You know it even if you think you don't: a single struck note with a curl on it, a held breath of silence, then a plunging cascade down the keyboard. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is the sound cinema reaches for whenever it wants dread.
An argument about authorship
Here's the surprise: musicologists genuinely debate whether Bach wrote it. No manuscript in Bach's hand survives — the earliest copy is by someone else, decades later. Some scholars, notably Peter Williams, have argued the piece sits oddly among Bach's organ works, and may be a transcription of a lost solo violin piece, or the work of a different composer entirely. The most famous "Bach" may be a question mark.
How it became gothic
The piece owes much of its fame to the twentieth century: Leopold Stokowski's lush orchestration opened Disney's Fantasia in 1940, and horror films did the rest. A Baroque church piece became the universal shorthand for the sinister.
Wear it
Our Toccata in D minor tee sets the famous opening — mordent, silence, and the plunge — as hand-drawn notation. See it in Wearable Music.