Q. I need a classical song that is very harsh and seems angry. It would be good if it were by Bach or Beethoven. Can you send me a link?
A. Composers are not by and large especially morbid people, but death and music go so well together, like roasted lamb shank and pinot noir, that the combination can be hard to resist. The centuries have supplied a stock of aural gestures to signify life ending: dark, bruised chords, demonic rhythms, violin bows trembling near the bridge, making gnashing sounds. The Halloween season, and the ebbing of the year's last warmth, suggests a deathly soundtrack. I am not talking here of doom-laden meditations such as such as Shostakovich's Fifteenth Quartet or of sublime expressions of grief such as Strauss' "Metamorphosen"or Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder" ("Songs on the Death of Children"). I am also not referring to death as the vital force in romantic opera, propelling the drama towards its triumphant, melodious bloodbath.
No, I want to focus on music that deals with the thing itself: that imagines what it is like to die. The wellspring of most death-related music (and the namesake of a death metal band) is the "Dies irae" chant, a not particularly doom-laden medieval melody to the prayer for departed souls. The chant got its anthemic status during the 19th century, when romantic composers slowed it down, cranked it up and had the brass pound it into a terrifying, zombie-like march.
In 1830, Hector Berlioz used the tune as the dramatic centerpiece of his "Symphonie Fantastique," which describes in music an opium-addled protagonist's dream of his own execution. In Berlioz's nightmarish world, Death is a grotesque, a dancing comic character who taunts the living with raucous music.
For Franz Liszt, a virtuoso pianist of rock star standing and a composer of mystical bent, Berlioz's piece fed his own exquisite fascination with mortality. Liszt contributed copiously to the morbid-symphonic repertoire, but his masterpiece in the genre is the 1849 "Totentanz" ("Death Dance"), a ferociously lugubrious showpiece for piano and orchestra that he also adapted for solo piano.
He, too, uses the "Dies Irae" in all its pounding majesty, embroidering it with so much hyperactive passagework for the piano that playing the piece itself can be nearly lethal. Like many of his contemporaries, Liszt was transfixed by the gruesome imagery of medieval and Flemish art, alive with dancing skeletons and sin-drenched blood. But instead of treating mortality as an object lesson in Christian morals, Liszt (who became a monk later in life) fashioned an ode to death as a heroic stage in life, a titanic struggle for immortality.
In most people's minds, death is tangled up with fear, and a harrowing depiction of both comes in Schubert's 1815 song, based on the Goethe poem, "Der Erlkönig" ("The Erl King"). A father gallops through the woods holding his small and terrified boy, who hallucinates a demonic sprite. The piano hammers out the horses' relentless hooves, and the singer switches among the urgent narration, the child's pleas and the Erl King's come-ons.
Over a century later, the vivid horror of Schubert's tiny music drama still gripped expressionistic composers. Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck," completed in 1922, which describes a simple soldier's descent into the inferno of his own mind, culminates in a murder. Berg evokes violence with lucid precision: a B natural, disguised by different harmonies and orchestral colors, runs ceaselessly through the scene like a flickering obsession, and once the knife has struck, the entire orchestra masses overwhelmingly on that single note, flooding the scene in lurid sound. Surely Bernard Herrmann must have had that moment in mind when he wrote the repeating violin screeches for the shower scene in Psycho.
The quiet postlude to "Wozzeck" is creepier still: the victim's little boy is riding a hobbyhorse to the orchestra's lilting canter, a slow-mo echo of the piano part in "Elrkönig." Another kid runs up and blurts out, "Hey you, your mother is dead." The boy, already a dead soul, keeps impassively rocking. The curtain falls.
Death by music had its apotheosis in George Crumb's string quartet from 1971, "Black Angels," a work of grim electric beauty. The composer subtitled it "Thirteen Images from the Dark Land," but along the way it acquired a different moniker: The Vietnam Quartet.
Crumb's morbid horror is not an inner gloom or a religious vision, but a report on the times. It opens with "The Night of the Electric Insects," in which bows tremble on the strings' high register, creating an enveloping buzz. In the course of the brief, spasmodic movements, the "Dies Irae" makes an appearance again, as does another Schubert song, "Der Tod und das Mädchen" ("Death and the Maiden"), enveloped in haunted tremors. The references are antique, but the context is utterly modern and thoroughly original. Even death can be updated.
What was that song on Zombie Glee?
Q. The piano chords after the opposing team fumbled the ball.
Random glee original music? or from a song?
A. all i remember is the song "thriller" by michael jackson
What are some good piano songs?
Q. .OR a good place to find piano chords...progressions
A. Do you mean Classical or Contemporary? Assuming you mean the latter, here's a list of fun songs to play. If you know how to play chords on the piano, it's fairly simple to use guitar chords to learn the song on the piano. Acoustic versions of songs feature the chord structures of a song, so you can learn the basic structure and start playing leads and special piano parts when you feel more comfortable.
Fun Songs:
Imagine - John Lennon
Bridge over Troubled Water - Simon and Garfunkel
Let it Be - The Beatles
Brick - Ben Folds Five
Karma Police - Radiohead
Someone Like You - Adele
Surfs Up - The Beach Boys
Rose for Emily - The Zombies
Angel - Sarah Mclaughlin
Don't Stop Believing - Journey
The Scientist - Coldplay
How to Save a Life - The Fray
Another fun thing to do (that I prefer to do), is take an acoustic song or even just a plain song, finding the chord structure, and turning it into a piano song. You can come up with some cool leads and it's a completely new song.
And ANY music works, a great example of this is Ben Folds' cover of "B*tches Ain't Sh*t" by Dr. Dre. :)
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Title : What is a classical song that is very harsh?
Description : Q. I need a classical song that is very harsh and seems angry. It would be good if it were by Bach or Beethoven. Can you send me a link? A....