… I wonders where the flowers is?

The change of seasons is a magical time. We humans are completely obsessed with it, and love to draw comparisons between the earth’s seasons and the seasons of our own lives. It should be no surprise, then, that there are tons of musical compositions celebrating Spring – way more than good old Vivaldi.

Here is a short movement from “The Seasons”, a ballet by Russian composer Alexander Glazunov. Born into a wealthy family in imperial times, Glazunov’s politics and style of music went out of fashion after the 1917 revolution. Glazunov loved his country, though, and stayed in Russia for another decade, to ensure that the St. Petersburg Conservatory (arguably the most important music school in Russia) didn’t collapse amid the turmoil. He eventually settled in Paris.

The video ends abruptly. The music wasn’t written to be segmented – if you listen to the whole ballet, Spring flows seamlessly into Summer.

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.

… And if you don’t know how, Anitra will be happy to teach you.

Anitra is a character in the Norwegian play Peer Gynt, written by Henrik Isben. The play is a satire of Norway and Norwegians, their peculiarities, their mythology, and their humor (if you can call it that.) Isben asked Norway’s composer poster-child, Edvard Grieg, to write music for the play. Later, Grieg created two suites using music he wrote for the play, which have become orchestral favorites the world around. Not too shabby for a country of fishermen, whose total population today is less than 6 million.