Halloween

Camille Saint-Saëns

October 09, 1835 - December 16, 1921

Romantic Period

France

Like Mozart, Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy. At 2½ he could pick out tunes on the piano; at the age of 3 he composed his first piece; and when was only five years old when he gave his first public piano performance. When he was 10, he made his public debut and offered to play any one of Beethoven's 32 sonatas from memory. He had total recall of anything he had ever read.

Saint-Saëns was also a conductor, critic, music scholar, teacher and composer. Working in Paris, he founded a society that supported an entire new generation of French composers. His style of music was traditional and conservative and for the most part followed Classical traditions. His best-known works are several concertos, an organ symphony Danse Macabre and The Carnival of the Animals. He became one of the most famous French composers.Danse Macabre 2010 ( Saint-Saëns )

Danse macabre, Op. 40, is a tone poem for orchestra, written in 1874 by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.

A TONE POEM is an instrumental composition intended to portray a particular story, scene, mood, etc

Danse Macabre was written to portray the story of an old French superstition.

According to legend, Death appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (here represented by a solo violin). His skeletons dance for him until the rooster crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.

Listen to the music again following along with these listening maps. Pay close attention to the instruments playing, the dynamic levels and even the tempo change. You will hear lots of violins and wooden xylophones played with specific mallets are used to make the sound of skeleton bones!

Edvard Grieg

June 15, 1843 – September 4, 1907

Romantic Period

Norway

Edvard Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions brought the music of Norway to international consciousness, as well as helping to develop a national identity.

Grieg composed many things, including the incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, which includes the famous excerpt titled, "In the Hall of the Mountain King". In this piece of music, the adventures of the anti-hero, Peer Gynt, are related, including the episode in which he steals a bride at her wedding. The angry guests chase him, and Peer falls, hitting his head on a rock. He wakes up in a mountain surrounded by trolls. The music of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" represents the angry trolls taunting Peer and gets louder each time the theme repeats. The music ends with Peer escaping from the mountain.

Johann Sebastian Bach

1685 - 1750

Germany

Baroque Period

Johann Sebastian Bach was born into a musical dynasty. The Bach family had over 300 years' worth of professional composers and musicians, but Johann Sebastian was the most famous of all of them. In addition to being one of the greatest composers the world has ever known, Bach was also an excellent organist and violinist.

As a child, Bach's father taught him to play violin and harpsichord. His uncles were all musicians, serving as church organists and court chamber musicians. One of his uncles, Johann Christoph Bach, introduced him to the art of organ playing.

In 1707, Bach married Maria Barbara Bach. They had seven children. In 1720 Maria died, and Bach married Anna Magdalena in 1721. Bach had 13 more children with Anna Magdalena. He was a father to 20 children in all.

Some of Bach's most famous works include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the celebrated organ work Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor is very challenging to play on the organ. It is widely used today as scary Halloween music!!! Watch and listen!!