I’ve always liked Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride as a secular Christmas song 🙂 It’s not technically a Christmas song since the words never mention Christmas but it’s often played now so it seems like a way to ease into the season. Anderson had the original idea for the piece during a heatwave in July 1946; […]
Come join us for a free concert of holiday music! Usher in the holidays with the sounds of the Harp, Flute, Piano, Organ, Soprano vocalist, Handbells, Jazz duo and an Irish session! The concert will conclude with everyone joining in singing some traditional carols. A reception will follow. At Pender UMC on route 50, […]
I’m thankful for my piano studio, my students, and my piano 🙂 During Covid I was especially thankful for the Internet! When I was growing up, my dad was a minister, meaning we lived in whatever parsonage the church chose to let us live in. The one we had in Pawcatuck, CT […]
I have just purchased a set of Christmas Shades of Sound Listening & Coloring Book for the studio. Please let me know if you do not want your student to participate in Christmas activities and I will assign alternate activities. Each week, I will print out some of the pages for your student and put them in […]
Johann Sebastian Bach’s towering monument of organ music, with its deep sense of foreboding, will forever be associated with Halloween. The piece is recognizable to most and has been featured in many films, including: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Black Cat (1934), Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Sunset Boulevard (1950), 20,000 Leagues Under the […]
Night on Bald Mountain refers to a series of compositions by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881). Inspired by Russian literary works and legend, Mussorgsky composed a “musical picture”, St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain on the theme of a witches’ sabbath occurring on St. John’s Eve, which he completed on that very night, June 23, in 1867. Interestingly, […]
The Funeral March of a Marionette (Marche funèbre d’une marionnette) is a short piece by Charles Gounod. It was written in 1872 for solo piano and orchestrated in 1879. It is perhaps best known as the theme music for the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which originally aired from 1955 to 1965. In 1871-72, while […]
“In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46. […]
Danse macabre, Op. 40, is a tone poem for orchestra, written in 1874 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. It started out in 1872 as an art song for voice and piano with a French text by the poet Henri Cazalis, which is based on an old French superstition. In 1874, the composer expanded and reworked […]
The final movement is the best known part of the symphony, thanks to its use in the Julia Roberts movie, Sleeping With The Enemy. It features a four-part structure, which Hector Berlioz described in his own program notes from 1845 as follows: “He sees himself at a witches’ Sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering […]
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