Twenty years ago the European particle-physics laboratory known as CERN gave us the World Wide Web. Today the lab and its choir give us a rollicking hymn about the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that scientists there hope to detect using the Large Hadron Collider. (The tune may sound familiar; it was originally “The Hippopotamus Song,” by Flanders and Swann.) Call us old, but we find this ode to the boson far more listenable than the “Large Hadron Rap” of a couple years ago.
Back in the United States, we’ve been trading e-mail messages for the past couple of months with a PR guy at Iowa State University who has been politely but insistently promoting a video of a performance from the university’s Summer Carillon Concert Series.
We love carillon music as much as the next blog, but it just wasn’t right for Tweed. Then we ran across the video below, of a carillonneur at Iowa State covering Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”
The performance is by Tin-Shi Tam, an Iowa State professor of music who has been known to ring out such pieces as Hanson’s “MMMBop” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” As it turns out, she will conclude the summer series with more traditional carillon fare on September 12, when she will be joined by the university’s percussion ensemble and brass quintet.
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