I heard this piece on NPR this morning and it was instantly recognizable. Given that I don’t generally listen to classical music, was this used in some movie or something? I’m mainly referring to the very beginning, although the same theme is repeated several more times throughout.
(Here is a crummy MIDI version if you’re not sure what piece I’m talking about and want to give it a shot.)
It’s a majestic, wonderful piece of music, which is used as background whenever a documentary want to underscore the importance of the foreground events. You have heard it a hundred different times, but have just never noticed it.
If you’re of a Certain Age, you’ve probably heard Emerson Lake and Palmer’s version of it.
ELP - Pictures at an Exhibition
I can’t remember which studio it was for, but I’m pretty sure some movie company used it along with their logo before movie releases back in the 80’s. For some reason, my memory associates it with video disks, so it might only have been for disk releases (video, not laser disk, I’m talking about the huge honking record sized things you had to flip halfway through).
I’m sure other companies have used it as well, but that’s the first one that came to mind that you’re likely to have heard.
Just the first section? Shoot, and here I thought I’d get to reveal that you probably knew much of the rest of the suite as the background music for The Smurfs.
I’ve noticed it frequently gets used as background music when a movie has a scene at an art musem.
Well, being one of classical music’s greatest hits, Pictures probably gets plenty of play in movies, TV shows, and commercials. I have no idea how to find music on TV or commercials (too bad the free version of AdCritic.com is no longer), but IMDB has a listing of Mussorgsky’s music used in films. Perhaps one of them will be familiar to you? Just for grins, a bit of Googling also returned some more sites with lists of classical music used in movies:
http://home2.pacific.net.sg/~bchee/movies.html
http://www.bohemianopera.com/classicmovhome.htm
Yuh. I think it played at the very opening of the old RCA (???) LaserDisc videos. Yes, the really big (LP sized) ones. So it wasn’t for a movie production company or studio, rather it was the “theme” of the LaserDisc division of the company itself. (RCA? Sony? … can’t remember)
That’s definitely what I’m remembering. Video disk, not laser, though. Laser disks came later. Video disks royally sucked. 
RCA SelectaVision (Click on “1981 Fanfare”). I believe SelectaVision is a different technology incompatible with LaserDisc.