Modest Mussorgsky was a Russian composer and member of "The Five," the nationalist circle around Mily Balakirev that sought a distinctly Russian classical voice free of Germanic academic convention. A largely self-taught and often chaotic composer whose career was cut short by alcoholism, he nonetheless produced some of the era's most vivid and unconventional music, including the opera "Boris Godunov," the tone poem "Night on Bald Mountain," and the solo piano suite "Pictures at an Exhibition" (1874), written as a tribute to his recently deceased friend, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann, each movement evoking one of Hartmann's works. The suite's blunt, unresolved harmonies and vivid, almost pictorial imagination — startling even in its original piano form — later made it a favorite target for orchestrators and, eventually, rock musicians reaching for classical grandeur.

the sound in question

1874

Pictures at an ExhibitionModest Mussorgsky