I guess I have to post the quintessential spring piece.

Antonio Vivaldi wrote a massive amount of music. Musicians tell a joke about him: did he write more than 500 concertos? No, he just wrote the same concerto 500 times. It all sounds similar, but that doesn’t make it dull – quite the contrary actually. If it weren’t good, it wouldn’t have survived 300 years!

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are actually four violin concertos. The idea of attaching a non-musical idea (in this case, the seasons of the year) to a composition was fairly unique for the time. It was a wise move on Vivaldi’s part, because now this group of concertos are his most played work. Each concerto uses music to paint the sights, sounds, and smells of each season (Winter is a chilling storm!) To our modern ears and minds, this is a no-brainer – but in 1700, it was a little more cutting-edge. Eventually this idea (attaching a non-musical idea to a piece of music) became known as programmatic music, and is almost expected of any modern composition.

Stereotypes are as rampant in music as they are in the rest of human interactions. So when you’re a French Horn, everybody expects you to act like a French Horn.

So, berets, striped shirts, croissants, escargot et vin, oui oui? Nein – lederhosen und bier. The common French horn is actually German. (The English Horn is the French instrument, you silly billy.)

Brass instruments have been around for millennia, and because they have the capacity to be LOUD, they were used to communicate over long distances, either in war (charge! or, retreat!) or in the hunt (we’ve managed to catch a single fox/boar with no less than 20 men and 100 dogs!) To make matters worse, valves (keys) on brass instruments are a relatively new invention (late 19th century); without valves, they are somewhat limited in the number of notes they could play. If you think about the pitches heard in a typical brass fanfare (eg, the theme to Masterpiece Theater), that’s pretty much what brass could do before valves were added. Modern brass instruments are able to play any pitch, and are capable of a huge pallet of tone colors – but it’s hard to shake old stereotypes. They still get more than their fair share of “ta-das” and “too-ta-ti-toos.”

But despite all the negative effects of this musical stereotype, the brass do what they do really well. Fanfare for the Common Man wasn’t written for the glass harmonica, after all. So, here is a rondo from a Mozart horn concerto which makes me want to go and chase foxes. Not boars, though. They’re scary.

If you like this, may I recommend this funny song by Flanders & Swann. It requires a very specific sense of humor, and an acute understanding of British pronunciation – namely, that the English consider “horn” and “gone” to rhyme (not to mention “burglar” & “pergola”)

I’m usually a morning person, but some days it’s just hard. A little music can usually turn the day around – Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Harpsichord Concerti always do the trick.

What’s the secret to this piece’s ‘get-up-and-go’ attitude? Constant 16th-note motion. Throughout the piece, there is nearly always a voice in the ensemble which has moving 16th-notes, which gives the piece a constant rhythmic drive. The negative effect of this has earned this style of baroque music the nickname ‘typewriter music.’