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The Elements (song)

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This article is about the Tom Lehrer song. For the unreleased Beach Boys song from "SMiLE", see The Elements (Beach Boys song).

"The Elements" (1959) is a song by Tom Lehrer which recites the names of all the chemical elements known at the time of writing, up to number 102, nobelium. It can be found on his albums More Songs by Tom Lehrer and the live album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer. The song is sung to the rhythm and tune of the Major General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan.

The ordering of elements in the lyrics fits the meter of the song, and includes much alliteration, and thus has little or no relation to the ordering in the periodic table. This can be seen for example in the opening and closing lines:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
....
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard,
And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.

Since that time, 15 more elements have been discovered (synthesized, technically), and 9 of those have been named. Those 9 are lawrencium, rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, hassium, meitnerium, darmstadtium, and roentgenium.

Lehrer was a Harvard math professor (coincidentally, 'Lehrer' is German for 'male teacher'), and the final rhyme of "Harvard" and "discovered" is delivered in a parody of a Boston accent, i.e. non-rhotic so that the two words rhyme. Lehrer, a native of New York, does not normally speak with that accent.

Lehrer drew the inspiration for The Elements from the song Tchaikovsky and Other Russians, written by Ira Gershwin, which listed fifty Russian composers in a similar manner

The Elements differs from The Major-General's Song in that:

  • Lehrer's usual performance is more monotoned than its source tune, although the sheet music in the 1981 book contains Sullivan's normal score.
  • As per usual with Lehrer, it is accompanied solely by his own piano playing (as opposed to a full orchestra).
  • On the live version, Lehrer pauses in the middle for a spoken interlude, in which he talks to the audience ("I hope you're all taking notes, because there's going to be a short quiz next period!") while vamping on the piano.
  • The verse structure is altered, omitting the third verse of the original as well as all of the "responses" from the play's chorus, and adding an extra two lines at the end of the last verse.
  • The song ends with a piano coda: ].

Trivia

  • The Elements Song has itself been parodied by the group Amateur Transplants (of London Underground fame) as The Drugs Song.

Footnotes

  1. "A Conversation With Tom Lehrer", BBC Interview, 1999.

Further reading

Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer, 1981, has sheet music for many of Lehrer's songs, including The Elements.

External links

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