Every year around Halloween, you can expect to hear these familiar favorites: Danse Macabre, Night on Bald Mountain, Nightmare Before Christmas songs, Michael Jackson's Thriller, etc. They're all fitting choices for the holiday, and anything with a Vincent Price monologue is good for a few shivers here and there.Source: bbhc.com via Ariel on Pinterest
But, these pieces have become pretty routine. There are three others that I don't hear often enough at this time of year, even though I think they're just as good - or better - at making people jittery after dark. (At least, that's how they affect me.) Thus, here are my three ideas for additional Halloween music to listen to. (And if it turns out that these are actually quite common Halloween tunes, or are nothing new and exciting for your ears, I still would highlight them because they creep me out the most.... or make me want to creep under the bed.)
3 Creepy Selections of Halloween Music
- "Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat" (Tchaikovsky)
Yeah, I know what you're probably thinking: "Classical cat music?!? I mean, if it was about black cats, that would be one thing - but what's scary about Puss-in-Boots?!?"
Well... do you remember the scene in Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty when Maleficent bewitches Princess Aurora to touch the spinning wheel? The animation was creepy enough, but as a kid I was far more freaked out by the music accompanying it. That music was "Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat," from Act III of Tchaikovsky's 1889 ballet The Sleeping Beauty.
Coincidentally, this piece was not part of any scary scene in Tchaikovsky's ballet; it actually was part of the happy ending. At the wedding of Princess Aurora and Prince Désiré, fairytale characters perform dances - Pas de caractère/Pas de quatre - to celebrate the royal union. While the dance of Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat was not intended to be frightening in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty adaptation, Disney used it to great effect in the Scary Spindle scene. Its haunting strains still echo in my memory today.
2. Any of the Harry Potter soundtracks (from the first two movies) involving Voldemort, the Forbidden Forest, the Chamber of Secrets, wandering the halls at night, or anything else ominous (Williams).
OK, I know this is kind of cheating, since it isn't one specific piece of music. But these soundtracks combined represent "Eerie Harry Potter music." They're all hair-raising in different ways, mainly because they all serve as buildup to the reveal of something scary.
What do I mean by this? Think of the library scene in the first movie: the buildup of ghostly chamber music enhances the ominous atmosphere and creepy imagery (like Harry's disembodied hand carrying a lantern through the dark) and adds to viewers' unease before the actual shock of the screaming book happens. It is scenes like this one where Williams' music excels in stimulating deep-seated fear.
Source: lizandrob.co.nz via Ariel on Pinterest
Sorceror's Stone and Chamber of Secrets have many more scary scenes than the other movies in the series do, simply because the music adds to their overall suspense and mystery. Scenes with Voldemort/Quirrel in the Forbidden Forest, Knockturn Alley, bloody messages etched on the walls, spiders scuttling through the passages, or Harry's journey to the Chamber of Secrets are frightening mainly because the music creates such good suspense. It makes the viewer that much more receptive - and the payoff much more striking - when the scary whatever-it-is materializes on screen. It's why I could be more afraid of Voldemort in Sorceror's Stone and Chamber of Secrets than of the later Voldemort or even the dementors; more than any other Harry Potter soundtrack, the first two movies' soundtracks foreshadowed Voldemort as a terrifying and ghastly figure before I even saw his face. For that reason, when he finally revealed himself to Harry, he was just as awful as the music suggested.
Thus, I say kudos to Williams: more than any other composer, he knew how to make Harry Potter legitimately unnerving.
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3. Fifth Movement of Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14: "Songe d'une nuit de sabbat"/ "Dreams of a Witches' Sabbath" (Berlioz)
This piece I saved for last, because it is the closing movement of Berlioz' dramatic Symphonie Fantastique. According to Michael Austin's translation, the 1855 version of the symphony can be summarized as follows:
A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere. (see Programme of the symphony)
Over the course of the symphony's five movements, the young musician has five different dreams (see translation for further detail). After being beheaded in the Fourth Movement, he awakens in the Fifth Movement at a witches' sabbath - or in the underworld - to behold a score of demons who have amassed for his funeral. As the music builds to its climax, his beloved is revealed to be at the head of the procession.... and then he awakens from his nightmare.
"Songe d'une nuit de sabbat" is truly unique in its eeriness. Its sweeping crescendoes and crashing notes make me jump with their suddenness, its bell dirges pierce the movement with gloom, and its skittering strings and sonorous brass animate every ghoulish and batlike beast that can be conjured by the imagination. Berlioz' Fifth Movement masters the art of interchanging grand with grotesque; funereal with demonic; lugubrious with gleeful. It sums up all the best musical elements of the supernatural, leaving a deeper impact on my memory than any other piece of Halloween music ever composed. In my personal opinion, this makes it the creepiest selection of Halloween music I have ever heard.
- "Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat" (Tchaikovsky)
Yeah, I know what you're probably thinking: "Classical cat music?!? I mean, if it was about black cats, that would be one thing - but what's scary about Puss-in-Boots?!?"
Well... do you remember the scene in Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty when Maleficent bewitches Princess Aurora to touch the spinning wheel? The animation was creepy enough, but as a kid I was far more freaked out by the music accompanying it. That music was "Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat," from Act III of Tchaikovsky's 1889 ballet The Sleeping Beauty.
Coincidentally, this piece was not part of any scary scene in Tchaikovsky's ballet; it actually was part of the happy ending. At the wedding of Princess Aurora and Prince Désiré, fairytale characters perform dances - Pas de caractère/Pas de quatre - to celebrate the royal union. While the dance of Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat was not intended to be frightening in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty adaptation, Disney used it to great effect in the Scary Spindle scene. Its haunting strains still echo in my memory today.
What do I mean by this? Think of the library scene in the first movie: the buildup of ghostly chamber music enhances the ominous atmosphere and creepy imagery (like Harry's disembodied hand carrying a lantern through the dark) and adds to viewers' unease before the actual shock of the screaming book happens. It is scenes like this one where Williams' music excels in stimulating deep-seated fear. Source: lizandrob.co.nz via Ariel on Pinterest
Sorceror's Stone and Chamber of Secrets have many more scary scenes than the other movies in the series do, simply because the music adds to their overall suspense and mystery. Scenes with Voldemort/Quirrel in the Forbidden Forest, Knockturn Alley, bloody messages etched on the walls, spiders scuttling through the passages, or Harry's journey to the Chamber of Secrets are frightening mainly because the music creates such good suspense. It makes the viewer that much more receptive - and the payoff much more striking - when the scary whatever-it-is materializes on screen. It's why I could be more afraid of Voldemort in Sorceror's Stone and Chamber of Secrets than of the later Voldemort or even the dementors; more than any other Harry Potter soundtrack, the first two movies' soundtracks foreshadowed Voldemort as a terrifying and ghastly figure before I even saw his face. For that reason, when he finally revealed himself to Harry, he was just as awful as the music suggested.
3. Fifth Movement of Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14: "Songe d'une nuit de sabbat"/ "Dreams of a Witches' Sabbath" (Berlioz)
A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere. (see Programme of the symphony)
Over the course of the symphony's five movements, the young musician has five different dreams (see translation for further detail). After being beheaded in the Fourth Movement, he awakens in the Fifth Movement at a witches' sabbath - or in the underworld - to behold a score of demons who have amassed for his funeral. As the music builds to its climax, his beloved is revealed to be at the head of the procession.... and then he awakens from his nightmare.
"Songe d'une nuit de sabbat" is truly unique in its eeriness. Its sweeping crescendoes and crashing notes make me jump with their suddenness, its bell dirges pierce the movement with gloom, and its skittering strings and sonorous brass animate every ghoulish and batlike beast that can be conjured by the imagination. Berlioz' Fifth Movement masters the art of interchanging grand with grotesque; funereal with demonic; lugubrious with gleeful. It sums up all the best musical elements of the supernatural, leaving a deeper impact on my memory than any other piece of Halloween music ever composed. In my personal opinion, this makes it the creepiest selection of Halloween music I have ever heard.
Love this post! Good choices. Any chance you can put a link to the music in the text that describes them? Almost didn't realize there was an option for hearing the music and I would hate for others to miss out!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your suggestion! However, I generally attach music at the bottom of the post so that people can listen to music and read info on the same page, rather than clicking a link that takes them to an entirely different page. Also, I usually tend to attach music files from my own account because certain songs I talk about on my blog can't be found on Youtube (or they aren't the exact version I'm thinking of).
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