Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Antonin Dvorak wrote this work, The Noon Witch, after his return to Europe from the United States. It is a musical telling of a horrible story:

A mother warns her son that if he does not behave she will summon the Noon Witch to take him away. He does not behave, and the witch arrives at the stroke of noon. The witch, described as a horrible creature, demands the child. The mother, terrified that the witch has actually come, grabs her son, and the witch begins chasing them. Finally the mother faints, grasping her child. Later that day, the father arrives home, and finds his wife passed out with the dead body of their son in her arms. The mother had accidentally smothered their son while protecting him from the witch. The story ends with the father’s lament over the terrible event.

Yikes!

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Another hallmark of scary classical music: A Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky.

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Here’s something I’ve never heard before: The Mask of the Red Death, a work for harp and string quartet by Andre Caplet. Caplet was a French composer and a contemporary of Claude Debussy, and in fact his most noted work seems to have been orchestrations of the great master’s works. Caplet’s work here is based on the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe, and it is an eerily effective piece of mood music, employing a number of sonic effects throughout in addition to tonal moods that suggest atonality.

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It’s October, which is usually my favorite month of the year. We’re off to a rocky start this year, aren’t we…but life still must go on.

I’m doing a theme to the Tone Poems for this entire month, starting today. Since we’re approaching Halloween, we’ll be doing spooky music, or music that meditates on life’s darker aspects. Here is one of my favorite works of all time, by one of my very favorite composers of all time: “The Isle of the Dead” by Sergei Rachmaninov.

(The performance and sound are terrific here, but the accompanying movie may or may not work, depending on personal taste.)

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Happy birthday, George Gershwin!

And also, Happy Birthday, Jim Caviezel!

And Happy Birthday, Olivia Newton John!

Also, happy birthday to me, but that’s not so important.

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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”.

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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 Ponchielli, and the ballet suite in question is the “Dance of the Hours”. This is one of the most familiar pieces of music in the classical repertoire, mainly for having been parodied by comedian Allan Sherman in his summer camp song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”. If you can manage to listen to the actual Ponchielli suite with fresh ears, it’s really a wonderful and evocative work of classical dance music.

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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 seen the movie on the big screen yesterday (the first time I’ve seen it in a theater since I was nine), here is the finale and end credit music to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Here’s a blog post of mine about Close Encounters. My thoughts on this film have not appreciably changed: it’s still a beautiful, magnificent film.

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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 isn’t always performed, and it adds a very nice dimension to the work. So here, again, is Jean Sibelius’s wonderful Finlandia, this time with chorus when the big hymn tune starts.

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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 the shape of the music. These are always fun to watch and use to appreciate the structure of a musical work. As for the Children’s March itself, its mood shifts and changes, starting off in jaunty fashion but occasionally becoming stormy or pensive, all the while maintaining a healthy sense of a child’s optimism as he or she sets out on the path to Adventure.

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