Spooky Compositions: Getting you in the mood for Halloween!

From as early as the Medieval Era, there have been compositions of music that sound spooky or creepy to our ears. Here are a few examples you can listen to in order to create that eerie ambience for Halloween!

1. Dies Irae: The Dies Irae is originally a Gregorian Chant from the early Medieval Era. The Dies Irae text comes from the Requiem Mass, depicting a fiery and violent judgment day.

2. Commendatore Scene, Don Giovanni: From Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (pronounced: dahn jo-vah-nee, never dahn jee-oh-vah-nee), this final scene shows the Don being dragged to hell by a statue of the man he killed earlier in the opera!

3. Marche Funébre (Funeral March) from Piano Sonata No. 2 In B-flat Minor, op. 35: Written by Chopin, this piece is the quintessential funeral march. It is a very popular piece of music that has been used in many movies, commercials and cartoons

4. Night on Bald Mountain: As with the Chopin Funeral March, this piece by Modest Mussorgsky is often used as scary background music. Notice how the frantic strings and bombastic brass create an unsettling feeling.

5. Danse Macabre: Written by Camille Saint-Saëns, this piece literally means “dance of death”. It starts with a violin solo playing the tritone (interval of an augmented 4th or diminished 5th), which was also known as the “devil’s chord” in Medieval music.

6. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta: Composed by Béla Bartók, this suspenseful piece was featured in Stanley Kubrick’s famous horror film The Shining. An interesting feature of this song is that the whole piece is a palindrome!

7. Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima: Written in 1960 by Krzysztof Penderecki, this piece is perhaps the most unsettling and creepy of them all. This piece subsequently paved the way for the manner that horror film scores would be composed; using cluster chord techniques to give the listener a very panicked feeling. Also, notice how the music score is very unconventional and different!