Classical music usually soothes with its dulcet tones. Usually. But sometimes it is raw and shocking. Sometimes it expresses the side of man that we avoid the consideration of. This list looks at ten such pieces of music. None of these pieces pre-date the 20th century which, when you consider that art mimics society, is rather condemnatory of our time. Some of these items contain nudity, flashing images, and scenes of horror. Now, turn up the volume and steel yourself . . .

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10 Too Terrifying For The Exorcist

Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin, best known for writing the theme to Mission Impossible was asked by William Friedkin to produce the soundtrack for The Exorcist, which he was directing. Schifrin wrote the theme and it was placed in a trailer. However, then the unexpected happened. In his own words: “The people who saw the trailer reacted against the film, because the scenes were heavy and frightening, so most of them went to the toilet to vomit. The trailer was terrific, but the mix of those frightening scenes and my music, which was also a very difficult and heavy score, scared the audiences away.”

According to Neil Lerner’s Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, Friedkin had asked Schifrin for a score that “did not sound like music” and which was “tonal and moody.” But it proved too disturbing for the audience to handle and apparently Friedkin threw the score out the window. Listen to the theme above (followed by the more delicate track for the closing titles) but be warned: it starts with a bang.

9 Jack The Ripper, Lesbians, Whores

Whores. Lesbians. Jack the Ripper. These are not things we normally associate with opera. But here we are. Lulu is a superb opera formed in the mind of one of the greatest 20th century composers: Alban Berg. He was a student of the more famous (in general circles at least) Arnold Schoenberg (whose Pierrot Lunaire is below) and he used the same compositional technique: 12 tone rows. In Lulu, Berg surpassed his teacher and fellow member of the Second Viennese School Anton Webern (the first school comprised Mozart and Haydn) in his ability to take the strict rules of serial composition and produce something lyrical.

In this, the final scene of his opera (incomplete on his deathbed), the main character Lulu is stabbed to death by Jack the Ripper after she has had sex with him for money, while the disgraced Countess Geschwitz (Lulu’s lesbian lover) looks on in horror. In its day you can imagine the controversy and shock that would have been experienced by a viewing public unused to homosexuality and candid discussions of prostitution and murder. I am excited to say that the Metrpolitan Opera will be staging Lulu next year.

8 Eerie Repeating Numbers

American composer Philip Glass would be more typically found on a list of beautiful music because his minimalist style is usually quite calming and more “classical” sounding. Here, however, we see a part of his 1976 opera Einstein On The Beach which, as you will see, involves recitation of numbers with seemingly unrelated and random excerpts of text, backed by a mind-numbing track on synthesizer with a choir repeating numbers over and over and over and over . . . In other parts of the opera the singers recite the solfeggi (“do re me”, etc) and a violin takes the place of the main character of Einstein in recognition of his love for the instrument. This is definitely a creepy and disturbing piece of classical music.

Here is a more formal staging of the same excerpt from above, and here is a crazy scene in which you can be certain every performer is wearing an earpiece to keep track of where the hell they are in the four and a half hour long performance. This is the first of three operas Glass refers to as his “Portrait trilogy”, the other two cover Mahatma Gandhi and Pharaoh Akhenaten.

7Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

When the theme written for The Exorcist by Lalo Schifrin (item 10 above) was rejected, William Friedken settled on a more famous existing piece of music: Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima by acclaimed Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki written in 1960. The piece uses tone clusters to produce a sound world rather than the tunes and harmonies we are used to in music. In fact, most of the written score allows the players to actually pick whatever notes they want to play. It is a disturbing and penetrating piece of music long studied in schools as an example of modern classical music.

The Threnody was also used during the much-talked-about long scene of a nuclear explosion seen in the Twin Peaks return of 2017. The scene is pretty amazing and you can watch it here. Sadly Krzysztof Penderecki died one month ago of a long illness. Here is further viewing: a video of the master himself conducting his work Polymorphia, also used in The Exorcist.

6 The Banshee

Scritching, scratching, scraping and squeaking are the various noises mostly associated with this bizarre piece of piano music by the very highly regarded American composer Henry Cowell. (Actually those sounds are not atypical for much of Cowell’s work.) This composer was a teacher of John Cage (as was Arnold Schoenberg—see Pierrot Lunaire below) who, in turn, was an inspiration for much of the more avant garde music of pop singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

Another highly recommended piece by Cowell is The Tides of Manaunaun (written while Cowell was 15!) which you can listen to here. Much of the playing is performed with the entire arm against the whole piano keyboard creating a disturbing sound world.

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5 Black Angels

Black Angels is for electric string quartet and was written by American composer George Crumb in 1971. As you can see in the perforce, a variety of other instruments are involved and played by the various quartet members. These include wine glasses filled with liquids and percussion instruments—skip to 12:57 to hear these being played. It was written during, and in representation of, the Vietnam war and the troubles in the contemporary world. Like Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, the piece also appeared on the original soundtrack for the movie The Exorcist (it plays partly through the end credits).

4 Helicopters, Camels, And Trombones

Yes that is a fake camel on the stage. No I don’t know why (I guess they couldn’t train a real camel to do the leg movements!) The music is all over the place, the characters are not all human (the leading man is actually a trombone performer, not a singer), and the third scene involves a string quartet flying around the sky above the opera house in four separate helicopters (yes really). This may not be as frightening as some of the pieces on this list but it is certainly disturbing. Perhaps it is the very sinister notion of helicopters as musical instruments; is that where we, as a society, have come to?

That said, as bizarre as it sounds, this performance is a legitimate opera by Karlheinz Stockhausen and is, in fact, just one of the six he completed (one for each day of the week, though he died before writing his seventh). This one is Wednesday From Light, but you may also want to look at Donnerstag Aus Licht (Thursday From Light) which is equally insane and written earlier.

3 Faust: Taken By The Devil

Alfred Schnittke may one day be, to the twentieth century, what Mozart was to the 18th. He wrote enormous amounts of music in a variety of styles but, through all of it, he remained true to a very particular quality: eclecticism. In this piece of music we see the Alto solo in his Faust Cantata – a piece in the same form as the well-known Messiah by Handel in which soloists stand in a line and perform songs between choral pieces. In this cantata we see the perfect example of Schnittke in a nutshell.

The outstanding singer (Iva Bittova) belts all over the place, yells, grunts, growls and takes liberties liberally. The orchestra includes unexpected instruments—the most weird being the flexatone played by a soloist beside the singer in this video, but also piano, electric guitars, jazz drums, and organ. And even the choir gets a bizarre modern makeover with directions to whistle at various stages of the composition. This is a superb performance of a stunning piece of music. It is creepy and hellish, and will have you on the edge of your seat for the sheer guttural power of it.

2 Descent Into Insanity

Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg was a groundbreaking piece of chamber music when it was first written in 1912. In the video performance here we see chopped up people, cockroaches crawling around, transvestites, and an insane narrator marching through it all nonchalantly as she descends into madness. Pierrot Lunaire is a chamber music setting of the German translation of poems by Belgian poet Albert Giraud.

Be warned: this video contains full frontal nudity. Though Schoenberg pioneered the use of the twelve-tone row in serial composition, this piece is atonal meaning it lacks a harmonic or tonal center but is free from the formal device of serialism, the system for which he ultimate became most famous. His students were equally disturbing in their compositions as evidenced by Lulu above (item 9).

1 Doom, A Sigh

“Doom. A Sigh, is based on two songs that Istvan Marta, a Hungarian composer, recorded during a 1989 visit to Romania. The first, sung by Mrs. Pieter Benedek, 58, evokes her long dead parents, and the second, sung by Mrs. Gergel Imre, 46, recounts the scene of a bloody battle.” For assisting in the making of these recordings, the people involved were fined by the Romanian government and Istvan Marta, the composer, was told, in no uncertain terms by the government, to never return. He didn’t. Words cannot do justice to this mournful and extremely tragic piece. Just listen to it.

+ Magnificently Macabre

I am wrapping the list up with something that is incredibly entertaining to watch but only a touch disturbing (in contrast to the other items on the list). This is a famously difficult piece to perform – for the singer, the orchestra, and most especially the conductor. Yet here we see an amazingly talented Canadian soprano and conductor, Barbara Hannigan, perform Mysteries of the Macabre, taken from the opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–77) by Hungarian composer György Ligeti) singing, acting, AND conducting. This is unheard of and this performance is nothing short of amazing because of it. The raucous standing ovation at the end is well deserved and you can see the toll this piece takes on the performer in Hannigan’s face.

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Classical music: It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But there are certain performances that have appeared on YouTube that receive special attention from a wider audience. This is a list of those such performances as selected by me.

I was studying to be an opera singer at the prestigious Royal College of Music in London. While I ultimately started a business focused mainly on writing and the internet (hooray!), my foray into the world of opera and classical music generally, continues to bring me great joy to this day. I hope you enjoy this small selection from me . . . with love to you.

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For the sake of clarification, I will say that the title here refers not to the “Classical Era” of classical music (from roughly 1730–1820 and comprising the work of Mozart, early Beethoven, and Haydn), but uses the term in the broader sense in which it is most well known: music based upon the forms, instrumentation, and styles of the great eras (Classical, Baroque, Renaissance, 20th Century etc.)

If you want to keep up to date with my personal life and loves when it comes to music and other arts, feel free to add me as a friend on Facebook.

10 Spontaneous Audience Eruption

Let’s start with something unexpected and exciting! Classical music is rather structured in form and audiences tend to behave in a certain expected manner. But here, in this live performance by the astonishing virtuoso Cecilia Bartoli, the audience is so awestruck by her opening bars that they erupt into a totally spontaneous applause garnering an adorable reaction from Miss Bartoli which is extremely pleasing to watch. It is a very human moment.

At 34 seconds we hear what may perhaps be a recording of one of the most perfect sounds produced by a human being. For further listening here is a moving rendition of Voi Che Sapete from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

9 Spiegel im Spiegel, Arvo Pärt

This piece requires metronomic perfection from the piano and intense concentration from both performers. It may seem basic but the highly exposing nature of the composition makes it incredibly difficult. Here we see a stunning rendition. Arvo Pärt, the composer, is from Estonia and uses a minimalistic compositional style that calls to mind much religious music of the Renaissance era. The title means “mirrors in the mirror” and refers to the myriad reflections seen when one reflects a mirror in another mirror: this is represented in the music by repetitive rising and falling tunes. Spiegel im Spiegel has proven to be incredibly popular with film makers and it has been used dozens of times in that setting.

8 Adagio for Strings

Okay now for something a little sadder. This is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and it was played at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy, the announcement of which we covered on our list of amazing audience reactions as a bonus item (thanks HM8432). It is one of the most widely loved and played classical pieces in the world and is particularly popular music for funerals. Its popularity can be seen in the many tens of millions of views that the various recordings of it have on YouTube. It is transcendent in its beauty. This is a week of birthdays of the departed and death anniversaries for me, so I am including this entry especially in memory of my late mother Lois, my late father Adam, and my late brother Stewart.

7 Rosenkavalier Trio

Behold one of the possibly worst dresses ever to appear on the stage of the Metropolitan opera in New York! What was Frederica von Stade thinking in that chocolate-box getup? It may have been the eighties but that’s still no excuse! Anyway, this song is not here for the fashion. These are three of the greatest voices of the twentieth century performing together at an anniversary concert for one of the greatest opera companies in the world . . . with one of the greatest conductors of opera in our time. This trio by Strauss from his opera The Rosenkavalier is beautiful in its own right, but the combination of talent here takes it to a whole other dimension. It is, in a word, Angelic.

An interesting sidenote on this one is that the black singer above, Kathleen Battle, was (and maybe still is) such a difficult woman to work with that she was fired by the Metropolitan opera for bad attitude and very publicly chastised by the company. It was a great shame as Battle, originally an elementary schoolteacher, shot to opera superstardom with her incredible vocal talent.

6 International Accord

Pandemics, economic disasters, and geopolitical tensions are on all of our minds at the moment. Here is a performance that can give us some hope for the future. Here we have my personal favorite baritone, the late Dmitry Hvorostovski (with the white hair), singing the famed Pearlfisher’s duet with the accomplished tenor Kauffman. Why is this so special? We have a German and a Russian man singing a duet by a Frenchman. It also happens to be one of the most loved pieces of classical music outside of the classical music world (I guarantee you’ve heard this song).

For additional pleasure you might like to listen to Hvorostovsky performing Rodrigo’s Aria at the Singer of the World Competition (which he won) in which he demonstrates what I would consider one of the most perfect vocal breathing techniques ever. Watch here.

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5 Akhnaten

Sung in Ancient Egyptian, this minimalist opera by the great Philip Glass is really the single best opera in the modern minimalist style. Watch for yourself: it is hard not to love it. Gentle tunes repeat over and over while slow delicate movements are performed in time by the singers. It is hypnotic. Akhnaten is the third in a trilogy of operas with the first being based on part of the life of Albert Einstein (we featured that, amusingly, on our recent list of Truly Disturbing Classical Pieces,) and the second being the South African portion of the life of Gandhi.

Minimalism is often the closest thing we get these days to a truly harmonic sounding classical style. What is particularly beautiful in this section of the opera is the way the male singer (a countertenor—see item 1) often has to sing a higher part than the woman playing his wife. It makes for an unusual and eerie, but attractive sound.

4 In Paradisum, Fauré Requiem

A Requiem is a musical setting of the Catholic funeral mass. It has set pieces that are included in all requiems and while they are primarily for public performance, they do occasionally get used in actual Catholic funerals. The most famous requiem is probably the setting by Mozart featured prominently in the film Amadeus. Verdi also wrote a very famous requiem and his Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is known by most people from movies or TV programs. But the most beautiful, I think, is the Requiem of French composer Gabriel Fauré.

You will probably recognize the part I have selected to show here, In Paradisum, as it was used as part of the soundtrack to the zombie film 28 Days Later. It is glorious and the music reflects the words: “May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your arrival and lead you to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive you and with Lazarus, once (a) poor (man), may you have eternal rest.” For your edification I have included the entire Requiem, just drag the player position to 0 to start it over.

3 Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

This piece (Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s third symphony) actually hit the pop music charts it was so internationally loved. It may have even been the first piece of classical music to do that since the popular music charts were invented. It is a set of three songs in the form of a symphony and this one (the most popular) is the second song. It is sung in Polish and the text is a prayer to the Virgin Mary inscribed on the wall of a Gestapo cell during World War II. The words being sung are: “Oh, Mamma do not cry. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, support me always.”

2 I hate and I love

Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer of this piece died in 2018 at the age of 48 from an overdose of cocaine and cold medicine. It is a profound loss to classical music and the film industry (he wrote most of his music for films including the most outstanding recent science fiction movie Arrival which you have to see if you haven’t already). I may be taking a small liberty including this on a list about classical music, but my reason is that it includes a vocal part and lyrics, albeit performed by a computer, and was not intended specifically as film music. To complete the very modern take on classical music, it is written for strings and tape recorder and the ensemble includes a synthesizer and electric guitar. Jóhannsson himself is seen in this live performance controlling the vocal recording, conducting, and playing the piano.

The lyrics are by Catallus who wrote the famous sexual poem known as Catullus 16 which bears the famous opening line: “I will sodomize you and face-fuck you”; we have covered it before. Odi Et Amo is the first line of his two line poem Catullus 85: “I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.” The setting of this Latin lyric is profound, beautiful, and out of this world. If you wish to hear another beautiful piece by this composer, I recommend his haunting “The Sun’s Gone Dim” with Lyrics by the indomitable Dorothy Parker from Jóhannsson’s 2006 album entitled IBM 1401, A User’s Manual.

1 Ombra Mai Fu

I want to end this list with a performance that is both surreal and beautiful. Beautiful because the piece “Ombra mai Fu” is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful pieces of vocal music ever written, and surreal in that the male singer is a counter-tenor, which means he sings in a feminine register. His rendition is certainly one of the best. The piece is from Xerxes by Handel. In this day and age its words speak volumes to us. Yesterday we published a list about entering a new dark age, let us look at these words now while listening to this beautiful aria and remember that the world is full of wonder. They may be 300 years old, but I sincerely wish these words upon all of us today.

“Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never disturb your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.”

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