Category: Classical in Media

You know the shot. Thousands of people walk across a Utah salt flat, the camera pulls up, and they turn into a face that winks. Under it, two women’s voices climb in thirds over a rocking 6/8. That advert is…

A wounded man runs into a clearing. Above him, the helicopter is already lifting, and the men inside can see everything and do nothing. He goes down on his knees with his arms in the air, and the strings keep…

Most people meet classical music in a dark room with popcorn in their lap. You can hum the sunrise from 2001. You know the helicopter music. You have heard the sad string piece from the Vietnam film at three funerals…

Four minutes into Up, an entire marriage goes by without a line of dialogue, and a lot of people walk out of that scene trying to find the classical piece that played under it. There isn’t one. Every note in…

Honest answer from the string section: the Bruch G minor is a genuinely professional-level concerto that happens to be the most approachable of the great Romantic ones — which is why it is so often the first major Romantic concerto…

Orchestras tune to the oboe for three reasons that stack. Its double reed cuts through a stage full of instruments, so everyone can actually hear the pitch. A professional oboist can deliver that pitch, to the cent, night after night.…

Because Tchaikovsky designed it that way from the very beginning. In February 1893, months before a note of it was public, he told his nephew Vladimir “Bob” Davydov what the new symphony would do: “the finale is not to be…

Those cryptic letters after classical titles — K. 626, BWV 232, D. 759, Hob. I:94 — are catalog numbers: ID tags assigned to each work by a scholar who indexed the composer’s entire output, usually long after the composer died.…

In the autumn of 1823, the most respected musician in Vienna lay gravely ill in a hospital ward, and the city was repeating a story about him. Antonio Salieri — Imperial Kapellmeister for thirty-six years, teacher of Beethoven and Schubert…

If you came here for a list of ten cues, I have bad news first. Across the nine Jesse Stone films made between 2005 and 2015, there is exactly one piece of classical music the story stops to listen to:…