![]() Of all the Seasons, only Summer has a relentless progression across its three movements from anticipation to realization of a single event, and this is reflected in the fast movements’ unusually high degree of motivic integration. The string quartet applied this technique with more rigor and austerity, and added other formal devices of rhythmic organization and canon-like interrelationships.Vivaldi’s vision of the fear and destruction associated with a temporale – a violent storm, brewed by the warm winds from the Sahara, of a kind that regularly afflicts Italy in summer – is arguably his most inspired characterized concerto. Concepts of the four seasons, as drawn from Indian philosophy, shaped the structures of the two scores, and both works utilized what Cage came to call his “gamut” technique, in which pre-composed cells of motives generated the musical material. For the quartet, he returned to ideas first developed in his ballet The Seasons from 1947. The String Quartet in Four Parts, from 1950, was a crucial step in Cage’s path from traditional forms of music toward his iconic, chance-driven scores. He is most famous for 4’33”, in which the performer “plays” a note-less score for four minutes and 33 seconds. He went on to redefine the very structure and sound of composed music, introducing silence and random operations of chance, and creating music that merged Asian philosophy with the Western canon. Patrick Castillo ©2012 Toggle open/close John Cageįrom early in his career, John Cage challenged the sonic limits of music, using everyday items as percussion instruments and doctoring pianos with foreign objects to create exotic new sonorities. Violin Concerto, Winter from The Four Seasons Violin Concerto, Autumn from The Four Seasons ![]() Patrick Castillo ©2012 Toggle open/close Antonio Vivaldi ![]() The Four Seasons concertos are remarkable for their illustration of their subject matter, whether in depicting hunting horns and guns in Autumn or in the chilling texture of Winter, mimetic of the “cold in the icy snow/In the harsh breath of a horrid wind.”Īntonio Vivaldi Summer from The Four Seasons (They also established the concerto as a vehicle for instrumental virtuosity-fittingly so, given Vivaldi’s stature as one of the finest violinists of his generation more than two hundred of Vivaldi’s concertos are for violin.) Vivaldi’s concertos served as significant models for no less than Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, among other major works of the Baroque period.īut of equal importance to the formal innovations manifested in works like The Four Seasons are the breadth of their dramatic character and the extent of Vivaldi’s vision in imagining the expressive potential of the concerto form. His contributions to the genre, which total more than five hundred, defined the concerto form as a dialog between soloist and ensemble and established certain formal characteristics as standards in concerto writing. The Four Seasons evinces Vivaldi’s importance to the development of the Baroque concerto. The sonnets’ tripartite structures align with the three movements of each concerto, which in turn provide vivid musical depictions of the corresponding text. Vivaldi composed them to accompany a set of four sonnets-“La primavera,” “L’estate,” “L’autunno,” and “L’inverno”-whose authorship is uncertain but generally attributed to Vivaldi himself. The concertos that make up The Four Seasons ( Le quattro stagioni) appeared as the first four of twelve violin concertos published as Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione ( The Contest between Harmony and Invention), op. Such widespread popularity is a double-edged sword: The Four Seasons’s ubiquity in popular culture has too often presented as harmless background music a fiendishly inventive work by a composer of terrific originality. Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons makes a strong case as the Western canon’s most universally familiar music. ![]()
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