The Heavens thunder and roar and with hailĬut the head off the wheat and damages the grain. The North Wind sweeps them suddenly aside.Īs gnats and flies buzz furiously around. Soft breezes stir the air, but threatening Then sweet songs of the turtledove and finch are heard. Languishes man, languishes the flock and burns the pine Tronca il capo alle Spiche e a’ grani alteri. Scioglie il Cucco la Voce, e tosto intesa Langue l’ huom, langue ‘l gregge, ed arde il Pino Let’s start by taking a look at the 3-part sonnet, mirroring our 3-part concerto. What we’re going to do today is look at the programmatic elements in Vivaldi’s Summer, and listen through a few examples. Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and others also wrote plenty of program music. An Alpine Symphony is a good example of his programmatic writing. Strauss was the king of program music, saying that “music can describe anything, even a teaspoon”. Liszt coined the sub-genre “symphonic poem”, which is basically a shortened program music composition (one movement only). Liszt is a notable performer who wrote program music, often basing a composition off a piece of artwork or literature. Program music fell out of favor in the Classical period but came back with a vengeance in the Romantic period. They were written around 1721 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam. Each season is written in three movements, just like the sonnets. Vivaldi himself likely wrote a sonnet to accompany each season. The Seasons is a set of Concerti written in the Baroque period, where the idea of program music was still very new. 1 in C major” – nothing evocative in that title. An example of “absolute” music might be something like, “Invention no. The opposite of program music is absolute music, which bears no resemblance to anything in the natural world – it’s purely about the sounds. It’s almost entirely used for instrumental-only work. Program music was particularly popular in the 1800s during the Romantic era of classical music. So if the music is depicting a scene of, say, hellfire, the composer is going to pull out all the stops so that you imagine hellfire when you hear the music. The basic idea with program music is to represent a specific thought, scene or idea musically. Since each of these concerti are great examples of a style of writing called “program music”, I thought we’d talk about what program music is. Today we’ll be specifically talking about the genre “program music” and how “Summer” demonstrates it. This will be a long-running series – each season I am going to examine the corresponding concerto, finishing with Spring next year, the most famous of the set of concertos. This is a Baroque-era concerto in a set of four concerto, each with its own season/theme: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Since it’s currently summertime, I wanted to take this opportunity to delve into The Four Seasons by Vivaldi, specifically the “summer” movement.
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