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Dance Macabre & the Blue Danube. Danse Macabre ~ Saint -Saëns.
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Danse Macabre, Op. 40 (opus number 40), is a tone poem for orchestra, written in 1874 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. It started out in 1872 as an art song for voice and piano with a French text by the poet Henri Cazalis, which is based in an old French superstition. In 1874, the composer expanded and reworked the piece into a tone poem, replacing the vocal line with a solo violin. Midnight Dance (1996), is a personal project by John McCloskey. The drawings are hand-animated & then photocopied onto sugar-paper then colored with studio colored pencils for EACH FRAME.
According to the legend, "Death" appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance their dance of death for him while he plays his fiddle (here represented by a solo violin). His skeletons dance for him until the rooster crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year. Danse Macabre is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all.
High Note is a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short directed by Chuck Jones. It was originally released on December 3, 1960 and is performed without dialog, relying solely on the animation and music to carry the plot. Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones was an animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio.
The Blue Danube is the common English title of An derschönenblauenDonau, Op. 314 (German for On the Beautiful Blue Danube), a waltz by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II. It has been one of the most consistently popular pieces of music in the classical repertoire.
Various musical notes set up the sheet music to get ready for a performance of The Blue Danube Waltz. However, a sole note is missing. It turns out the note (a red-headed "High Note") is drunk upon staggering out of the sheet music to "Little Brown Jug", and the irritated composer chases after him to put him back in his place so the waltz can continue as planned. Throughout the chase, many objects are created from the simple musical notes, such as a dog, a slide, a clothes hanger, a lasso, and a horse, among others. Eventually, the rogue note is put back into place, but when the performance starts again, it has disappeared again, along with the rest of sheet. Turns out all the “notes” had gone into the "Little Brown Jug", whereas the high note had gone into "How Dry I Am”.