The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: Happy Halloween! Here is some spooky music along with a spooky way to listen to it.

By Jacob Stockinger

BOO!

Today is Halloween 2015.

Trick or treat?

The Ear is giving out treats today.

Eeriness has played a role in classical music since its beginning.

So here are the 13 scariest pieces of classical music – with links to performances – as determined by Limelight magazine:

http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/13-scariest-pieces-classical-music-halloween

And here is another selection of Halloween music, 10 pieces also with links to performances, from The Imaginative Conservative:

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/10/classical-music-pieces-for-halloween.html

Together the two websites offer a wide variety of composers: Camille Saint-Saens, Franz Liszt, Johann Sebastian Bach, Modest Mussorgsky, Hector Berlioz, Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Gyorgy Ligeti, Antonin Dvorak, Josef Suk, Jean Sibelius, Andre Caplet, Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert.

You could stream them loudly as you do trick-or-treat with neighborhood children.

But The Ear also wants to share what he finds to be a fascinating and irresistible but nonetheless spooky way of listening to the famous Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, a work that made both lists of music appropriate to Halloween.

The YouTube video uses an ingenious but spooky visual bar graph bar way to follow the music. Try it and see for yourself! Over 25 million people have!

Then leave any suggestions you have for Halloween music, along with a link to a YouTube or other performance if possible, in the COMMENT section.

The Ear wants to hear.