Category Archives: Holidays

Halloween! Toccata and Fugue in d minor by J.S Bach

Posted by MaryO on

toccata-d-minor

Johann Sebastian Bach’s towering monument of organ music, with its deep sense of foreboding, will forever be associated with Halloween.

The piece is recognizable to most and has been featured in many films, including: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Black Cat (1934), Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Sunset Boulevard (1950), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), and The Great Race (1965).

This is arranged for very easy piano in PIano Maestro. Get a free copy of the sheet music at IMSLP or borrow a copy from the O’Connor Music Studio.  I have this arranged for organ, piano, duet, 2-piano, simplified…

If you want this in a book with other Bach transcriptions, amazon has this: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and the Other Bach Transcriptions for Solo Piano, arranged by Ferruccio Busoni.

Here, Virgil Fox performs it on his Allen Digital Touring Organ.

Diane Bish plays the Massey Memorial Organ at the Chautauqua Institution and talks about this instrument.

Mormon Tabernacle Organist, Richard Elliott, performs an eerie rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata in D Minor” with the Salt Lake Tabernacle pipe organ, the Tabernacle Organ has 11,623 pipes. “Toccata” is often played in the full extent as “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” This piece is one of the most famous works in organ repertoire.

Fantasia (1940)

As a bar graph

Just because…one of my new favorites, a mashup of a different Bach d minor work and the Phantom of the Opera.  I bought it at MusicNotes last year, in case anyone wants to give it a try!

Halloween Themes Changed to a Major Key

Posted by MaryO on

Classic horror themes are ominous and generally dread-inspiring for a reason: They are written in minor keys. Find a nifty melody, go minor, and watch the goosebumps pile up. For composers, sometimes it’s almost too easy.

To prove that it’s the minor key and not the melody that is eerily accenting the work of cinema’s most murderous villains, musician/writer/filmmaker Ian Gordon re-recorded five iconic themes in major keys. What comes next will definitely not frighten you.

A quick rundown:

The X-Files theme sounds like the beginning of an inspirational journey across side-scrolling Nintendo worlds. (One where you’re searching for a magic flute.)

Halloween sounds like the side A, track one of an indie-pop outfit’s meadow-frolicking breakout record.

Saw recalls the music that scores when the football game is getting out of hand and only the underdog protagonist can bring you back.

The Exorcist sounds like a Styx breakdown.

Nightmare on Elm Street sounds like you’re at Sea World, and Shamu is doing a night show. (The ones with lasers.)

via Horror themes re-recorded in a major key will make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

Music for Halloween: Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky

Posted by MaryO on

bald-mountain

Night on Bald Mountain refers to a series of compositions by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881). Inspired by Russian literary works and legend, Mussorgsky composed a “musical picture”, St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain on the theme of a witches’ sabbath occurring on St. John’s Eve, which he completed on that very night, June 23, in 1867.

Get a free copy of the sheet music at IMSLP or buy it on amazon.com.  There is also an easy version on amazon, with all the note names written in.

Interestingly, the original piece composed by Mussorgsky is not the version you typically hear. That was only published in 1968 and is performed very rarely. The piece we have come to know (and hear in places like Walt Disney’s Fantasia is an arrangement by Rimsky-Korsakov.

From Disney’s Fantasia

Piano version transcribed for solo piano by Konstantin Chernov (1865-1937).

The Ludwig Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Thomas Ludwig

Music for Halloween: Funeral March of a Marionette by Charles Gounod

Posted by MaryO on

funeral

The Funeral March of a Marionette (Marche funèbre d’une marionnette) is a short piece by Charles Gounod. It was written in 1872 for solo piano and orchestrated in 1879. It is perhaps best known as the theme music for the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which originally aired from 1955 to 1965.

In 1871-72, while residing in London, Gounod started to write a suite for piano called “Suite Burlesque”. After completing one movement, the Funeral March of a Marionette, he abandoned the suite and had the single movement published by Goddard & Co. In 1879 he orchestrated the piece. The instrumentation is: piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in A, 2 bassoons, 2 horns in D, 2 trumpets in A, 3 trombones, ophicleide, timpani, bass drum, triangle, strings. The work is in the key of D minor, with a central section in D major. Various arrangements by other hands exist.

There is a program underlying the Funeral March of a Marionette: The Marionette has died in a duel. The funeral procession commences (D minor). A central section (D Major) depicts the mourners taking refreshments, before returning to the funeral march (D minor).

The score contains the following inscriptions in appropriate places:

La Marionnette est cassée!!! (The Marionette is broken!!!)
Murmure de regrets de la troupe (Murmurs of regret from the troupe)
Le Cortège (The Procession)
Ici plusieurs des principaux personnages de la troupe s’arrêtent pour sa rafrâichir (Here many of the principal personages stop for refreshments)
Retour a la maison (Return to the house). (Wikipedia)

Download this music in several versions from IMSLP.  Click on Arrangements and Transcriptions.  There are also some arrangements for piano at the O’Connor Music Studio, including an advanced level.  This is arranged for three levels starting with very easy piano in Piano Maestro.

On Alfred Hitchcock:

From Faber Piano Adventures Performance Book Level 3B No.7 (Also available in the OCMS Library):

Piano 4-hands:

With animation:

On organ:

Mannheim Steamroller:

And, finally, a light show!

Music for Halloween: In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg

Posted by MaryO on

hall-mountain

“In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46. Its easily recognizable theme has helped it attain iconic status in popular culture, where it has been arranged by many artists, including for the piano.

The translation of the title of this piece from Norwegian isn’t quite literally “mountain king”. The “king” in this instance is actually a troll that Peer Gynt invents in a fantasy. The introduction of this movement is, “There is a great crowd of troll courtiers, gnomes and goblins. Dovregubben sits on his throne, with crown and sceptre, surrounded by his children and relatives. Peer Gynt stands before him. There is a tremendous uproar in the hall.”

Borrow a copy of the sheet music from the O’Connor Music Studio.  I have this arranged for piano, duet, 2-piano, simplified…

8 part vocal orchestra (plus a tiny pair of cymbals)

Pianist Paul Barton

Solo piano sheet music – Video Score

Orchestral version

Organ

Music for Halloween: Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns

Posted by MaryO on

danse-macabre

Danse macabre, Op. 40, is a tone poem for orchestra, written in 1874 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. It started out in 1872 as an art song for voice and piano with a French text by the poet Henri Cazalis, which is based on an old French superstition. In 1874, the composer expanded and reworked the piece into a tone poem, replacing the vocal line with a solo violin.

With a title that includes the word “macabre”, you can tell it’s a great piece for Halloween. This is by far the most famous work associated with the holiday, and with good reason. It is a tone poem inspired by a French legend that says “Death” appears at midnight on Halloween to call forth the dead from their graves to dance for him. He plays the fiddle while skeletons dance until dawn.

Get a free copy of the sheet music at IMSLP (Look for Arrangements and Transcriptions) or borrow a copy from the O’Connor Music Studio.  I have this arranged for organ, piano, duet, simplified…

Amazon has a great Dover edition for solo piano.  This splendid compilation features a variety of the composer’s best piano works, all reproduced from authoritative sources. Taking its title from the popular orchestral work “Danse Macabre” (presented here in the brilliant arrangement by Liszt), this collection also includes “Allegro appassionato,” “Album” (consisting of six pieces), “Rhapsodie d’Auvergne,” “Theme and Variations,” plus six etudes, three waltzes, and six etudes for left hand alone.

This video originally aired on PBS in the 1980s:

 

For two pianos:

 

Piano Tutorial:

 

Orchestra:

Music for Halloween: Dies Irae

Posted by MaryO on

 

Although not technically a “halloween piece” this very old Gregorian Chant (from the 300s!) is used in a lot of music that sounds spooky.  Dies Irae is a Latin term that means “Day of Wrath”.

The words of Dies irae have often been set to music as part of a Requiem service. In some settings, it is broken up into several movements; in such cases, Dies irae refers only to the first of these movements.

The traditional Gregorian melody has been used as a theme or musical quotation in many classical compositions, film scores, and popular works, including:

  • Marc-Antoine Charpentier – Prose des morts – Dies irae H. 12 (1670)
  • Thomas Adès – Totentanz
  • Charles-Valentin Alkan – Souvenirs: Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique, Op. 15 (No. 3: Morte)
  • Ernest Bloch – Suite Symphonique
  • Hector Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique, Requiem
  • Johannes Brahms – Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118, No. 6, Intermezzo in E-flat minor
  • Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind – Opening theme for The Shining, 1980
  • Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco – 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195: “XII. No hubo remedio” (plate 24)
  • Michel Chion – “Dies Irae” (on The Roots 2014 album …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin)
  • George Crumb – Black Angels (1970)
  • Michael Daugherty – Metropolis Symphony 5th movement, “Red Cape Tango”; Dead Elvis (1993) for bassoon and chamber ensemble
  • Gerald Fried – Opening theme for The Return of Dracula, 1958
  • Donald Grantham – Baron Cimetiére’s Mambo
  • Jerry Goldsmith – scores for The Mephisto Waltz (1971) and Poltergeist (1982) – quoted during the track “Escape from Suburbia”
  • Charles Gounod – Faust opera, act 4
  • Joseph Haydn – Symphony No. 103, “The Drumroll”
  • Gustav Holst – The Planets, movement 5, “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age”; Ode to Death for chorus and orchestra (1919)
  • Arthur Honegger – La Danse des Morts, H. 131
  • Gottfried Huppertz – Score for Metropolis (1927)
  • Aram Khachaturian – Symphony No. 2
  • Franz Liszt – Totentanz
  • Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez – Frozen II (soundtrack), “Into the Unknown”
  • Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 2, movements 1 and 5
  • Ennio Morricone – “Penance” from his score for The Mission
  • Modest Mussorgsky – Songs and Dances of Death, No. 3 “Trepak”
  • Nikolai Myaskovsky – Symphony No. 6, Op. 23
  • Sergei Rachmaninoff – Symphony No. 1, Op. 13; Symphony No. 2, Op. 27; Symphony No. 3, Op. 44; Isle of the Dead, Op. 29; The Bells choral symphony, Op. 35; Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43; Symphonic Dances, Op. 45, Piano sonata No. 1, Études-Tableaux, Op. 39 No. 2
  • Ottorino Respighi – quoted near the end of the second movement of Impressioni Brasiliane (Brazilian Impressions)[23]
  • Leonard Rosenman – the main theme of The Car (1977)
  • Camille Saint-Saëns – Danse Macabre, Symphony No. 3 (Organ Symphony), Requiem
  • Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony No. 14; Aphorisms, Op. 13 – No. 7, “Dance of Death”
  • Stephen Sondheim – Sweeney Todd – quoted in “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” and the accompaniment to “Epiphany”
  • Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji – Sequentia cyclica super “Dies irae” ex Missa pro defunctis and nine other works
  • Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Manfred Symphony, Orchestral Suite No. 3
  • Eugène Ysaÿe – Solo Violin Sonata in A minor, Op. 27, No. 2 “Obsession”

 

By itself, it sounds like this:

 

See if you can find it in these other places:

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you watch movies or listen to music, see if you can hear a hidden Dies Irae.

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday, Franz Liszt!

Posted by MaryO on

liszt-quote

Franz Liszt was born in Raiding, near Ödenburg, October 22, 1811 and died in Bayreuth, July 31, 1886. He was a Hungarian composer and pianist who was a major influence during the romantic period. Liszt was an outstanding pianist at seven, composed at eight and made concert appearances at nine. In addition to being a piano virtuoso, he was also a critic, conductor, city music director, literary writer and transcriber of the works of other composers. He transcribed Beethoven’s Symphonies for the piano.

Franz Liszt began his career as the outstanding concert pianist of the century, who, along with the prodigious violinist Niccoló Paganini (1782-1840), created the cult of the modern instrumental virtuoso. To show off his phenomenal and unprecedented technique, Liszt composed a great deal of music designed specifically for this purpose, resulting in a vast amount of piano literature laden with dazzling, and other technical marvels. In this vein, Liszt composed a series of virtuosic rhapsodies on Hungarian gypsy melodies, the best-known being the all too familiar Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. Liszt developed the rhapsody as a form of serious music. This kind of music is worlds apart from the generally more introspective, poetic music of pianist-composer Frédéric Chopin.

Liszt was wildly handsome and hugely talented. He was extremely popular in Paris during the 1830’s. It is said that women actually fainted at his piano recitals. He was the first to position the piano so that its lid reflected the sound and the audience could see his profile as he performed.

Liszt was the first to write a tone poem, which is an extended, single-movement work for orchestra, inspired by paintings, plays, poems or other literary or visual works, and attempting to convey the ideas expressed in those media through music. Such a work is Les Préludes, based on a poem in which life is expressed as a series of struggles, passions, and mysteries, all serving as a mere prelude to . . .what? The Romantic genre of the symphonic poem, as well as its cousin the concert overture, became very attractive to many later composers, including Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss.


Liszt’s birthday

anniversary of Liszt’s death

Listen to Liszt’s transcription of Meyerbeer’s Hellish Waltz from Robert du Diable, which probably caused more public commotion than any other piano piece in history.


Read quotes by and about Liszt

Liszt was the first recitalist

In Praise of Pianos and the Artists Who Play Them

History of the Piano

Franz Liszt

Music for Halloween: “Catacombs” from “Pictures at an Exhibition”

Posted by MaryO on

Modest Mussorgsky composed this multi-movement work in memory of his friend, artist Viktor Hartmann. Each movement corresponds to a picture in Hartmann’s gallery, with one pairing with Hartmann’s Paris catacombs. The painting depicts Hartmann and two other men walking through the labyrinthine catacombs, illuminated only by lamplight.

The movement is in two distinct parts. Its two sections consist of a nearly static Largo consisting of a sequence of block chords with elegiac lines adding a touch of melancholy and a more flowing, gloomy Andante that introduces the Promenade theme into the scene.

The first section’s alternating loud and soft chords evoke the grandeur, stillness, and echo of the catacombs. The second section suggests a merging of observer and scene as the observer descends into the catacombs. Mussorgsky’s manuscript of “Catacombs” (shown right) displays two pencilled notes, in Russian: “NB – Latin text: With the dead in a dead language” and, along the right margin, “Well may it be in Latin! The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me towards the skulls, invokes them; the skulls begin to glow softly.”

The whole suite is really good – there is a copy of Mussorgsky — Pictures at an Exhibition (Alfred Masterwork Edition) in the O’Connor Music Studio, if you want to give it a try.

Piano

Orchestra

Symphony Band

Music for Halloween: Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath from Symphonie fantastique

Posted by MaryO on

berlioz-symphony-fantastique
The final movement is the best known part of the symphony, thanks to its use in the Julia Roberts movie, Sleeping With The Enemy. It features a four-part structure, which Hector Berlioz described in his own program notes from 1845 as follows:

“He sees himself at a witches’ Sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the Sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.”

The Dies irae melody is one of the most-quoted in musical literature, appearing in the works of many diverse composers.

The traditional Gregorian melody has also been used as a theme or musical quotation in a number of  classical compositions, notable among them:

Free sheet music from IMSLP for the basic Dies irae

Free sheet music from IMSLP for the basic Symphonie fantastique (look under Arrangements and Transcriptions)

The basic Gregorian Chant

An animated version of the  Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath from Symphonie fantastique.  Can you hear the Dies irae in this?  It starts around 3:18.

Leonard Bernstein conducts the “Orchestre National de France” in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique
5th Movement

Arranged for piano

A listening guide