What is Bewitched Music?
This is a term I’ve coined for a style everyone recognizes. It is not just ghoulish popular Halloween tunes, but a cross-cultural style using many different instruments that evokes conditions when the veil between the worlds is the thinnest, the traditional Celtic definition of the Halloween (or Samhain) season when we are able to communicate with the dead and the ancestors. It is thus one type of Mystic Music. The Bewitched Genre of music has four traits (one for each of the four elements and four directions). It must have the MUSICAL traits as well as the more-obvious subject matter to fit the genre. 1. The subject matter (the air or intellectual aspect). The title, artist’s name, lyrics or program of a Bewitched piece has to do with ghosts, witches, spirits, Halloween, the paranormal, the other side, the dark side, magic(k) and the occult, gods and (especially) goddesses, and the mysterious powers of nature. Sometimes, as in the case of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d minor, popularly
