Olivia Jordan

If a Symphony Were a Building: My Experience of Night on Bald Mountain

It was Sunday night, and I had just gotten home from our concert. My violin was back in its case, but the sound of Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky was still echoing in my head.

During rehearsal, I had kept imagining what this piece would look like if it were a building. That night, after performing it, the image felt even clearer. If this music were architecture, it would have looked like Hogwarts from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The opening always felt like stepping into darkness. When we began playing that night, the first measures were intense and immediate. There was no gentle introduction. It felt like arriving at a towering castle at night, wind moving around stone walls, windows glowing faintly in the distance. The lower strings and brass created a heavy foundation, like thick stone rising from the ground.

As the music built, the themes climbed and twisted. Sitting in the violin section, I could feel the energy moving from one part of the orchestra to another. It reminded me of spiraling staircases and tall towers. Nothing felt still in this piece. It surged forward. The sound grew larger and more dramatic, almost overwhelming.

When the full orchestra played at its loudest, the music felt enormous. It was like standing inside a vast hall with a ceiling too high to see clearly. The sound surrounded us and the audience at the same time.

There was tension throughout the piece. The harmonies clashed. The rhythms drove forward relentlessly. I imagined long corridors with flickering torchlight and shadows stretching across stone floors. The music did not let you relax. It kept building and building.

And then, near the end, everything changed. The storm passed. The intensity softened into something calm and almost peaceful. That shift felt especially beautiful. After all the chaos, the quiet ending felt like dawn breaking over the castle, light slowly washing over towers that had seemed so dark only minutes before.

When the final notes faded and the applause began, it felt like walking out of that imagined building after traveling through it room by room. Playing this piece reminded me again how much music felt like architecture to me. It had structure, scale, tension, and release. As a violinist, I could feel where we were inside that structure. I knew when we were climbing toward the highest tower and when we were finally stepping back into open air.

If a symphony were a building, this one would have been bold, dramatic, and unforgettable. And for a few minutes on stage that night, we did not just perform it. We built a castle out of sound.