Title: "Night on Bald (or Bare) Mountain"
Format: Orchestral work/tone poem
Written by: Modest Mussorgsky
Performed by: n/a
Genre: Classical
Taken from: n/a
Year (Performer): n/a
Year (Composer): 1867
Acclaim: One of the great pieces of classical music that has survived to this day, used in ads and movies and most memorably in the Disney mixed live-action/animated movie
Fantasia
The first time I heard this was as an advert for, I believe, yogurt. How inauspicious, huh? But I was quite young at the time. Later I discovered it on one of my classical compilation albums, though I never saw
Fantasia. I did research it for my History of Animation journal though. The piece’s history seems odd to me, and I’ve never heard of this situation occurring before, though what I don’t know about classical music could fill several warehouses.
Composed originally by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, the pice was apparently lambasted by his mentor, and later re-recorded by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, for whom we have to thank for "Scheherazade" and "Flight of the Bumblebee". It was with this version that the work found fame, and it’s his version that Disney chose. I knew nothing of this, and I honestly couldn’t tell you which one I heard, though I expect on the CD at least it was surely Mussorgsky’s, or I remember it being labelled so.
A tone poem - a musical piece set to evoke the spirit of a story, basically - it tells of the purported meeting of a coven of witches on a mountain on St. John’s Eve, a summer solstice festival witch (sorry)
takes place over the night of 6 - 7 July, to await the arrival of Satan. As such, it has a lot of dramatic flair to it, as well as darker, ominous tones in (maybe) bassoon and French horn (I know next to nothing about orchestras, don’t get on my case) and ends with a flighty little run of flutes or something that I always thought sounded incongruous, but which I now see is meant to either signify the witches running around and dancing, summoning their dread master, or flying off maybe after the ceremony.
Actually, I see now that what I was listening to was an except from the piece. It doesn’t end that way at all. Ends quite serenely and peacefully, which is twice as incongruous really.
Things I like about this:
The atmosphere evoked by the various instruments
The sense of danger and approaching doom
The power of the piece
Things I do not like about this:
Nothing
Rating:
The video I’ve decided to go with is the one from Fantasia, if only because the animation it’s set to is pretty damn cool, and it is after all eleven minutes long, the kind of length that might test the patience of anyone not into classical. Proles.