When the new NIGHTWISH music video, ‘Perfume of the Timeless’ was posted Eki sent me the link. The first thing that grabbed my attention was the 12,500+ hits it got in the first hour - a north later it has 1,3 m. I watched it, the I listened. It was way out of the 30s deco, i.e. Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, etc, I’m hooked on. But I went online to check them out.
A symphonic-metal band sounded like a contradiction. I called Eki. He said metal music is close to classical. If you played the notes on a piano it would be a tune. In the top 20 NW recordings "The Greatest Show on Earth" was number one. I listened. For me POTT was more symphonic and less metal.
I probably won’t buy headphones, or give up Billie, Louis. Ella. But will check out new recording. NIGHTWISH congrats. And ‘thanks a million'’ for clueing me in.
Sources: Eki, internet
Next week: little margie doc blog will be back in August
Iron Maiden medley with a symphony orchestra
Note: I have become a fan of the Nightwish songs I have worked on (the videos for "The Islander", "Noise" and POTT). But for some reason, I've never taken the time to listen to their full catalogue. Perhaps making a video and listening to a song hundreds if not thousands of times while working on it is so high a dosage that it deters from diving into the band more generally. Dunno.
As an example of this, I hadn't heard to "The Greatest Show on Earth" yet - and it's a song from a decade ago. So i took the time to listen to it now. I'm not sure what version Maggy listened to, but at least on the album version, the band does not even kick in before the six minute mark.
Until then, i's certainly not metal, but rather what could be called a cinematic composition in the vein of Hollywood adventures, played by classical instruments. And that's not all, the symphony orchestra returns many times during the 23 minute piece, alternating with the rock segments. And the passages read by the great Richard Dawkins. I actually liked it quite a lot. Perhaps I indeed should do that dive into Nightwish ;-)
Talking about the symphonic metal thing, Nightwish actually uses a real symphony orchestra instead of synthesizers in their records. But the connection between classical music and metal goes deeper. The musical language is actually often rather similar, different from pop and rock, which are usually more based on blues and jazz vocabulary. As Maggy said, i think many metal compositions would pass as classical music, if arranged for an orchestra. This has not escaped classical musicians, there are many examples of doing just that - the Iron Maiden medley above is just the first example i came across.
Finnish group Apocalyptica was started on this premise in 1993, perhaps originally as a joke. They played Metallica on cellos. Now, Metallica is in the genre of trash metal, which is from the not-so-complex end of the metal pool, but even that worked surprisingly well - so well in fact that it resulted in a 30-year, still ongoing international career with 10 albums and counting for Apocalyptica.
In the opposite end, another Finnish metal band, Stone, started their first album with Jean Sibelius' Finlandia, played with electric guitars. The album is a good example of the virtuosity and complexity often at display with metal musicians with their instruments - don't let the form fool you, they can give any classical players a run for their money.
CU
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Eki
