Modest Mussorgsky and the Walking Melody

What You'll Learn

• Learn what program music is — music that paints pictures or tells stories without words, letting your imagination see things through your ears
• Discover the Promenade theme — how Mussorgsky wrote a special walking melody that returns again and again, its mood changing depending on what you've just seen and what you're about to see
• Understand how different instruments can paint different pictures — heavy brass for creaking ox carts, light woodwinds for dancing baby chicks, mysterious strings for haunted catacombs
• Learn how friendship between artists can create something lasting — how Mussorgsky turned his grief for his friend Viktor Hartmann into music that keeps Hartmann's paintings alive forever
• Explore the idea that music and visual art can inspire each other — that a painting can become a song, and a song can become a painting in your mind