Dark Piano Music

Dark piano music spans generations and genres as one of the best mediums to express the longings and torments of the human soul.

The Lonely Sound of the Piano

A solitary piano note evokes an image of a composer, sitting alone, frustratingly hammering out an elusive idea. This image is relatable – regardless of your occupation or place in life. The feeling of being alone. Of processing your thoughts – your feelings.

“Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano.”

Frederic Chopin

The melancholy voice of the piano is the perfect companion for our most isolated hours spent studying, working or creating.

Dark Academia and the Gothic Piano

Emily Brontë, a matriarch in the dark academia movement, was known to frequently spend time at the piano while imagining the ghost stories and brooding characters that inhabited her pages. The author of the gothic novel Wuthering Heights, preferred the complex pieces by Beethoven, Liszt, Dussek and Clementi – she even got the opportunity to meet Liszt.

Eerie piano melodies have continued to weave and embed themselves deep into the dark academia and gothic tapestries – especially in cinema.

The 1948 film, The Beast With Five Fingers tells one of the most bizarre horror stories ever written:

“A piano long silent, mysteriously plays again – its weird and ominous chords filling a bedeviled house with stark terror – a concerto of death. Macabre music of a dead man, played by a hand that returned from the grave to wreak vengeance on his betrayers.”

Trailer narration from 1948 film, The Beast With Five Fingers.

Other horror films like The Exorcist and John Carpenter’s Halloween have since relied upon the dark piano music as the main themes.

Tim Burton employs a more romantic use of gothic piano music in his 2005 animated film, Corpse Bride. Victor, a lone living person in the land of the dead, attempts to apologize to Emily, The Corpse Bride, by joining her in a charming piano duet.

The Nuanced and evocative piano.

Gothic literature ranges from horror and suspense to sorrow and grief. These dark themes are dynamic and nuanced and require an equally versatile instrument to convey these emotions.

The piano’s 88 keys offer one of the largest ranges of any instrument and the its sensitivity gives the player a dynamic range of volumes. Talented craftsmen and women spend countless hours refining the piano’s voice.

More modern composers have found innovative ways to expand the sound of the piano to explore more feelings. Nils Frahm’s album Felt placed fabric between the hammers and the strings to create a softer tone – a technique that has also been used by Olafur Arnolds and can also be heard in Gary Jule’s “Mad World” cover.

The perfect playlist of haunting piano for stormy evenings.

This playlist of dark piano music samples the most emotional, evocative and dark recordings of haunting melodies from the last three hundred years and sequences them seamlessly to accompany your nights of solitude.