With the coming of Valentine’s Day, considered to be the steamiest and romantic holiday of the year, Tom Huizenga brings up two interesting topics; sex and music. He notices that sex is found in all sorts of art form such as literature, painting, sculptures, etc…but what about in classical music? Huizenga demonstrates five classical musical examples to which he finds the songs were intentionally created to seem “sexy” or project a sexual idea. Selection of (1) Gionvanni Pierluigi da Palestrina “Osculetur me”, (2) Strauss: “Dance of the Seven Veils” (from Salome) (3) Scriabin: “Poem of Ecstasy” (4) Schulhoff: “Sonata Erotica”, and (5) Adés: “Come here…” (from Powder Her Face) are five examples Tom is delivering to his readers to be found as “sexy”.

I decided to pick Strauss: “Dance of the Seven Veils” from the Opera Salome to listen to and compare Tom’s ideas to my own. Before reading the context of the piece, I decided to listen to the song and paint a picture in my mind of what I Interpret of the music. “Dance of the Seven Veils” was a piece performed during a striptease of an opera.

From the start of the clip, I closed my eyes and felt a sense of a soothing sensual vibe; as if something were about to occur and slowly was building up to the point. Soon after at the 1 minute mark of the clip, the build-up seems disappear and begin to sound more playful and to me gave off a floating around kind of feeling. At 1:53, the tension again emerges. Its sounds a bit devilish to my ear. The build-up starts again and keeps me waiting to see how it will end. The finale comes to a close and I have an uneasy feeling of uncertainty.

Listening to “Dance of the Seven Veils”, I felt a mix of emotions from soothing to uncertainty. The word “sexy”, I personally find it to be subjective and personable to one’s own taste. “Dance of the Seven Veils” was not sexy to my ears. It brought up an array of emotions that many people could associate as soothing, playful, tension, and possibly create a sort of build-up to sexy but what threw me off was the uncertainty I interpreted in my mind while listening to the clip.