Ironworker plays spellbinding ‘Lord of the Rings’ melody on an enormous flute
5 July 2021, 15:20
A rugged ironworker dons a hard hat, and use his work break to play spellbinding music over the drips and clangs of a concrete space.
If you woke up thinking ‘all I need to see today is a hard hat-donning ironworker playing a sublime Lord of the Rings cover on the flute in work situ’, you’re in luck.
Flautist ‘Paul Harvey Flute Guy’, who masquerades as an ironworker by day, recently took out his native American walking stick flute for a special performance of a song from the film trilogy’s soundtrack.
The piece he’s covering is ‘A Walking Song’, which Lord of the Rings fans among you will have heard from the vocal cords of Pippin in the third film in the trilogy, The Return of the King.
Harvey’s rendition of the sweet flute song is accompanied by the drip, drip, drip of a fair volume of water at the site he’s at (there had been a thunderstorm), plus the occasional clank of colleagues lifting metal. Or that’s at least what we’re picturing.
The surroundings are a striking juxtaposition to the gentle tones of Harvey’s wooden instrument, and what the space might lack in opulence it makes up for in resonance.
Read more: These are factually the 19 best pieces of flute music EVER written
Paul Harvey Flute Guy performs ‘A Walking Song’ (Home is behind) from Lord of the Rings
As well as riffing on the song’s melody line, Harvey adds beautiful harmony through drone notes, making use of the fascinating flute’s ability to allow a player to play more than one note at the same time.
Read more: The 9 greatest times the flute was used in rap music
“It is a walking stick drone flute, which means there are two flutes,” Harvey tells Classic FM. “The one on the upper half of the stick is the drone flute, so it has no holes in and makes only one note when blown. That note matches the lowest playable note on the melody flute, which makes up the lower half of the walking stick.”
As Harvey explains, he can opt to play just the melody flute, or to give the instrument its bagpipe kind of sound, by playing the two simultaneously.
“The flute I use in the video is in the key of E minor and tuned to a pentatonic scale. And with the rubber tip, you can use it as a walking stick too.”
A beautiful meditative moment, with some extra flute nerdiness attached. We’ve never been more here for it.
Click here to see more fabulous flute moments on Paul Harvey’s YouTube Channel.
