Dmitri Kabalevsky - Free Lesson Plans
Dmitri Kabalevsky
1904 - 1987
Russian Composer
Wrote Music for Piano and Chamber Ensembles
Best Known For:
Galop, from The Comedians
Dad was a mathematician.
I wasn’t into math - MUSIC was my thing!
I was a great pianist. When I was a teenager I played in a movie theater to accompany silent movies.
During WWII I wrote a lot of patriotic songs for Russia.
I cared about Music Education! I taught a class of 7 year olds how to listen to music and talk about what they heard.
I won a lot of prizes during my lifetime for my work in Music Education in Russia, and also for my compositions.
In 1938, Kabalevsky wrote the music for a children’s play, “The Inventor and the Comedians.” The play was a comedy about the German inventor Johannes Gutenberg and a group of traveling clowns.
In 1940, he chose ten short pieces from the incidental music from the play and arranged them into a suite.
The Comedians’ Galop: Presto is the second movement of the suite.
The Galop was used as the theme song for the American TV show “What’s My Line.”
The Comedians op. 26
