I am a composer – one of the many things I do to keep myself busy.  For some people, composing comes easy; for others like me, we struggle.

So whenever I hear the music of Felix Mendelssohn, I am filled with two intense emotions. The first is one of great joy and love, because his music is just so amazingly beautiful it hurts. The second is one of jealousy and anger because, dammit, I want to write like that! His music is structurally perfect but never too predictable, emotionally passionate without being saccharine. I think he simply wrote the textbook on what good music is. I dare you to find one less-than-perfect moment in the first movement of his Violin Concerto:

One has to deeply admire Hilary Hahn, not just for her amazing playing, but for her dedication to new music. She gets called all over the world to perform the great violin masterpieces (IE, the old, tried-and-true pieces by dead composers), then turns around and commissions new music for the instrument. The album “In 27 Pieces” is filled with these pieces – 26 encores that she commissioned herself, and 1 final piece which she reserved for a winner of an open contest that received over 400 entries.

This piece, titled “Third Sigh” is from one of the composers Hahn commissioned – Antón García Abril.

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.