blasphemous. Fast forward 70 years or so and you’ve got groups like Maiden, and then listen to groups out now like Napalm Death. Metal is where our music is moving, and it keeps the “heavy of the heavy” alive, just like Bach did back in 1700.
Does this all make any more sense? I explain this theory to alot of people all the time.
here’s a great video that shows the classical influence on metal heads. Great reply rachel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzOF9w8kG-c
Amazing….
this is completely mind-blowing. You have to find this guy and interview him
that is sweet, but it sounds more like a piano than a harp
the piano is very similar to the harp; in the harp, however, the strings are plucked, and not struck by hammers.
This guy is a GOD!
doesnt this dude look like Michael Berryman from the original hills have eyes?
YES! Creepy motherfucker. He can play the shit out of a harp though.
Totally awesome, thanx for posting this!