While Art Music is typically heard by sitting audiences, much of it is written in rhythms or forms that come directly from dances. Take the gavotte – a French dance, originally performed by peasants, and later adopted by the royalty (who added erotic kissing to the dance moves …) It has a distinct rhythm which makes it easy to identify.
This is a movement one of Bach‘s orchestral dance suites. It’s in trio form – which means there are two contrasting “songs” – the first ends at 1:15, and next you hear a second, contrasting “song”. When he second concludes, the first is played one final time. Trio is a simple but important form which is often heard in symphonies (minuet and scherzo movements), waltzes, and military marches.
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.
In a time when composers wrote prolifically as a matter of course, Georg Philipp Telemann exceeded all other composers in the sheer amount of music he produced (over 3,000 pieces – and by “piece” I don’t mean a 3-minute ditty for keyboard, I mean a 20-minute cantata or suite for orchestra.) He was a self-taught musician who had a real talent for writing great music – but more importantly, a real mind for business. He did not die a poor penniless pauper (the way many of us imagine musicians die), but instead a successful business person whose work was the rage of 18th-century Europe. More than that, he was a forerunner in the idea that a composer’s work is his/her intellectual property, which helped shape the future of Art Music and publishing.
This short piece from an orchestral suite captures the sound of a Scottish Reel – or, at least what a 18th-century German thought a Scottish Reel would sound like.
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