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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