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.

It’s easy to think of a composer writing a piece as a romantic gift to a potential lover. Wow, lucky guy/girl, we think. But what about when a composer writes a masterpiece as a friendly gift to a 6 & 7 year old girl & boy? Bah, ungrateful little brats!

I’m kidding, of course. But still, we can be sure that this young pair had no idea of the honor bestowed upon them when Maurice Ravel wrote his Mother Goose Suite as a present for them. Though the original composition was for piano, within a year Ravel had expanded the work into a full ballet and orchestrated it. It has since become a beloved classic of “children’s’ music” (that is to say, music for all ages). The suite includes tells some common fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, Little Ugly, and Beauty and the Beast. It ends with this gorgeous pastorale, The Fairy Garden, which doesn’t tell any specific story, but instead captures the simple rapture of children listening to a good tale.