Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

Got a spare two minutes? Give this a listen, then. It’s a very short bit of tone painting, in the form of a folk dance, by Percy Grainger. Here is “Shepherd’s Hey”.

It’s increasingly clear that this feature is really “Whatever piece of one-movement classical music I want”, because this isn’t a tone poem but rather a selection of ballet music from an opera. Specifically, the opera is La Gioconda by Amilcare … Continue reading →

OK, this isn’t a tone poem, it’s a piece of film music–but it’s a classic by John Williams, and as such it is as cohesive and well-constructed a piece of music as any great tone poem. In honor of having … Continue reading →

I’ve featured this work before, but on my way to work yesterday I heard it played and I was already thinking that hey, I can just run it again…when I heard something new. Turns out there’s a choral part that … Continue reading →

This is a cool video realization of one of my favorite marches of all time, the “Children’s March” (subtitled “Over the Hills and Far Away”), by Percy Grainger. It’s one of those videos that allows you to follow along with … Continue reading →

OK, this is pretty cool. I’m not the biggest fan in the world of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, but I suppose it’s iconic enough and this video is pretty neat: it’s a scrolling score of the piece. The YouTube channel … Continue reading →

New to me is this work by Georges Enescu, Vox Maris. I know nothing at all about this work, or what the vocal element is singing about. While much of the Enescu that I have heard is heavily reflective of … Continue reading →

I don’t know anything at all about this piece. I heard it while driving to work one morning last week, and I liked it quite a lot. It’s a dramatic and romantic miniature by Anatoly Liadov, called About Olden Times. … Continue reading →

Claude Debussy, like Hector Berlioz years before, won the Prix de Rome in his youth; and like Berlioz, he did not much care for the experience of living in Rome for the years required of winners of the prize. One … Continue reading →

What a dramatic work this is! Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini is based on a story from Dante’s Inferno, and as such, you can imagine how volatile a piece of music it is. The story being illustrated … Continue reading →