![]() In some live performances, after the song was finished, Lehrer joked that an earlier version, from Aristotle's time, lists only Earth, Air, Fire and Water, explaining that "life was much simpler in those days". The song ends with a piano coda: " Shave and a Haircut".On some of the live recordings, Lehrer pauses in the middle for spoken interludes, in which he talks to the audience (e.g., "I hope you're all taking notes, because there's going to be a short quiz next period!") while vamping on the piano.It is in the key of C, while the " Major-General's Song" is in E-flat.Lehrer simplifies the melody by primarily singing each phrase on a single note, instead of rapidly moving back and forth between two different notes as in Sullivan's original melody.It omits the third verse of the original as well as all of the choral "responses", and adds an extra two lines at the end of the last verse. ![]() "The Elements" differs musically from the " Major-General's Song" in that: Lehrer also drew inspiration from the song " Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)", written by Ira Gershwin, which listed fifty Russian composers in a similar manner. "The Elements" is sung to the tune of the " Major-General's Song" from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. He accompanied himself on the piano while singing the song. Lehrer had been a mathematics student and lecturer at Harvard in the closing lines of the song, he pronounced "Harvard" and "discovered" in a parody of the non-rhotic Boston accent to make the two words rhyme, even though he did not normally speak with that accent. These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,Īnd there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered. ![]() There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,Īnd hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,Īnd argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,Īnd chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium. ![]()
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