Time was, if you lived in or near a big American city, that the orchestra in your neighborhood would drag out spooky light classics to celebrate Halloween: the Saint-Saens Danse Macabre, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, perhaps the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Paul Dukas.

Those days are pretty much gone, and the celebration itself isn’t what it used to be, it seems to me. Swine flu fears will keep many kids off the streets this year, and that will remind us that Halloween is a relic of a much older America, when hanging out with each other for activities like this was something we did routinely because there wasn’t anything going on at home. That’s much more difficult now, thanks to the 24/7 entertainment culture on tap at all times through television and computers, which keeps young ones much more isolated from each other.

These days, it’s adults who use the day for exceptionally casual Fridays at work, for excuses to have costume parties, or to go off their diets and consume handfuls of candy-corn pumpkins, as well as all the candy left over from trick-or-treat, which is found in every office in the land during the first week of November. Still, there are a couple classical-music events coming up this weekend in honor of Halloween, and like the “pumpkin patches” we see at this time of year in church parking lots and green markets, they conjure memories of a simpler, less frenetic time.

Begin with Carson Kievman’s SoBe Institute for the Arts, which is offering a two-night preview on Friday and Saturday of its closing program for Sleepless Night, which will honor the contribution of music to the art of cartoons by presenting live music along with animated features beginning at 5:30 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 8, at Lummus Park on Eighth Avenue and Ocean Drive on South Beach.

In order to prepare for it, the SoBe Jazz Ensemble presents music from the 1930s (Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, etc.) in open rehearsal Friday at 8 p.m., and at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, the SoBe Arts Chamber Ensemble plays music familiar from the cartoons; light classics, again, such as the Morning Mood music from Grieg’s Peer Gynt incidental music, the William Tell Overture of Rossini and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 of Franz Liszt.

Both performances take place at the institute’s home in the Carl Fisher Clubhouse on Washington Avenue, and are free to the public. Saturday’s rehearsal/concert is followed by a Halloween costume reception.

The children of the night! What music they make!

Up the road in Pompano Beach on Friday night is the annual Halloween Monster Concert on the organ of the First Presbyterian Church, better known as the Pink Church. This concert features some of the area’s best organists: Mark Jones, Matt Steynor, Chuck Stanley, Jay Brooks and Simon Jacobs.

Organizers of the concert, which is part of the church’s Spire Series of seasonal programs, promise that Count Dracula himself will play the Toccata and Fugue in D minor of Bach, and the rest of the program includes music primarily from the Romantic French repertoire, with composers such as Tournemire, Vierne and Gigout.

The church is asking donations of $10 for the concert, and if you’re a fan of serious organ music, here’s a good reason to check it out. South Florida has a remarkable number of fine organists, and they do yeoman work in keeping this fascinating segment of the repertoire alive.

Besides, it will be fun to see whether the count’s cape gets in the way as he races up and down the manuals trying to bring Bach back to life.