From last.fm, copied verbatim in the Wikipedia: “The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach sometime between 1703 and 1707. The attribution of the piece to Bach has been challenged since the early 1980s by a number of scholars, and remains a controversial topic.”
This piece of music has been used in dozens of movies (The Tree of Life, Gremlins 2, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, Fantasia, among others), TV shows, and video games. Check out this list of Bach music, and find the toccata references. The music is usually used to suggest something scary in a way that has become an unfortunate cliche.
I, though, continue to be moved by its chordal structure. Here’s one recording; you can find several others on YouTube. Listen to the segment that starts at 7:20; the chord at 7:45 just wows me. By those last three chords which are as intense as any power chords by a rock guitarist, I’m in tears of awe.
Somehow, it puts me in the right frame of mind for the latter stages of Holy Week.
