It’s easy to be scared of large animals with sharp teeth or scary humanoid creatures with exaggerated features. It’s also easy to be scared of clowns.

But what about when everyday household objects go bad? Say, an umbrella, or shoes? Maybe a broom? What about a magical flying mortar & pestle, or a house with chicken legs?

Enter Baba Yaga, a your classic witch, except that she flies around in a mortar and lives in a house with chicken legs. I suppose that makes her more scary? Or is it a ruse to confuse children long enough for her to catch them?

It doesn’t really matter; more importantly, a painting of Baba Yaga’s house became the inspiration for part of Modest Mussorgsky‘s Pictures at an Exhibition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5p-gNyVlo

There’s also an awesome metal version:

The Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur, begins tonight at sunset.

Please read my previous blog post to learn about the brave life of Jacob Weinberg, whose work I recently discovered while seeking art music related to the Jewish High Holidays.

This piece comes from the same string quartet as my previous post; this time, we hear the second movement. Like the first movement, this one uses a traditional Jewish melody, this time based on the Kol Nidre – a declaration on the day of atonement, Yom Kippur. There is something magical about this melody and it’s short, pleading phrases, so much so that Protestant Christian composer Max Bruch wrote a concert piece for cello and orchestra based on it. But whereas Bruch simply uses a Jewish melody as the basis for a piece, Weinberg weaves the holy mysteries of the holiday into his music.

Don’t do drugs, kids. But if you do, do it like Scriabin.

Alexander Scriabin wrote plenty of perfectly normal pieces; he was a brilliant pianist who wrote his own set of piano preludes and etudes, similar to the great Chopin and Liszt. But once he turned 25, things began to get weird. He developed his own system of harmony based on the whole tone and octatonic scales. At the time, this was edgy, but not groundbreaking; it makes his music sound similar to French impressionism. What sets Scriabin apart is his synesthesia, the “color organ” he invented, his devotion to Theosophy, his rambling writings, and his wild music inspired by religious visions. His two most famous pieces are the Poem of Fire and the Poem of Ecstasy.

Scriabin himself approved this description of The Poem of Ecstasy, which will describe it far better than I:

The Poem of Ecstasy is the Joy of Liberated Action. The Cosmos, i.e., Spirit, is Eternal Creation without External Motivation, a Divine Play of Worlds. The Creative Spirit, i.e., the Universe at Play, is not conscious of the Absoluteness of its creativeness, having subordinated itself to a Finality and made creativity a means toward an end. The stronger the pulse beat of life and the more rapid the precipitation of rhythms, the more clearly the awareness comes to the Spirit that it is consubstantial with creativity itself. When the Spirit has attained the supreme culmination of its activity and has been torn away from the embraces of teleology and relativity, when it has exhausted completely its substance and its liberated active energy, the Time of Ecstasy shall arrive.

I’ll say it again, kids: don’t do drugs.