A couple years ago, I was teaching a class on Musical Form & Analysis. I gave my students an assignment to take a short piece and analyze the phrase structure. For most people, their analysis looked like “A, A’, B, A'” or “A, A, B, A, C, D, C, A, B, A”. And then there was that one cheeky student who analyzed Edvard Grieg‘s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” —

A, A, A’, A’, A, A”; A, A, A’, A’, A, A”; A, A, A”’, A”’, A, A”; coda (based on A)

A lot of hip-hop, dance, and techno music is just a two-measure phrase repeated ad nauseam. Well, Grieg’s famous spooky work isn’t much more than that. It’s a four-measure phrase, grouped into a six-phrase unit which is repeated three times, with a little ending. He does two things to keep us from banging our heads against the wall in boredom: 1) in each six-phrase unit, the middle two phrases begin on a different note 2) each successive phrase gets a little bit louder and faster.

The work is from a suite of incidental music Grieg wrote for the Norwegian satirical play Peer Gynt. It’s the closest thing to humor a Scandinavian has ever created.

Fall is my favorite time of year. The cooler weather, the colorful leaves, the smell of decomposing leaves (seriously, I like that), and of course, pumpkin spiced everything (not a fan …)

Asa composer, Ottorino Respighi isn’t exactly a one-hit-wonder – instead, more of a three-hit-wonder. He wrote three orchestral suites, all based on Rome – The Pines of Rome, The Fountains of Rome, and Roman Festivals. One of the festivals that he paints with music is called “The Harvest of October.” In it you can hear horn calls, signaling a festive hunt; later, a mandolin plays a folk melody, painting peasants working to bring in the last harvest; the piece ends with the exhausted festival goers slipping off into a lovely, quiet sleep.

There’s a remarkable connection between our senses and our memory. The sound of the ocean, the feeling of a soft blanket or pet, the sight of a landmark or building, the taste of certain food, or even a mere smell can trigger vivid memories – sometimes positive, sometimes traumatic.

Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov was born and educated near St. Petersburg, Russia. After graduating from the conservatory there, he was appointed music director of an orchestra in Tbilsi, Georgia. After seven years, he returned to Russia to be a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. It was here he wrote his most famous work, the Caucasia Sketches – musical memories of the region of his first professional employment. Included in these sketches is a movement titled “In a Mosque“, in which you can hear a Muezzin‘s call to prayer at the beginning. I imagine that every time he heard this piece, Ippolitov-Ivanov was transported back to his time in Tbilsi.