The Onslaught  Recombinant Rock in the Valley of Dub
Actually, someone has. On the album Sabbatum, Estonian
medievalists Rondellus translate 12 Black Sabbath songs into
Latin and arrange them for medieval instruments, and the results
are haunting and not at all gimmicky. Interestingly, in adapting
the music to medieval modes, Rondellus not only eliminate
Sabbath's heavy guitar riffs but also give short shrift to the
band's 19th-century Northern European romantic (or 20th-century
horror film) chromatic density. And the result is that Sabbatum
highlights how psychedelic—that is, how Eastern-sounding—Sabbath
is. And I guess if you're a musicologist (which I'm not, but
I've read Peter van der Merwe's Origins of the Popular Style)
this shouldn't surprise you, since 1000 years ago European music
was generally derived from that of the Middle East—in fact the
Mideast musical influence stretched from West Africa to Ireland.
And so, in outlying parts of Europe that later resisted the
newfangled do-re-mi