It’s a shame that the timpani isn’t used more outside of classical music. A well placed timpani can be extremely effective. For instance, Roy Orbison’s use of it in his famous song You Got It:

To me, the timpani makes this song feel epic (along with simply being a great song otherwise). It adds a sort of drive to the chorus that simply wouldn’t work if a crash or something else was used in its place. In fact, a crash is used at the same time but it doesn’t serve to separate this section from the pre-chorus because it’s already been employed. There’s nothing novel about the sound of a crash at that point in the song.

I thought about this because of CocoRosie’s song Lemonade:

They use a timpani throughout and it immediately jumped out of me. It wasn’t that it was out of place, it’s just that it works so well. They manage to use it in a melancholic way and a more aggressive way. It adds atmosphere, maybe because it’s so reverberant, and capable of augmenting the chord changes because it’s actually pitched.

What I’m trying to say is, “I like timpanis.”

There’s a linguistic tidbit to this. Timpani is actually the plural form from the Italian word timpano. I’m curious about how often this happens with Italian loan words. Another obvious example is panini which is the plural of the Italian word panino. I’ve heard people complain about the pluralization of that one but even when I lived in New York I never heard anyone order a panino.

All that is to say that it’s fun to just add an s without any regard to the origins of these words. Fuck it, English is a plural imperialist. We’ll conquer your words and add our s’s.

And I’ll leave you with another famous timpani piece from a more traditional genre used in a non-traditional way: