Anvil - Anvils in Art and Entertainment - Musical Instruments

Musical Instruments

Anvils have been used as percussion instruments in several famous musical compositions, including:

  • Giuseppe Verdi: Il Trovatore, featuring the famous "Anvil Chorus"
  • Richard Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen in Das Rheingold in scene 3, using 18 anvils tuned in F in three octaves, and Siegfried in act I, notably Siegfried's "Forging Song" (Nothung! Nothung! Neidliches Schwert!)
  • Josef Strauss: Feuerfest!, op. 269 (1869). The title means "fireproof". This was the slogan of the Wertheim fireproof safe company, which commissioned the work.
  • Daniel Auber: opera Le Maçon
  • Gustav Holst: Second Suite in F for Military Band, which includes a movement titled "Song of the Blacksmith"
  • Aaron Copland: Symphony No. 3
  • Arnold Bax: Symphony No. 3
  • William Walton: Belshazzar's Feast
  • Edgard Varèse: Ionisation
  • Carl Orff: Antigone
  • Benjamin Britten: The Burning Fiery Furnace
  • Juan María Solare: Veinticinco de agosto, 1983 and Un ángel de hielo y fuego
  • Nicholas Hooper: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  • James Horner: Used it extensively in Aliens, and his other films like Flightplan, The Forgotten and Titanic
  • Howard Shore: The Lord of the Rings film trilogy
  • Don Davis: The Matrix trilogy
  • Albert Parlow: "Anvil Polka"
  • Louis Andriessen: De Materie (Part I), which features an extended solo for two anvils
  • Fear Factory: "Body Hammer", which features the sound of a hammer striking an anvil as percussion.
  • Judas Priest: "Between The Hammer And The Anvil" which features the sound of a hammer striking an anvil for dramatic effect.
  • The Beatles: "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" makes prominent use of the anvil. Ringo Starr played the anvil.
  • John Williams: Jaws, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
  • Kansas: "On the Other Side" featured some use of the anvil. Kansas violinist Robby Steinhardt played the anvil on the track.
  • Jean Michel Jarre: On the overture of the disc "Revolutions".
  • Brad Fiedel: The Terminator

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