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.

I’m said before that Mozart wrote the Requiem against which all others are judged. I’ve also mentioned how the intense emotions of that piece foreshadow a big change in musical style between the 18th and 19th centuries. Mozart’s is a masterpiece, classical in balanced form and romantic in dramatic execution. But what if we dump that balance and go straight for the feels – specifically, the OMG-I’m-afraid-to-die day-of-judgment fire-and-brimstone scared-out-of-my-wits feels?

Enter Giuseppe Verdi, the revolutionary composer who helped Italian Opera stay on the map. His Requiem IS an opera; the emotional drama is as chilling as Othello, heart-wrenching as Traviata, dark as Rigoletto. When we hear about the day of judgment, we are scared. We are very very scared. And when Verdi’s angel sounds the trumpet (at 2:25, “Tuba Mirum”), it makes me want to cower under my desk. Mozart’s Tuba? not so much. Makes me want to do a Mr. Bean dance.

Kudos to the performers here for having A LOT of singers in the choir, so the brass could play at full-volume!

The music is scary up until 4:10, at which point it’s the conductor’s face which is scary.

Today’s piece isn’t necessarily scary, but it is dark, deep, and heavy. I don’t associate it with Halloween, but I do remember an old Halloween cartoon in which a crazy old man played it on the piano in his haunted house.

There’s a tradition in keyboard composition to write a set of pieces in all 24 keys – that is, all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale (A, A#, B, C, C#, etc), in both major and minor tonalities. The idea to write this sort of musical collection can be traced to composer Vincenzo Galilei (who, incidentally, was the father of Galileo … lest you think musicians are dumb performing monkeys.) However, the first successful set of compositions in all 24 keys is without a doubt Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Well Tempered Clavier. The Well Tempered Clavier has since become one of those magical works which is all things to all people. It is used as a teaching tool for children and adults, pianists, composers, and more; and yet, you’ll hear selections from it on many piano concerts, and regularly see performances of all 24 pieces (memorized, usually.) Since its completion, all the great pianists have played it, and most composers refer to it as one of their inspirations.

Sergei Rachmaninoff would have known this work, as well as Chopin‘s and probably Scriabin‘s sets of 24 preludes. Being one of the greatest composers for piano in the early twentieth century, it would be wrong if he didn’t contribute his own exceedingly difficult set of pieces in every key. This Prelude in C# minor is practically a right of passage for young pianists, since it calls for a number of skills that are necessary as they graduate to more advanced literature. There are large chords, big jumps, and the middle section requires finger dexterity. And it has the added benefit of being not too hard, but sounding hard – making it good for impressing friends at parties.

This video contains a performance by Rachmaninoff himself!