Program Notes

Camille Saint-Saëns: Danse macabre (1874)

According to an old French legend, Death appears in a graveyard at midnight on Halloween, tunes his fiddle, and summons the skeletons from their graves to dance until dawn.[1] Saint-Saëns first set the idea as a song on a poem by Henri Cazalis in 1872, then expanded it into a tone poem in 1874. He gave the vocal line to a solo violin and used the xylophone, then a rare sound in the concert hall, to depict rattling bones.[2] Listen for the harp striking twelve midnight chimes, the violin's unsettling tritone (the "devil in music"), and the Dies irae chant, which the composer turns into a waltz.[2][3] Early listeners found the piece disturbing, but it has become one of his most celebrated works, and Liszt himself made a piano transcription soon after it appeared.[2][3]

John Williams: Symphonic Suite from Harry Potter

Warner Bros. first asked John Williams for music for early promotional material, and he wrote what became the series' signature theme, "Hedwig's Theme," before seeing any footage.[4] He chose the celesta for its gossamer sound, which he compared to a bird's feather floating.[4] Williams scored the first three films before handing the series to other composers,[5] yet the theme proved so recognizable that it was threaded through all eight films.[6]

Ray Parker Jr.: Theme from Ghostbusters

Parker was given only a few days to write a theme song for the 1984 film.[7][8] The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 11, 1984, and stayed there for three weeks.[7] It also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, losing to Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You."[8]

Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Dream of a Witches' Sabbath and March to the Scaffold

Berlioz premiered his symphony at the Paris Conservatoire on December 5, 1830, and insisted that audiences have a printed program explaining the story.[10] In it, a young artist, in a fit of despair over unrequited love, takes opium and dreams; his beloved becomes a recurring melody Berlioz called the idée fixe.[9][10] In the "March to the Scaffold," the artist dreams he has killed her and is led to his execution, and the melody returns for a moment, like a final thought of love cut short by the fatal blow.[9] In the "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath," he sees himself at his own funeral among ghouls and sorcerers. The beloved's melody returns as a vulgar dance tune, a funeral bell tolls, and the Dies irae is parodied and then combined with the witches' dance.[9]

Modest Mussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain

Mussorgsky completed this tone poem in 1867, inspired by a Gogol story and the midsummer St. John's Eve legend of witches and spirits gathering on a mountain.[11] He never heard it performed.[12] After his death, Rimsky-Korsakov reorchestrated the work in a more conservative style and replaced the original crashing, savage ending with dawn and church bells scattering the demons.[11] That 1886 version carried the piece to international audiences, while Mussorgsky's original was not published until 1968.[11][12] The work reached perhaps its widest audience through Disney's Fantasia (1940), which used Leopold Stokowski's arrangement based on Rimsky-Korsakov's.[12]

Danny Elfman: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Danny Elfman wrote both the songs and the score for the 1993 film and sang the songs of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town. The actor Chris Sarandon was cast as Jack's speaking voice after the songs had been recorded.[13] Tim Burton has said he and Elfman worked on the music before there was a script, and Elfman recorded each song at home as he finished it, singing it himself.[14] Elfman compared the project to an old-fashioned musical, with himself as both composer and lyricist.[14]

Edvard Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King

Henrik Ibsen invited Grieg in 1874 to write incidental music for his verse drama Peer Gynt, a task that swelled to 26 numbers.[15] Grieg was famously unimpressed by this one, writing that it reeked of cow dung and exaggerated Norwegian-ness, though he hoped the irony would come through.[15][16] He gathered it into the first Peer Gynt Suite in 1888, where it became the finale.[16] The music begins as a tiptoeing theme in the low strings and bassoons and grows ever faster and louder as the trolls chase Peer Gynt, ending in a crash.[17] Film historians point to the classic film M as one of the first to use music as a leitmotif, pairing this tune with its murderer.[18]

Rod Temperton: Thriller

The British songwriter Rod Temperton, formerly of the funk band Heatwave, wrote the title track for Michael Jackson's 1982 album.[19][21] It began life under the working title "Starlight," and Temperton wrote the spoken rap for horror actor Vincent Price in a taxi on the way to the recording session.[20] The album became the best-selling studio album of all time,[21] and the song's music video has been named the greatest of all time by various publications and reader polls.[19]

Sources:

Broadway Bach, "Danse Macabre, Op. 40" program note. https://www.broadwaybach.org/?p=234

Hollywood Bowl Musicdb, "Danse macabre, Op. 40." https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/musicdb/pieces/284/danse-macabre-op-40

Apple Music Classical, "Danse macabre in G Minor, Op. 40." https://classical.music.apple.com/rw/work/camille-saint-saens-1835-pp42

Mobile Symphony Orchestra, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" film note. https://mobilesymphony.org/?p=4891

Classic FM, "Harry Potter soundtrack: what are the famous themes and did John Williams score all the movies?" https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/periods-genres/film-tv/harry-potter-soundtrack-hedwig-theme-john-williams/

Classical Exburns, "John Williams: Hedwig's Theme." https://classicalexburns.com/2020/05/19/john-williams-hedwigs-theme-sufficiently-mystical-and-magical/

Wikipedia, "Ghostbusters (song)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_(song)

MusicRadar, "Ray Parker Jr shares the story behind the Ghostbusters theme song." https://www.musicradar.com/news/ray-parker-jr-shares-the-story-behind-the-ghostbusters-theme-song

Berlioz's program notes for Symphonie fantastique, as reproduced by CODA. https://codaweb.org/download/symphonie-fantastique/

Program notes by Charley Samson (2022), "Symphonie fantastique." https://audienceaccess.co/bio/OEB-32804

Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Night on Bald Mountain." https://www.britannica.com/print/article/1669633

Wikipedia, "Night on Bald Mountain." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_on_Bald_Mountain

Wikipedia, "The Nightmare Before Christmas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_Before_Christmas

Boingo.org, "Danny Elfman" article on The Nightmare Before Christmas. https://boingo.org/articles/NMBCArticle.html

Hollywood Bowl Musicdb, "Peer Gynt Suite No. 1." https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/musicdb/pieces/2685/peer-gynt-suite-no-1

Iain Farrington, "Edvard Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King." https://iainfarrington.com/grieg-in-the-hall-of-the-mountain-king.html

Dangerous Minds, "Edvard Grieg" (quoting the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra). https://dangerousminds.net/tag/Edvard-Grieg

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, "How Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' Haunts Pop Culture." https://cso.org/experience/article/20886/how-griegs-in-the-hall-of-the-mountain-king-h

Wikipedia, "Thriller (song)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thriller_(song)

SoulTracks, "Rod Temperton." https://soultracks.com/?p=81471

Sunday Independent (Ireland), "Rod Temperton," October 9, 2016. https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/sunday-independent-ireland/20161009/282458528467491