# "Dark", "Ominous", and "Foreboding" music



## KYGray

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.


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## Guest

There's way too much to list, but the first pieces that come to mind:

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8
Ligeti: Requiem


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## Celloman

Some favorites of mine:

Schoenberg - A Survivor from Warsaw
Mahler - Symphony #6
Penderecki - St. Luke Passion


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## merlinus

Mahler 6
Tchaikovsky 6

The ending of both of these often conveys total despair and anguish, for me.


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## Guest

Mahler 6 and St. Luke Passion also came to mind for me.


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## Tristan

What immediately comes to mind for me is the 1st movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6 in B minor, particularly the very end.


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## Rachmanijohn

Siegfried's Tod from _Gotterdammerung_ by Wagner comes to mind.


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## chalkpie

arcaneholocaust said:


> There's way too much to list, but the first pieces that come to mind:
> 
> Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8
> Ligeti: Requiem


Two great choices - I'll second these. Too much Schnittke to list here as well. +

Shostakovich 11
Vaughan Williams 7
Xenakis - Kraanerg
Varese - Deserts (w/ tape)


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## Vasks

Lutoslawski - Funeral Music


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## SilenceIsGolden

Rachmanijohn said:


> Siegfried's Tod from _Gotterdammerung_ by Wagner comes to mind.


Yeah, the music for _Götterdämmerung_ fits this description to a tee, doesn't it? Wagner uses his harmonic language to suffuse the dozens of themes that the audience has become familiar with over the previous three nights with frightening and unsettling sororities, and uses them to create an atmosphere where there is an unshakable feeling of dread. The music associated with Hagen is especially disturbing.


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## Cosmos

Penderecki - Polymorphia
Schnitkke - Concerto for Piano and Strings
Varese - Arcana


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## Bulldog

Pettersson - Sym. no. 12. By its conclusion, I feel like all my blood has been drained out of my body.


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## hpowders

Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.


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## norman bates

dark, ominous and depressing are different things, I mean an horror movie not necessarily it's also depressing.
Dark and ominous: a lot of Scelsi's work, I've mentioned other times but Uaxuctum is a good introduction in that sense.
Ligeti and his Volumina is another. Kurtag's Stele. Szymanowski's third symphony. Going back in time Weber's Wolf Glen scene


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## PetrB

KYGray said:


> 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.


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## techniquest

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.


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## PetrB

techniquest said:


> 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.


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## Blancrocher

I'd recommend Allan Pettersson's symphonies for dark, ominous, and foreboding music--especially the 7th, my favorite of the bunch.


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## chalkpie

Tapiola - Sibelius.

Been severely addicted to this piece over the past few days.


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## Andrei

hpowders said:


> Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.


I was just about to think of that!


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## starthrower

A favorite Schnittke CD.










This is about as dark as it gets. Inspired by that cheerful English author Aldous Huxley.


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## EdwardBast

I would propose that expressive descriptors like foreboding and ominous are sometimes more than just subjective reactions, more than just the projection of a listener's emotion onto a pliable medium. Sometimes they are a succinct encapsulation of a theme's structural function. The opening theme of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony is foreboding, I would argue, not because what it "expresses" in the moment can be nailed down to a specific human emotion (as an isolated expressive element it could be heard to embody depression, brooding anger, dread, any number of things really) but because it forecasts cataclysm. It, like its human emotional counterpart, anticipates a troubled or even catastrophic future. Its foreboding nature is not in its physiognomy, but in its relation to the later musical events in which it is implicated, including the harrowing climax of the first movement, the desolation of its coda, and the theme's return as a foil to forward-looking elements in the third movement. And if indeed foreboding is a part of its structural function in the symphony's opening, one won't know it until what it forebodes is manifest — not before one understands its role in the thematic processes of the entire symphony. 

Anyway, the opening statement of Shostakovich's Tenth is one of my favorite examples of musical foreboding.

Edit: On second thought, there is another viable interpretation of its expressive-structural function. That opening could be a threat, because threats also forecast unwelcome future events. It depends, I suppose, on whether one chooses to identify with the symphony's voice in the third person or in the first.


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## KenOC

Agree with that. "Meaning in music" is also transmitted by conventions, many of which have developed over hundreds of years. It's hard to believe that anybody in the West could hear the Pastoral for the first time and not immediately think of the countryside -- Beethoven milks those ancient conventions for all they're worth. Somebody from anther culture -- maybe not.


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## hpowders

Andrei said:


> I was just about to think of that!


I try and play that when someone else is in the house and never, never, never at night!!!


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## drpraetorus

Mozart, Masonic Funeral Music. Opening to the Overture to Don Giovanni. 








Sibelius, Opening of Finlandia




Wagner, Siegfried, prelude to act 1 and act 2 




Act 2 starts at 1:20:30


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## Alfacharger

Th 12 toners have a lock on dark and ominous. Here is Jerry Goldsmith's very dark "Music for Orchestra".


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## hpowders

The first movement of Bartok's Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta would be excellent background music for a halloween party with lights out and only a few lit candles.


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## Couac Addict

Dance of the sugar plum fairy. Really. I go to the movies and that's what the music box always plays just before the possessed doll strangles you from behind.


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## QuietGuy

Tchaikovsky 6 (4th movement)
Orff: Carmina Burana: O Fortuna


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## BaronScarpia

Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No. 2 (



)
Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2 (



)

Actually, come to think of it, those two^^ convey more of anguish and torment than... ominousness!

Surely the most foreboding piece of them all:
Wagner: Prelude from Tristan und Isolde (



)


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## hpowders

How about the beginning of the Mahler 6? It sounds to me like a fast beating heart is about to explode out of someone's chest.


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## HaydnBearstheClock

Haydn's Seven Last Words.


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## hpowders

Yeah. I have trouble sitting through it.


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## HaydnBearstheClock

hpowders said:


> Yeah. I have trouble sitting through it.


you don't like the work? It's great, imo.


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## geralmar

Schubert, "Unfinished Symphony," first movement.


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