"Hallowe’en," a very short piece for string quartet and piano, is pure chaos... the musical equivalent of a wild autumn night. It captures the boisterous Halloween parties that were all the rage at the turn of the last century, celebrations that composer Charles Ives remembered from his youth.
Ives once said the piece was “written for a Halloween party and not for a nice concert.” According to legend, the idea came not only from his memories but from an actual party — a get-together of musician friends who were clowning around and improvising. Ives supposedly urged them to make spooky noises with their instruments.
He later described the result as “wild music-making” and “improvised racket,” and he used those sounds in his piece, saying he wanted to capture “the spirit of a bonfire, outdoors in the night, with boys and children running around, dancing and shouting.”
Outdoors in late October, nature provides its own eerie music. Wind whistles through dry leaves, and bare branches creak like old doors. In the shadows, deer snort, coyotes yip and howl and tiny rodents skitter across the forest floor. In the cool stillness of autumn evenings, every sound seems to travel farther and every noise feels mysterious.
Ives’s "Hallowe’en" may be noisy and disordered, but within that clamor there’s a sense of wonder... the feeling of being outside on a dark fall night, where the boundary between fun and fright blurs. With his wild piece, Ives captured both the spirit — and the spirits — of Halloween night.
