Otherwise known as getting in the mood for Halloween.
I was re-watching the old TV series Jonathan Creek after finding it on Amazon Prime and got curious about the theme music. I figured it was written for the series but nope. Apparently the theme of that show is part of a fairly famous piece of music written by Camille Saint-Saëns with very strong roots in Halloween. More on that in moment. Also, once you get something like that in your head it’s hard to get it out so I thought everyone else should also have it firmly in their head for Halloween too. So enjoy.
What I really couldn’t get out of my head was this description:
Halloween wasn’t much of anything in this country 100 years ago, so it’s pretty new as we think of it with the costuming and the trick-or-treating. The European tradition, from which Saint-Saëns’s wrote, was the tradition of scaring the absolute bejeezus out of you. Consider the premise of Danse Macabre, which means, if you haven’t guess it yet, “dance of death.” The Reaper rouses himself out of bed at midnight on Halloween, summons the skeletons from the grave, and they all boogie down to dawn.
Even long before Saint-Saëns’s tone poem came along, woodcuts were common throughout Europe at Halloweentime featuring a plowman walking to the field to resume his endless toil, and the Reaper sidling up next to him and saying something like, “hey, this burden, this hard life, it can all be over just like that, come over here with me by this hayrick and have a rest.” That’s where this music springs from, and that’s no Ben Cooper costume conceit.
Saint-Saëns signals the arrival of midnight with a harp picking out 12 notes. A violin begins a wicked canter, a flute instigates a second theme, and these themes, distributed over the other instruments of the orchestra, dance with each other with grim inevitability, what you might fancy the rhythm of a ghost story. A quote from the Dies Irae (the scary bit in requiems) is flown in, and when the two themes mesh, at the piece’s loudest, most rhythmically intense point, it’s like, “do your thing, sun, get back up in that sky, and end this horror.”
Relief comes with an oboe signaling the cock’s cry, and everyone, presumably, gets back into their graves, dance over. But this is the real Halloween cask-strength stuff, and a reminder, of sorts, as well. Sure, everyone gets a birthday, and then you dance through life the best you can—but everyone gets a death day, too. How do you like bobbing for them apples?
The Purest Halloween Music Ever Written