Why Grieg's "Dance of the Elves" always makes me laugh

It's funny how a personal experience with a piece of music can cause you to have a unique reaction to it, different from anyone else's. Regardless of what it's composer originally intended, it's the personal encounters we have with music that truly define what they mean to us. For me, a great example of this is Edvard Grieg's Dance of the Elves, a short, bouncy piano piece published in 1867.

I was first introduced to Dance of the Elves when I was a kid, and Mom brought home a CD of Moonlight Classics she found on a bargain rack. It was the first CD of classical music we kids had ever had the chance to explore, and we had to admit there were some interesting—albeit slow (it wasn't called Moonlight Classics for nothing)—selections on the disc. One piece in particular caught our fancy: a 50-second version of Dance of the Elves. Maybe it was the staccato chords, maybe it was the playful little melody, maybe it was even because it was the "fastest" track on the disc—but of all the selections on the CD, it became our favorite.

The story might not have gone beyond that except that at about the same time we kids got into the hobby of amateur—and I mean amateur—filmmaking with a home video camera. Our "films" had one goal: to make us laugh. The "plots" could be nonexistent, the cinematography horrendous, the lighting dreadful, the soundtrack full of our own giggles, but if one of our movies made us laugh, we considered it a success. (It didn't matter if other unfortunate viewers struggled to understand what was happening and didn't laugh at the jokes. "You had to be there," was our repeated refrain.) We would watch a finished film, howl with laughter, put it away for six months, then pull it out and watch it and laugh together again.

Oddly, despite the humble production values of our motion pictures, we did insist on using a fairly sophisticated "score," since adding dramatic background music made the films seem even funnier than they actually were. Moonlight Classics was repeatedly mined for material—mostly because it was still the only CD we had "without singing." With the limited number of tracks available, we naturally returned to Dance of the Elves over and over. It was used for comedic scenes, for "dramatic" moments, for end and opening credits, and for "trailers" of upcoming films. Later on we discovered that there was more to classical music than Moonlight Classics, but Dance of the Elves remained a favorite.

To this day, I can't hear those opening staccato notes without laughing. I don't know how Edvard Grieg intended his listeners to react when hearing that piece, and I'm sure he never imagined a bunch of kids using his music to make silly videos. If he could know, though, I bet he would laugh too.

Daniel Johnson is a Wisconsin-based photographer and writer, and now enjoys producing videos that are of higher quality. You can see his photography work (he does a lot of animals!) at foxhillphoto.com. He still has his copy of Moonlight Classics.

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