… and the livin’ is easy.

Yes, you know this song. It’s part of the American landscape now, having been recorded over 25,000 times. It is, of course, by George Gershwin, from his opera Porgy and Bess. The 1935 performance featured an all African-American cast, and received poor reception due to the color of the cast as well as the racial themes of the work. Since then, the opera (especially “Summertime”) has exploded in popularity and is one of the most-performed operas today.

Gershwin himself called this a “folk opera”; it lies in that funny “crossover” place between a Broadway Musical and an Opera. The song form of “Summertime” is quite simple – the phrases would be analyzed as A,A’,A,B – like a folk song or a Broadway number. Most people know it as a jazz standard or a popular song, where the vocals tend to be in a much lower tessitura, giving it a sensual, sultry sound. This makes the music sound like a sexy love song that could be sung to your lover over a cigarette and a martini on a sweaty summer night. However, the original idea of the composer, though, was a sweet lullaby that a high, floaty soprano sings to her baby.

And so here is your obligatory summer piece, titled (what else) “Summer”, by Antonio Vivaldi.

Vivaldi wrote 500 concertos, though musicians will say that he actually wrote the same concerto 500 times. Most of these concertos are given really interesting titles – for example, “Violin Concerto in D” or “Violin Concerto in E” or maybe even “Violin Concerto in F.” In a sea of compositions with very similar names, four of his concertos stand out above the rest (not surprisingly) because they bear a title that suggests something extra-musical. The Four Seasons (having nothing to do with Franki Valli) are four Baroque concertos that musically capture the spirit of the respective times of year – Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. This sort of use of extra-musical influences is known as Program Music, and is commonplace nowadays. If a composer today wrote a piece called “A Cold Winter’s Day” or “The Ice Storm”, we wouldn’t think twice about it; in fact, we would probably begin making assumptions as to how the piece would sound, built on the musical ideas handed down through generations of wintery composers. But in 1720, for Vivaldi to write a Concerto that captures the spirit of summer AND to title it “Summer” was out of the ordinary.