Halloween is approaching, and what better way to get into the spirit of this holiday season than to learn some Halloween songs on piano, adding the right atmosphere to your friend and family gatherings. There are certain sounds or tunes that, through popular culture, we can’t help but associate with Halloween — from movie and tv soundtracks, like the The Addams Family theme music, to canonical pieces like Toccata and fugue in D minor by J.S. Bach.
In this article, we’ll delve into the relationship between Halloween and music, and how to make the most out of this season with your piano skills.
Music, movies and the essence of Halloween
Aside from trick-or-treating, going to the movies and watching a horror film is one of the quintessential activities during Halloween season. If you’re a fan of the genre, you know that a good soundtrack and sound design can take almost any scary scene to a whole new level. Additionally, some instruments tend to be particularly effective at this, such as the piano, used for the theme song of the Halloween movie franchise by John Carpenter, or strings, a classic example being the dissonant theme from the shower scene in Psycho, by Alfred Hitchcock — not to mention the eerie sound of children singing, as used in the soundtrack of Jordan Peele’s Us. To understand why this is the case, let’s discuss some of the features that make certain music more suitable for Halloween than others.
Behind the scenes: dissonance and tension
The effectiveness of a lot of horror movie soundtracks can be largely attributed to one thing: dissonance. Dissonance is a psycho-acoustic term that helps us describe how much ‘friction’ there is between two or more piano notes. To give you a concrete example, try playing this on the piano:
This interval, the minor second, is ubiquitous throughout horror films due to being highly dissonant, and therefore effective at conveying a sense of tension or distress to the listener. For instance, this is the same interval used by Bernard Herrmann in the Psycho shower scene mentioned earlier. Moreover, by combining minor seconds we can further increase the amount of dissonance, such as in the example below:
This is known as a cluster — a technical term for multiple seconds stacked on top of each other. An example of this is Ligeti’s Atmosphères, famously used by Kubrick in his epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Another interval that is closely associated with horror music is the tritone — an interval known as Diabolus in Musica (Latin for “Devil in Music”) during the Middle Ages. This interval, though technically not dissonant, is fairly unstable, and it’s just as used in music as the minor second to create tension. A simple, yet effective example of this is Mica Levi’s Death in the movie Under the Skin, directed by Jonathan Glazer. The theme consist of only three notes, where the first two form a minor second, between G# and A, and the last two form a tritone, between A and D#:
Other tricks: timbre and register
Of course, not everything can be reduced to interval or harmonic dissonance when it comes to Halloween songs. Two additional key elements are timbre and register.
Supernatural timbres
Timbre is what allows our ears to differentiate between different instruments or voices, even when they’re playing or singing the same note. Furthermore, one instrument can produce vastly different timbres, and the piano is no exception.
A great way to get interesting timbres on the piano is through a technique called piano preparation. This technique, which consists of adding different artifacts (e.g., nuts, bolts, erasers, etc.) to the piano strings in order to modify their sound, was popularized by American composer John Cage in the late 1930s. To get a sense of what a prepared piano sounds like, listen to this work written by Cage in 1942: And the earth shall bear again….
Although this is by no means a hallmark piece of Halloween music, one could easily imagine it fitting quite well in the context of a horror movie soundtrack. Surprisingly though, piano preparation is not used as often in mainstream horror movies as one might think.
Ominous registers
Another effective device in horror film music is register — that is, how high or low musical events are. If you pay close attention, a lot of horror movie soundtracks tend to focus on the extreme ends of the register: very low and/or very high sounds. Here are some popular examples:
Theme songs written in the lower register:
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula theme (director: Francis Ford Coppola; composer: Wojciech Kilar)
- The Conjuring theme (director: James Wan; composer: Joseph Bishara)
- Jaws theme (director: Steven Spielberg; composer: John Williams)
Theme songs written in the higher register:
- Halloween theme (director and composer: John Carpenter)
- Hellraiser theme (director: David Bruckner; composer: Christopher Young)
Chord progressions that characterize spooky songs on piano
Going back to the topic of harmony and dissonance, we can also find chord progressions that are more or less typical of Halloween music. For instance, a great yet simple way to create Halloween-like harmonies is to use minor chords that are a third apart from each other. For instance, play this series of chord pairs and see if they remind you of any movies:
Two minor chords, a major third apart
Two minor chords, a major third apart
Two minor chords, a minor third apart.
Two minor chords, a minor third apart.
This type of progression is used by Danny Elfman in the song This is Halloween from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. After you’re done reading, try making your own piano songs combining these basic progressions.
Another common approach to Halloween song progressions is creating chromatically descending voice-leading between chords — in other words, progressions whereby a voice is descending one semitone at a time. For instance, play this progression and notice how to top voice slowly descends from A to D# (a tritone):
Minor key progression with chromatically descending voicing
Top 5 spooky piano pieces to learn on Halloween
Now that we understand what kinds of features give Halloween songs that particular sonority, let’s look at some actual pieces and songs for piano we can learn through the Skoove app.
Mystical moments and atmosphere
A great place to start for beginner level piano players is not a song per-se, but Skoove’s Mystical moments and atmosphere lesson. In this lesson, the first thing you learn is to play the whole-tone scale, which has a quite evocative sonority, characteristic of many Halloween piano songs. By the end of the lesson you get to play a short song to a full piano accompaniment provided by Skoove.
Jaws
One of the easiest scary songs to play on the piano is the theme from Jaws by John Williams. This song, which has an arrangement for piano solo through Skoove, is another example of what we discussed earlier, as it only consists of two alternating notes a minor second apart, E and F. As with most Skoove lessons, you also get to play with accompaniment in the last part of the lesson.
In the Hall of The Mountain King – Grieg
No piece by Edward Grieg has been referenced in pop culture as many times as In the Hall of The Mountain King from the 1867 play, Peer Gynt. From movies, to tv shows, to video games, this piece has become a true trademark of Halloween music. Similar to the example discussed earlier, this song uses a progression with a chromatically descending voice (notice the descending line from D to A in the second voice, from bottom to top):
Progression from Grieg’s In the hall of the mountain king
The Skoove lesson for this song will help you learn a very friendly and approachable arrangement of this Halloween song.
Symphony No. 5 – Ludwig van Beethoven
Although not a Halloween song per-se, L.V. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is often thought of as having a somber, dramatic tone, which makes it suitable for Halloween. With Skoove, you can learn a very short and simple piano arrangement of this Symphony which makes for a great addition to your piano song collection.
Funeral March – Frédéric Chopin
Lastly, another classical piece that works well as Halloween piano music is Chopin’s Funeral March, for its gloomy, dark character. This lesson is part of Skoove’s new course for beginner level pianists, where you can start learning this and many other exciting piano arrangements.
Please note that you can access the lesson through the new Beginner Classical Songs course in the mobile app.
Final words
In this article we discussed the close relationship between Halloween and music, the different things composers often do to make a given piece or song sound tense or scary, as well as different examples of Halloween songs, such as This is Halloween, The Hall of the Mountain King, and more. In particular, we looked at the top 5 Halloween song arrangements for piano, all available for you to learn with the Skoove app.
If you’ve been looking for a fun way to entertain your guests at this year’s Halloween party, now you have all the knowledge at your disposal to do so. Spend some quality time with Skoove and make the most out of this Halloween. Have a spooky holiday season, and until next time!
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