h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks for an excellent entry - this gives some background to a piece I played when I was a member of an orchestra

The piece is called "Baba Yaga's Hut" or "Hut on Fowl's Legs" and is one of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an exhibition"

It is said that he was inspired to compose this piece by a drawing of Baba Yaga's hut made by his friend Victor Hartmann

That was my runner-up illustration, the hut standing in the woods, with skull gateposts. I grew up listening to that orchestral piece as conducted by Toscanini. It's one of the most vivid pieces of program music ever written, to my mind -- you could hear the ominous power of the magic.

I thought this was a very informative article and enjoyed doing the artwork for it.

"Pictures at an Exhibition" is also one of my all time favorites. Just to mention it, Musorgsky composed the pieces for solo piano, Ravel did the orchestration that we commonly hear. Ravel said he used "all possible ingredients", including things like glissando, flutter-tonguing, muting and exotic instrumental combinations. This is from "Musorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition" by Michael Russ, Cambridge Music Handbooks, with lots of great history, analysis of the music, etc. I think the music is intriguing because it is so different from most "classical" music. "(Musorgsky) had little respect for the conventions of musical grammar ... the castigation of much of Musorgsky's music for its lack of sound harmonic technique is one of the great injustices perpetrated upon him ..." Somewhere in the book is described a sequence of chords (major triads, I think) which show the "usual infelicities".

Thanks.

I only know 'Pictures at an Exhibition' as played by ELP (Emmerson, Lake and Palmer).

The entry was a labour of love. I've always loved fairy stories and their meanings.

I'm not sure which orchestration we played, but it was great fun - and also a lot of work, no easy pieces