I remember going to a screening of an animated short set to Danse Macabre, composed by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, around Halloween time with a group of fellow students from Seabrook or Moore School, between first and fifth grades. What class or group, what purpose, I have no idea, nor do I remember it being much anything else in detail but mind-bogglingly awesome.

Brilliant. Stunning. Epic.

A phenomenal auditory takeover.

I see through the notes a vaguely lit auditorium, captured under a petroleum jelly film over my mind's eye. The cadence hangs taut over the blurred gaps, strung sequentially by a phantom orchestra playing, or not playing, through speakers or for salaries that my assumed group rate ticket may never have funded; the piece dances full and familiar in my memory despite of this floating context.

Hazy now as it may be, from then on this arrangement has been my favorite instrumental piece. I listened to it in looping sessions while I outlined my senior thesis that fall semester; the fall before that, while studying abroad in Madrid, I jogged to it on my iPod a couple times for the sheer grandiosity of it. Once again during this time of this year, it delivers a haunting experience laid subconsciously over dry and drying leaves crunching and creaky wooden doors swinging from telltale rusty hinges.

Although darling, this video is not the creepy, enthralling version lodged in my mind (that I have yet to find, dammit! I'm considering contacting elementary school teachers at this point.) In any case, hearing this wonderful, eerie piece is an aural pleasure to enjoy with abandon.

To October!



"Delicious autumn!
My very soul is wedded to it,
and if I were a bird
I would fly about the earth
seeking the successive autumns."
George Eliot