There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,

And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,

...

And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,

And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,

And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.

Lehrer was a Harvard Mathematics lecturer, and the final rhyme of "Harvard" and "discovered" is delivered in a parody of a Boston accent—a non-rhotic manner—so that the two words rhyme. Lehrer did not normally speak with that accent. Lehrer accompanied himself on the piano while singing the song.

Background

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.^[2]

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

• 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.
• 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 (Shave and a Haircut).
• "The Elements" is in the key of C, while the "Major-General's Song" is in E-flat.
• In some live versions, after the song is finished, he may tell the audience of an earlier version, from Aristotle's time, that consists of Air, Fire, Water and Earth, explaining that it was a much simpler time.

In popular culture

"The Elements" has been featured in popular culture many times. In the episode "Ex-File" of NCIS, Timothy McGee and Abby Sciuto hum the song, which forms a key clue in their case. In The Big Bang Theory episode "The Pants Alternative", a drunk Sheldon Cooper starts to sing the song during his acceptance of an award from his university. In the 2006 episode of Gilmore Girls called "The Real Paul Anka", Luke Danes's daughter April and her classmates sing the song on the bus.^[3] Daniel Radcliffe sang "The Elements" on The Graham Norton Show in 2010.^[4] The Jewish parody group Shlock Rock acknowledges Lehrer and "The Elements" as inspiration for "The Shabbat Song".^[5] David Costabile, as Gale, sang along to the song in "Something Beautiful", a season 4 episode of Better Call Saul (2018).^[6]

Cover recordings include Jesse Dangerously on his album How to Express Your Dissenting Political Viewpoint Through Origami, where the song is titled "Tom Lehrer's The Elements".^[7]

Footnotes

Further reading

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

External links

• [https://archive.org/details/elements_0 Tom Lehrer's "The Elements" performed by Lehrer. Community Audio]
• Lyrics and chords for the song
• {{YouTube|zGM-wSKFBpo|Animation of the song}}
• Another animation by Mike Stanfill