The Four Seasons

Flowers blooming in the open, shedding the winter’s cold; bees a-buzzing, butterflies flying, making spring is the most wondrous season. The sights, emotions, and activities all go hand-in-hand, to making spring the greatest season of them all.

Antonio Vivaldi is a famous Italian baroque composer, known by most Suzuki violin students who study his concertos or by audiences everywhere who have heard and love his composition of the Four Seasons.  Having grown up as students of the Suzuki Violin Method, we recognize this composer and have experience performing his pieces.  In addition to his many concertos written for solo violin, Vivaldi composed many concertos intended to be performed by two solo violins, accompanied by a small orchestra.  Because we are both violinists, we chose to analyze the second movement of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins in A minor, RV 522, included in his L’Estro Armonico works.

The symphonies performed were constructed by well-renowned composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen, Igor Stravinsky and other compelling composers as well. Many of these composers led overwhelming lives that clearly influenced their works. The symphonies drew the listeners closer and closer to their rich and bold sounds. For instance, Schoenberg’s famous “emancipation of dissonance” was reflective in his “Five Pieces for Orchestra”. He derived the intriguing concept of dissonance and presented this as it was his first atonal piece. The colors and sharp sounds were very dynamic. The first four pieces I would say are programmatic and Stravinsky’s pieces are absolute; he made a clear reference to classical music. However it is important to note how Schoenberg intended his piece to be non-programmatic in order to focus more on the evolved music he had created. On the other hand his titles

The first movement, “Spring,” in E Major represents the birdsong of the season. The solo violin is supported by two other violin soloists, Jorge Ochoa and Martin Irving. Unfortunately, the cohesiveness between the three violins was slightly off in tempo. However, they quickly recovered representing a high level of musicianship. Next, “Summer,” demonstrates the intense heat and storms by the G Minor key. Takayama imitates the goldfinch, turtledove, and cuckoo on her violin while the orchestra imitates buzzing insects. Later, in F Major, “Autumn,” consists of the theme of a drunken solist which provides extreme freedom in the music. Lastly, the terrifying season of “Winter” voices the frozen water and bitter cold of the outside air. The instruments begin by conversing in F Minor prior to the virtuosic entrance of solist, Akemi Takayama. The second movement switches to E-flat Major, demonstrating the coziness of the indoors during the colder

Vivaldi composed a multitude of works, comprising over 350 solo concertos with over 230 of those concertos for violin alone (Talbot). He worked at the Pieta, an orphanage and school for girls (Hanning & Burkholder 265). Vivaldi’s concertos imbued qualities of fresh melodies, clarity of form, and color between the solo and orchestra (Hanning & Burkholder 264). His Concerto in A Minor, Op. 3, No. 6. demonstrates the virtuosity of the violin. The idea of the concerto is still upheld today, showcasing the soloist’s ability.

Both The Forge and Love, Death and the changing of the seasons are sonnets that are a moment’s monument. The both describe a moment in time. Weather it is a loss of a lover or a working day. They both

Back in Medieval times, music was crude, extremely limited, costly, and exhausting to write. It was and used mainly for church services. The music used in the church were mainly choir chants; only men and young boys could sing in the choir due to the church rules. Next came the praise worthy baroque period. Figured bass, preludes, ornamentations, trills, mordants, and various new musical forms developed, such as the etude or sonata. In this part of musical history, the composers Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi were the cream of the crop. Baroque’s musical characteristic consisted usually of detached, staccato accents, light metered rhythms, and fast precise notes. Next came the classical period, where the staccato accents still stayed within the music, but the light pace and styles where dropped for freer rhythms and notes. Some of the composers who wrote music in this period are some of the most widely known composers ever. Composers such as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Mozart were the top classical writers, but some such as Beethoven branched to both the classical and the romantic periods. The romantic period brought warmth, emotions and life into music. Pieces were no longer mechanical and orderly any more. Music was written with feeling and was written for enjoyment. Therefore, the modern period was quiet a huge jump for the general public, and most of the music after the romantic period is usually left unexplored. Though the daunting task of sorting through the various modern pieces is very tedious, it is worth it. From behind the ear-bleeding music of Rachmaninoff and the odd works of Ravel, comes many wonderful and different styles of music. Modern music's characteristics include atonally, minimalism, twelve-tone, and many other new musical devices and ornamentation. Not all modern music, however, is unusual or weird. Some composer wrote music in a revival of romantic. Gustav Mahler and Jean

In the classical era Symphony was the time when live concert where perform more often. The concerts that during the past millennium, classical music has been created by some of the musical mind the world has ever seen with Beethoven, Mozart and many more. The wide of Range of genres that these great artist composers, including orchestral, instrumental, choral and opera. The era’s the music used the two theory of natural and pleasing variety and The two ideas that can be traced in all the elements of musical technique rhythm, dynamics, tone, melody, texture and form. With the styles of a classical symphony An important form of instrumental music was the symphony, The basic form of the classical symphony was the Italian overture which is,

Vivaldi 's Violin Concerto in A Minor, RV 356, is a three-movement work that has become a staple in the violin repertoire. The exact date of this composition is not known, but it was first published in 1711 as the sixth in a set of twelve solo string pieces. The collective title of these pieces

A comparison of two major Baroque composers: Claudio Monteverdi and Domenico Scarlatti The purpose of this paper is to analyze two psalms by Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Giovanni Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) and compare and contrast the two pieces to find out how music changed throughout the Baroque period.

Project 5 Vivaldi-Concerto for Four Violins and Orchestra in B Minor Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins and Orchestra in B Minor bears some similarities and some differences to his work “Winter” from The Four Seasons. The most prominent of these similarities relates to the speed of the movements. The typical concerto from the Baroque period had three movements. These movements often alternated their tempo: the first was fast, the second slow, and the third fast again.

Before the Romantic musical age, composers wrote music for the purpose of arranging sounds into the most beautiful way possible. Because of these goals, they followed some very specific ideas and wouldn't stray from them. Once the Romantic era hit, composers wanted to express a variety of things in their music. This is when the idea of program music appeared. Program music is usually instrumental music without spoken or sung words to explain the story or event that the composer has chosen to describe with his or her music. However, program music relies on a few non-musical things to make sure that the listener is interpreting the correct story. These things are often the title of the piece, a written forward and many times notes

The genre is a symphony, which is a multimovement composition for orchestra lasting about twenty-five minutes in the Classical perido to nearly an hour in the Romantic era. It has

Be Congruent with all that will happen in your life while you're on this auspicious journey -The good, the bad, the great and the devastating.

The structural thinking behind the Four Seasons was that each movement – twelve in all (three per season) – would evoke a certain mood. Vivaldi delivered elegance and originality in his work. His music mirrors graphically the action described; this literary link is called program music.Vilvaldis four season concertos were based on an Italian sonnet, likely written by Vivaldi where he depicts and illustrates the narratives through his compositions. For example, in Vivaldi’s second concerto summer he depicts a peaceful, calm mood at the beginning of the first movement. The atmosphere is extraordinarily vivid, depicting the oppressive heat from the Mediterranean sun. The plaintive signs of the violin, separated by silences which suggest the intake of breath is a tiring exertion, it gives no hint to the explosive energy that lies ahead. (See example two). In the concerto Winter he evokes a thunder storm,with the use of piercing high notes in the violin at a rapid speed. For