Great White Snark: Why don't we call them "Halloween carols?"

Friday, October 15, 2010

Why don't we call them "Halloween carols?"


Classical music is awesome all the time, but there are some particularly amazing pieces that get lumped in with Halloween music. I want to share them with you, even though you've doubtlessly heard them all before. I just like to run them in the background to get the feel of fall and all that.

The first is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," by Paul Abraham Dukas (which originally had nothing to do with marching broomsticks or this guy). It's just a fun piece.


Second is one of my all-time favorite songs ever, "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the Pier Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg. I LOVE THIS SONG.


Third, the "Danse Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saëns. Per Wikipedia: According to legend, "Death" appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance their dance of death for him while he plays his fiddle represented by a solo violin with its E-string tuned to an E-flat in an example of scordatura tuning. His skeletons dance for him until the rooster crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.


"Night on Bald Mountain" takes my fourth place spot. Also, I wanted to post the scary-as-hell video from the original "Fantasia." It REMAINS TO THIS DAY one of the scariest things I think I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure I wept aloud upon seeing it as like, a five year old kid.


And lastly, this is another one of my all-time favorite pieces of music ever written. It's Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor." SO AWESOME. The mastery of this piece never fails to astound me. And it's inherently creepy. So here's a vid with pics of Béla Lugosi as Dracula (lolwut). Suck that, Edward Cullen. *_~


Enjoy, friends!

No comments:

Post a Comment