I can’t tell you how many people of my generation say they were first introduced to Art (“classical”) Music through cartoons. There are more than a dozen music-themed Looney Tunes shorts, not to mention the marvelous pairing of music and emotion found in Ren & Stimpy. These of course are light cartoons, based on slap-stick comedy (or, in the case of Ren & Stimpy, truly absurd comedy). Disney, on the other hand, tended to take things a little more seriously.

In the years surrounding World War II, Disney was working hard to lift the American spirit, producing music-themed feel-good movies such as Make Mine Music (containing Peter & the Wolf and an Operatic Whale) and of course, Fantasia. Unlike cartoon comedy shorts which presented anarchic musical satire, Disney presented a fairly authentic version of Art Music performances. Still, the story and music of Disney’s Peter & the Wolf is very different from Prokofiev‘s, but not insultingly so. A composer who came out worse for wear after dealing with Disney was without a doubt Igor Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring was changed from a primitive pagan ritual into a dancing dinosaur ballet. Stravinsky said he was offered little choice whether or not to allow his piece to be used; Disney approached him and said he was going to use the Rite one way or the other – Stravinsky was offered only the choice to be paid or not.

Paul Dukas, on the other hand, died five years before Fantasia was released, and therefore didn’t have to negotiate with Disney when they decided to set his tone poem, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to cartoons. And, amazingly, Disney adapted neither the original story nor Dukas’ score in the film – it’s about as authentic as you can get, once you get over Mickey Mouse as a main character. Now, the image of magician Mickey Mouse can be found everywhere, and Dukas’ music is permanently associated with this performance

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.