Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

I heard this work on the radio just the other day and I found it captivating. It is Im Sommerwind — “In the Summer Wind” — by Anton Webern. I am honestly not sure if I have ever heard anything … Continue reading →

Easter is coming, so in that vein, a concert overture by the great orchestral master Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His Russian Easter Festival Overture is a work that pays tribute to Easter and the Russian Orthodox liturgies. The composer actually uses a … Continue reading →

Like many a lover of classical music, I suspect, my knowledge of composer Paul Dukas can be summed up in one sentence: “He wrote The Sorceror’s Apprentice.” Which he did. The Sorceror’s Apprentice is pretty much the only work by … Continue reading →

An American in Paris. Is it a tone poem? You bet! Or rather, a “symphonic poem”, which is really much the same thing. Gershwin intended the work to reflect the energy and rhythms he experienced while traveling in 1920s Paris … Continue reading →

Here’s a strange work by Ludwig van Beethoven, written to commemorate a victory in battle by the Duke of Wellington. The piece is viewed as one of Beethoven’s lesser works, and probably rightly so. Even Beethoven himself admitted as much, … Continue reading →

Here’s a particularly lovely piece of tone painting from the film music world, from a movie you might not expect it from: The Karate Kid Part II. These movies had a “diminishing returns” kind of thing going on, in that … Continue reading →

No days start with “R”, so I can’t have “Rhapsody R-day”. Thus I fold rhapsodies in with tone poems. This work is pretty straight-forward, and it’s one of my favorite pieces of all time. Emmanuel Chabrier composed this work after … Continue reading →

This is one of the most well-known of all classical works, although I suspect more people recognize it by virtue of its use in cartoons than anything else, and therefore I also suspect that relatively few people can actually name … Continue reading →

Not really a tone poem, but a concert overture, by Dmitri Shostakovich. This is not a long work, but it is a particularly invigorating one. As the weather today in my neck o’ the woods is gray and gloomy and … Continue reading →