Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

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.

Jean Sibelius and the virtual national classical music work of Finland. Here’s Finlandia. (Worth watching in HD fullscreen.)

As much as I love the Russian Romantics, the work of Modest Mussorgsky has always left me a little cold. However, it’s the Halloween season, and Night on Bald Mountain is a staple of scary music, so…here it is. Kind … Continue reading →

American music before the rise of jazz — roughly, prior to George Gershwin’s rise to prominence — presents a kind of odd musical landscape. The musical culture here was still greatly steeped in European traditions and formal approaches, and attempts … Continue reading →

I found this while searching for recordings by Sir Neville Marriner for yesterday’s post on his passing. Marriner seems to be best known for conducting Baroque and Classical-era music, but he was far from limited to those periods. Frederick Delius … Continue reading →

I hated Debussy for years, but I started coming around a decade or so ago, when I began to appreciate his atmospherics more than I had before. La mer is, quite simply, a musical depiction of the sea, in three … Continue reading →

Closely related to the tone poem is the Concert overture, which is the forerunner of the tone poem in many ways. Also a single movement work, a concert overture was often intended to kick off a program of symphonic music, … Continue reading →