Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

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 →

It’s not a tone poem. It’s also not a piece that I even like. I’ve never liked this piece. I didn’t like it when I played it in college. I didn’t like it when Torvill and Dean skated to it. … Continue reading →

Tchaikovsky! Technically this isn’t a “tone poem”; Tchaikovsky himself called it a “Fantasy overture”. But for the purposes of this series I take a pretty expansive definition of “tone poem” anyway, so here’s Romeo and Juliet.