Walk into a dark Victorian (or Transylvanian) mansion and this is what you'll hear. It was prominently featured during the opening credits of Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 film adaption of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That's probably why this piece of organ music has become associated with everything eerie. Also heard in The Black Cat and Tales from the Crypt for obvious creepy reasons; parodied in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and outside the horror genre in Sunset Boulevard.
Classical Music and The Movies
J.S. Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor"
Walk into a dark Victorian (or Transylvanian) mansion and this is what you'll hear. It was prominently featured during the opening credits of Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 film adaption of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That's probably why this piece of organ music has become associated with everything eerie. Also heard in The Black Cat and Tales from the Crypt for obvious creepy reasons; parodied in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and outside the horror genre in Sunset Boulevard.
Walk into a dark Victorian (or Transylvanian) mansion and this is what you'll hear. It was prominently featured during the opening credits of Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 film adaption of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That's probably why this piece of organ music has become associated with everything eerie. Also heard in The Black Cat and Tales from the Crypt for obvious creepy reasons; parodied in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and outside the horror genre in Sunset Boulevard.
Finally, a Computer that Writes Contemporary Music Without Human Help
The BBC ran a story about a computer at the University of Malaga in Spain, dubbed “Iamus” after a mythical Greek prophet who could translate birdsong, that’s capable of composing contemporary classical music without human aid (“contemporary” meaning you probably won’t walk away humming a melody unless you’re an aficionado of 20th century classical music).
... Aesthetics aside, Iamus isn’t the 21st century’s answer to Mozart, though that’s the sort of eye-catching headline this technology gives rise to. It’s rather a 21st century flag waver for something known as “melomics music technology” (melomics is a portmanteau of ”melody” and “genomics”). Genomics is the discipline of sequencing, assembling and analyzing all of an organism’s genetic material — its genome. Melomics, then, is an algorithm that fiddles with genome-like data structures to produce plausible music compositions.
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The Perfect Classical Music App
Esa-Pekka Salonen’s The Orchestra puts the Philharmonia on your iPad—in very clever ways.
By Seth Colter Walls
A funny thing happened the last time I was taking in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (just a few minutes ago). Right smack in the middle of the blaring finale, the conductor reminded me that the composer’s contemporaries “accused him of being drunk when he wrote these pieces.”
The baton-swinger, Esa-Pekka Salonen, didn’t have to stop the Philharmonia to tell me this, because the performance I was watching wasn’t live, but playing on an iPad. Nor did the sound of his voice obscure the main aural attraction, since his words were running as a subtitle track sandwiched in between four different simultaneous views of the world-class ensemble and a “curated score” of Beethoven’s famous work, its notes running across my screen in real time.
Welcome to The Orchestra—a flat-out astounding new app produced by Touch Press, the Philharmonia Orchestra and its principal conductor Salonen. At $13.99, it’s not only one of the best albums—you know, a longish compilation of music—you could purchase for someone; it’s an app that could easily change how you consume classical music outside of the concert hall. Or how we introduce new listeners to symphonic works in the first place.
... Aside from a chuckle over imagining Beethoven pounding back lager after lager and coming up with something as well-constructed as his Symphony No. 5—“which might actually be the case,” Salonen allows—the value of the little history lesson was its reminder that orchestra music has been, and can continue to be, an audience-shocker.
... The Philharmonia’s success here wasn’t guaranteed merely by its being the first orchestra to upload some videos to a tablet’s app store. Rather, their opening gambit was deeply thought through by people who understand both Mahler and the iPad.
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By Seth Colter Walls
A funny thing happened the last time I was taking in a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (just a few minutes ago). Right smack in the middle of the blaring finale, the conductor reminded me that the composer’s contemporaries “accused him of being drunk when he wrote these pieces.”
The baton-swinger, Esa-Pekka Salonen, didn’t have to stop the Philharmonia to tell me this, because the performance I was watching wasn’t live, but playing on an iPad. Nor did the sound of his voice obscure the main aural attraction, since his words were running as a subtitle track sandwiched in between four different simultaneous views of the world-class ensemble and a “curated score” of Beethoven’s famous work, its notes running across my screen in real time.
Welcome to The Orchestra—a flat-out astounding new app produced by Touch Press, the Philharmonia Orchestra and its principal conductor Salonen. At $13.99, it’s not only one of the best albums—you know, a longish compilation of music—you could purchase for someone; it’s an app that could easily change how you consume classical music outside of the concert hall. Or how we introduce new listeners to symphonic works in the first place.
... Aside from a chuckle over imagining Beethoven pounding back lager after lager and coming up with something as well-constructed as his Symphony No. 5—“which might actually be the case,” Salonen allows—the value of the little history lesson was its reminder that orchestra music has been, and can continue to be, an audience-shocker.
... The Philharmonia’s success here wasn’t guaranteed merely by its being the first orchestra to upload some videos to a tablet’s app store. Rather, their opening gambit was deeply thought through by people who understand both Mahler and the iPad.
READ MORE
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