[PetrB]

In this thread you recommend to me your favorite Dark, Ominous, and Foreboding compositions. In other words works that you listen to when you want to wallow in your anger, depression, fear, or frustrations…. Don't lie we have all been there.

Please tell us why you find the suggested pieces to be categorized as such.

First, you have to tell the reader what you think are some specifically Dark, Ominous, and Foreboding pieces.

Hell, a lot of people's default setting is modern and contemporary classical, a lot as old as the 1920's - mid 20th century, because it is used so often as the 'unfamiliar' music under scenes of suspense and horror in films specifically because the general audiences are unaware of that repertoire, and the new and unfamiliar disorients, which is the desired effect to increase the viewers sensation of 'something strange or scary.' Within the film and video score milieu, that early 20th century musical vocabulary is routinely used, in often a highly derivative manner, to perpetuate that conditioning -- to the point where those scores, and all the music from which their vocabulary is lifted, has become a cliche sound for the emotions and states of mind you listed.

I don't use music to accompany or enhance 'mood,' either... i.e. it is neither medicine or therapy for me.

If this is for some study, I teethed on tuneful and gnarlier early 20th century music in my pre-school and kindergarten years, started piano at age six with Bartok: 99% of what most associate as 'creepy / scary, Dark Ominous, Foreboding, etc. is "Just music" to me.

Best of luck

and best regards.

 

[PetrB]

I don't think I ever consciously want to wallow in anger, depression, fear or frustration although their range seems to be my default emotional setting unfortunately. Music that reflect these moods to me include:

Just about anything by Scelsi (for dark & foreboding) but particularly "Uaxuctum"

Also - and I realise it's not supposed to represent anger or frustration - but this piece embodies those emotions for me. It's the final movement of Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite", or more accurately, the final section of the final movement. In this performance especially, the enormous tension in the build up to the end and the way that final dissonant chord is held with the whole orchestra at full volume and the stand cymbals and tam-tam hissing like some kind of strangled snake; the noise for me is anger, it's unresolved chord, frustration! Listen from 3:16 as loud as you dare.

outube;9fdVbOJrLS4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fdVbOJrLS4

This might illustrate how different it is from one to the next listener. The end of the Prokofiev Scythian Suite is a tried and true formulaic grand-style ecstatic build up, finale / ending. It is a spine-tingler, a hair-raiser, complete with formulaic crescendo and orchestral tutti. I'm a lotta formally trained from early childhood, and used to listen to Prokofiev's gnarly and beautiful piano concerto No. 2, set to very loud, while eating breakfast and drinking juice somewhere in middle school, ca 5th grade.

I am so not bound to common practice anything (know and love a lot of that rep) that I don't even hear or feel any 'message' via a chord which does not resolve -- I don't even hear or feel it is "unresolved."

Ergo, devices which work on some don't work on all, or some others.

That all said, of course there is a huge majority who are conditioned and have similar expectations so you get the sort of reaction -- and interpretation --- that you get from this same piece. To me, its a good wholly effective standard gesture finale, the likes of which is still in circulation in John Adams Harmonium, or the finale of his Dharma at Big Sur.

The closest I got to perceiving 'anger' in a piece is the first movement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. During my first several listens to anything new to me with sung text, I never pay attention to what is being sung. Subsequent listening, if the music speaks on its own, then has me looking to the text. Without any understanding of the song's text, that opening segment is one raving / raging bit of music! I remember thinking, "Wow! What was he so angry at or about? Then, consulting the text, Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde confirmed by its text that raging musical setting

I think what you think, feel, what I think and feel, and others only proves my tenet that all such 'perceived meanings or emotions in music,' they are completely in the ears and minds of the listener, and the music itself is almost always a near completely neutral sort of aural Rorschach Blot.

Best regards.