For what it's worth, I've been playing, or have played trumpet for 25 years now and even played professionally for the U.S. Navy for a time as a member of its honor guard with the Marine Corps. I also play the violin (am getting better at it, took one year in the 5th grade, hated it, and then bought myself one for fathers day a couple years ago) and have taught myself piano and composed some variations on some songs I like and am getting better and better at it.
Out of that time, now, part of my educating my children at home is starting to teach them an appreciation for music. Obviously at 3 and 5 I don't know how much they will pick up but I've tried to turn them on to something besides just the hip hop music.
At any rate, this is the one song that actually turned my son onto classical music! It's called "Danse Macabre" or "the Danse of Death" (or more precisley translated "Scarey Dance") and was written by a French Composer in 1872 (it's one of my favorite classical pieces). I just got done putting my children to bed to some music and it made me think to write this.
The background behind the song, roughly, is that, in an age when there were kings and nobles, peasants and aristocrats, abounding wealth and power alongside rampant need and poverty - the great equalizer was Death. Death came to all, kings and princes as well as the poor. Despite their sepulchers it was the one thing that made all men equal and none could escape and all stood before God to be judged of their works in this life - and money could not save you. In America today, Death is a Stranger. It is the one thing that awakens us from the American dream (or lately some idiot kenyan president). However, at the time this was written, death was much more commonplace. And with it - superstition.
Danse Macabre is a waltz that was written about the death on the Witches Sabbath. On All Hallows Eve (Halloween) when the Devil, in the dance, pulls out his fiddle and the spirits and ghosts that are captive to him dance for him, along with skeletons and every other spectre of death through the night until when the morning comes - the rooster crows and they return captive for another year. The piece is the musical interpretation of the dance beginning with the harp striking midnight of 12 notes on the harp and then begins with the "devils chord" summoning the others and then the dance begins. With some imagination you can hear the skeletons dancing (xylophones) and even the ghosts whirling through the air in an incresingly maddening fashion until.....morning comes when the very last of them slip into their graves (superstition or not, some biblical accounts such as Matthew 8:29 indicate to me there might be more truth to this than I'd like to think).
The song was NOT well received when it was first played for its content. However time has given the piece a place immemorial among classical music. When I told my son (boys will be boys!) what the music was he thought that was pretty cool. Since then I've been able to turn him onto Mozarts 5th symphony and even the "1812 Overture" (he likes the cannons firing at the end of it) and he gets a kick out of hearing me play renditions of the things he knows on the violin or trumpet now.
However, I suppose the thing I came to appreciate about music in my liberal arts education (ha! A Military Police veteran and former Nuclear Machinists Mate getting a liberal arts education and becoming a doctor of psychology - still makes me crack up and I'm pretty much the odd duck in every college course I attend) is that music isn't "imitated" or even "recreated" - it's "real" every time it's played. Unlike using antique tools or antique recipes or dressing up in antique clothes music is the one thing that's "real" and just as applicable and useful today as it was then that it's "live" and not a reproduction (does that make sense?) You're actually hearing something that was heard way back when and enjoyed then as well and it's just as useful now as it was back then. While I don't need a blacksmith anvil (and I don't need classical music) when I DO hear it it isn't something that's being done in order to remember the old ways so much as it is to entertain still.
But the one thing that was different back then with music was politics. If you were a composer, your music was a political statement on the affairs of the kingdom or nation and some pieces were even outlawed (Figaro for example and later even Stravinsky's music in the 3rd Reich) because they could be construed to stir up class warfare and expose people to the harsh truths of the state of affairs in relations between the wealthy and the masses. Some music was considered dangerous and forbidden by kings and emperors!
