Transcription
Hello again. Today we are going to continue talking about instrumentals. On Rah's last time I talked about the mid-Baroque violinist composer Arcangelo Corelli, and today I'm going to talk about the late-Baroque Italian violinist composer Antonio Vivaldi. Last time I talked about the genre called the Sonata, and today I'm going to talk about the genre called the concerto.
So the book discusses Vivaldi and the concerto together, but there are actually two different types of concerto, and so they also discussed the other type. They can turn or grow, so a little bit earlier. So if we kind of have to turn back and forth a little bit in the book, so this section, just to let you know again, if you're using the ninth Brief Edition, the place where they talk about the concerto grosso and also about ritornello form is beginning on page 110 in the ninth Brief Edition and precedes for about four pages after that. And there's a listening example, which happens to be the first movement of a concerto grosso by J.S. Bach, the Brandenburg Concerto number five. Okay.
But then later on in the book, you pay just later, they have a little discussion of Antonio Vivaldi, and this is beginning on page 128. We talk about Vivaldi, and then they talk about his solo concerto, a three-movement concerto for violin and orchestra called La Primavera, or Spring, how we translate in English. And so I'm going to talk about the concerto but also talk about Vivaldi because, although he composed all kinds of music, he is probably best known for his concertos. He composed over 450 concertos for various instruments of both types of concertos that we're going to talk about today. So let's talk first about Vivaldi, and then I'll talk about the concerto. How's that?
Antonio Vivaldi was born in 1678. He was a Catholic priest and also happened to be among the greatest violinists certainly of his time, if not the greatest. Now, interestingly, Vivaldi—although you think, okay, a priest, so he's, you know, he has a parish and he says Mass and hears confession—that's not what he did. Actually, he worked as a music teacher at a girls' school. It was actually an orphanage for girls who were not really orphans. No, what the heck does that mean? Well, we're not—it was it was an orphanage, but actually it was these girls; their parents, for the most part, were alive. It's just that they were born out of wedlock, and in those days—and this is in Venice—okay, um, I already mentioned Venice actually once before. I was talking about Claudio Monteverdi, and I talked about how Venice was a cultural and commercial hub. It was a powerful, wealthy, independent republic and had been an important cultural center for a very long time, actually, for through the Renaissance and well into the Baroque era.
Well, in Venice, there was this—as there were in cities all across Europe—there was this institution for girls who were born out of wedlock. And I'm gonna go off on a little bit of a sort of a social history digression here because I think it's kind of interesting. So then, as now, sometimes people had children out of wedlock. But in in those days, having a boy was considered a good thing, and having a girl was considered not such a good thing. And it's not just for the obvious reasons you might think of: sexism, or preferring male children, which is it is a thing for sure, but—and had to do really with because it had to do with dowries, actually mainly. If you were if you had a boy, okay, that meant that someday that boy was going to be married, and in those times the the father of the bride would actually pay the father of the groom—whether there would be a trend, a money transaction, which is an important part of marriages in those days. A dowry is money that is paid by the family of the bride to the family of the groom. All right. So let's say you are—let's say you are a young couple, you're not married, but you're let's say fooling around, and you unexpectedly get pregnant. What are you gonna do? Well, it's possible you could just go ahead and get married, or you might want to wait and see if the baby turns out to be a boy or a girl. If it's a boy, you might go ahead and decide to get married because someday that boy is going—first of all, you know, you could—the boy is for, you know, hopeful in let's say the family business, and something that boy is gonna bring in a dowry from whomever he marries. But if you have a girl, that means someday you will have to pay a dowry to someone else. And or if your daughter's getting married, well, why couldn't my daughter just not get married? It just kind of wasn't an option in those days. In those days, if you if you did not marry as a young lady, you had only two other options: to become a nun or to become a prostitute.
So dowries were very important, and in many different cities—for example, in Florence—they have actually a public fund that was set up to provide dowries for girls from from poor families so that they wouldn't be forced into them—into that choice. Okay. So, and they also had these institutions like the Pieta, which is the place where Vivaldi worked. And by the way, these these orphanages—so-called—they had a little sort of a compartment built into the side of the building with a sort of a lazy Susan, sort of a turntable inside, so that you could—let's say you're dropping the baby off—you would you know maybe pay a visit late at night when no one would see you, and you would open up this compartment in the side of the building, put the baby in there, close that that compartment door, and then spin the turntable, so now the baby is on the inside of the building, and ring a little bell, and the monks or the nuns or whoever that would run the place would hear the bell ringing. They would come down; they would say, okay, we have a new a new baby to take care of, a mouth to feed. Okay. So what do you—if you are one of those monks or those nuns or those priests like Vivaldi who works at one of the institutions—what are you going to do with these girls? Well, one thing you can do actually that will help them in a very practical way is to train them in music because part of being an attractive prospect for a bride for a young woman, for example, especially if you didn't have a lot of money for a dowry—right, if you're from a poor family—if you are very cultured and educated, in particular if you were skilled in music, that was something that would make up for potentially the lack of a dowry. If you were a good musician, so this is a time when women, although they are not generally professional musicians—with very few exceptions, for example, opera singers—but instrumentalists, never composers—I mean, there were some who composed as a pastime, and there were certainly some excellent amateur female musicians—women were expected—women of a certain class, that's middle class and higher—were expected to be excellent amateur musicians and to provide entertainment in the home, this kind of thing, and to train the children of the family in music, but they were not expected—when they were actively discouraged from being professional musicians. Men, on the other hand, were obviously most of the professional musicians and composers. That's just kind of how the way the world was, and it was it was that way not just in regard to music but—and you know, just in generally—until fairly recently, of course. Women generally did not have careers. So the the people who worked in places like the Pieta, like Vivaldi, took this very seriously. It was not just a matter of giving these girls culture and whatnot; it was sort of had a very practical end. They will they will have a better, an easier life if they learn music because that will make it more likely that they will be attractive to someone as a bride, and therefore they won't be forced into, you know, a life like that of a nun or of a prostitute.
So Vivaldi, in his capacity as music director at the Pieta, composed hundreds of concertos in addition to lots of other pieces for his girls to perform. And and the orchestra of the Pietà, composed entirely of tween and teenage girls, was one of the best orchestras in Europe, and they were actually kind of a tourist attraction. So people from all over Europe would go to Venice because, again, it was a cultural hub, and they would—especially people who were into music—would go to Venice, would go to the Opera House, take in Venetian Opera, and they would pay a visit to the chapel of the Pietà because every Sunday in the chapel this orchestra, conducted by Vivaldi, would perform. And as the book notes, they would actually perform behind a screen, behind a latticework, so that you could hear them but you could not see them because it was I guess considered—it was liable to cause impure thoughts to see these teenage girls playing musical instruments. Kind of risqué in those days. So that's what Vivaldi did.
Now, Vivaldi was pretty well known in his lifetime, but after his death he kind of slipped into obscurity. His music was not performed very much, and until I believe the the 1960s or so there was a sort of a revival, interest in in Vivaldi's music, and it began to be performed again. And the piece that is in your book as an example of a work by Vivaldi is one of the best-known pieces of classical music. You've probably heard it before. You might not have known what it was or who it was by, but if you've ever been on hold with customer service or in an elevator in a department store, you might—you hear it on TV sometimes—you've undoubtedly heard the Vivaldi concerto called the Spring. Now, of those four hundred and fifty-odd concertos that Vivaldi wrote, four of them, in particular—four concertos—were composed by Vivaldi as a set, and they are an example of what we call program music. So there's a new vocabulary term: program music. Program music is purely instrumental music that has a program that sort of tells a specific story or has a sort of indefinite meaning that is often associated with let's say a story, a poem, a painting—something that inspired the artist—the composer—and which is made explicit. In other words, there has to be a descriptive title in a piece of program music. And sometimes that's all there is, right? So, for example, if a composer writes a piece for piano called Spring, let's say, or a Storm, or something like this, as opposed to giving it a title like Sonata—so it doesn't really mean anything; it just means instrumental work; it's a very generic title—if we have a title like The Storm or Spring, all we really need is that title to put the suggestion in the listener's mind. The listener will say, oh, you know, they're kind of knowing what to listen for now, like, oh, it's it's about spring. I'd be thinking thoughts of spring, or the storm—maybe there's going to be some sort of thunder and lightning effects. So in some program music, that's all there is—is there's just a title which is descriptive rather than a title that is generic, like Sonata or Symphony or even Concerto is kind of a generic title; it doesn't tell you anything about the content, about what you're supposed to feel, about the mood, what it's about. By the way, when we have music like that that does not have a program, we call that absolute music. So the opposite of program music is absolute music. Okay, so we've just learned a new vocabulary term: program music. They've all these concertos—most of them are not program music; most of them are absolute music—it's like, Concerto in A minor or whatever. But four of them, in particular, Vivaldi composed as a set, and he named each one of them after the different seasons, and they're often performed as a set—that is, go to a concert, sometimes all four of these concertos are performed on the program. So in order they are Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. And the one that's in in your book as an example is Spring, definitely the best-known of these four, right? Okay. So I'll come back to talking more specifically about this particular concerto effect. I'll probably make another video because this is going to go on; this is gonna be a two-part deal talking about Vivaldi and the concerto. So I've talked about Vivaldi, his career, and a little bit about these four concertos, one of which is in your listening. Now I'm going to talk about the concerto a bit more generally as a genre of instrumental music.
So a concerto is a piece for orchestra, but it's not just for orchestra; it's for orchestra and something else. There are two main types of concerto: the concerto grosso—that also just means big—the big concerto—and the solo concerto. And there's really not much difference between them. The concerto grosso is a piece for a small group and orchestra. The small group is called the concertino. And by the way, concertino is simply the Italian word for small group. The word concerto—it's it's just like the word concert but with an O on the end of it—and you might think, oh, that makes sense: a concert is where you go to hear music, and so concertos have something to do with music. That's actually—that's not really the intrinsic, you know, the meaning of the word concerto. The it has to do with coming together as a group. And sometimes you hear people use the term concert this way: like, working in concert with so-and-so, we managed to accomplish whatever task. In a working in concert, working as a group, that's really what the meaning of concert is. So the the con, for example, the co n means with. All right. When you think of like consolidated, a confederation, any of that, con means to bring together, to with. Chili con carne is a chili with meat. Anyway, so concerto means a piece for a group—for a group of instrumentalists—an instrumental piece. Sometimes it's for a group meeting the orchestra and an individual soloist; sometimes it's for a group—the orchestra—and a smaller group within the big group called the concertino. Now here's another term for you: tutti. Tutti is simply the Italian word for all. I ever heard tutti frutti ice cream? The tutti means all fruits, and if you get all the different fruits all mashed up together in your ice cream, you've got tutti frutti ice cream. So tutti means all. There are sections within a concerto where everybody is playing—the entire orchestra and the soloist or the entire orchestra and the small group, the concertino, if we're talking about a concerto grosso. So there are sections when everybody is playing, and those sections are labeled tutti. The composer would actually write in—in the old days—tutti in the score, meaning everybody plays here, right? So even today we talk about—if we're performing a concerto—we talk about the tutti sections versus the solo sections.
Here's another thing to know about concertos: they are almost always three-movement works. There are multi-movement works, and they tend to be three movements. Now I said last lecture about multi-movement works, at things—the thing that distinguishes one movement from another—the main thing is the tempo. So we will have an alternation between fast and slow tempos, and this is a way of attaining variety of mood. So in a concerto, typically we have three movements: the first movement is fast, the second movement is slow, and the third movement is fast again. Here's another thing that the book talks about. Now this is something that the book discusses back in the earlier section on the concerto grosso, so this is back page 110 or so: ritornello form. So this is another term to know. The ritornello—that simply means the thing that returns, right? The ritornello is the main theme of the first and last movement of a concerto—with about the first and last movement—the two fast movements. We could also refer to them as the outer movements of the concerto. Those two movements will be in a particular type of form we call ritornello form because they have a main theme that we hear at the very beginning that returns periodically, and that form will be found in the first movement and the last movement.
Now, in talking about form—which we haven't done a lot of so far—we haven't talked specifically about different types of forms. I've talked about the general concept of what form is. I did this way back in the first unit when I talked about the elements of music, and I've made the point a couple times since then, I think, that form in music is simply the arrangement of different sections. And in coming up with the form of a piece of music, the composer kind of has to strike a balance between repetition of certain elements and variety, right? So we have to repeat things; we have to either restate things or have things appear over here and then come back later to provide some continuity to a musical work. But of course we can't always just be repeating the same thing over and over again, or the audience becomes bored. So we need to have variety as well; we need to hear different stuff once in a while. We need both continuity, which is caused by repetition, and variety, and we need them in some kind of proportion to each other. We can't have all—they're both good things, but we can't have too much of one or too much of the other. There has to be kind of a balance between the two of them. And in the form of just about any piece of music, you can see how the composer's trying to strike this balance—to give the right amount of repetition, which gives a feeling of continuity, but also variety. Okay. So what the ritornello does is to provide that continuity—that feeling of continuity—in between the appearances of the ritornello, which are usually presented by the tutti. In other words, usually hearing the ritornello, everybody is playing—the entire orchestra and the soloist. But in between those appearances of the ritornello, we have different stuff, and that different stuff is usually provided by the soloist or soloists—the small group—the concertino. The form is the same whether we're talking about the concerto grosso or the solo concerto. So sometimes I had to use the word soloist or soloists. All right. In either case, in ritornello form we simply alternate back and forth between tutti sections, which are presenting the ritornello, and solo sections, which are presenting some contrasting material. That contrasting material is usually kind of flashy, technically difficult. A concerto is kind of a showpiece; it's meant to show off the ability—the virtuosity—of the soloist or soloists. That's sort of the whole idea; it's kind of a showpiece.
So in ritornello form—what I've done is I've actually made a one of my visual aids here; I'm just gonna hold this up to the phone—the camera—and it appears to be reversed, but maybe it'll de-reverse itself when we actually look at it on the screen. I don't know. But the outer movements—as you see there—I've got a little overview, okay? Concerto grosso: a piece for small group and orchestra. The solo concerto: a piece for an individual soloist plus orchestra. The outer movements of the three movements—those fast movements—and by the way, I always use Roman numerals when I'm talking about different movements—those outer movements are going to be in ritornello form, and I've got a diagram down here at the bottom. So first, we have—the first thing we always hear is the tutti—the entire orchestra along with the soloist playing the ritornello melody. And in the case of the Vivaldi—the first movement of Vivaldi—that—that ritornello melody is very familiar; it's this thing—okay—that's the ritornello melody. Then, after we've heard that—returned—ritornello melody, we hear the soloist presenting something different; I'm just calling it X, right? It's just some new material, and it will usually be flashy, technically difficult, challenging, you know. And then after that we hear the tutti—the entire orchestra—come back in and a reappearance of the ritornello melody. Then we have the soloist or soloists come back in with something different yet again; we'll call it Y. After that passes, the tutti jump back in with the ritornello melody. Then the soloist will come back in with something different yet again; I'm calling it Z. This can go on and on for as long as the composer wants, right? There could be, oh, you know, many more. I've just got three different—I only have room on a paper for three different solo sections, but there could be many more than this. One thing that we will find is that the composer will end with the ritornello—with the tutti playing the ritornello—he's going to end with the same material that he began with to sort of round things off and and give a feeling again of continuity, of unity, and cohesiveness to the overall movement. Now, although the first and the third movements will be in the same form, they will have different themes; they'll have different material, so they will sound different; they might have a different mood, right? And they will certainly have different melodic material. It's just that the arrangement—the structure—will be similar. Between the first and the last movement, will both be in ritornello form. The second movement—the slow movement—will not be in ritornello form. What form will it be in? We don't need to worry about that; it could be—it could be different from one composition to the next. They're in the second movement; there is no expectation of a particular form; there is no correct answer for what the form will be; there's a lot of different possibilities that the composer could decide to go with. But it was expected that the composer would use ritornello form in the first and third movements—in the fast movements—or what we call the outer movements.
No, the example by J.S. Bach—okay—in that musical example, they're just giving you the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto number five. This is a concerto grosso. It's called Brandenburg Concerto number five because it is one of a set of six concertos that Bach sent as a present to a nobleman who was—his title was the Margrave of Brandenburg. Bach had met this nobleman and actually probably hoped to get a job working for him. So he put together six concertos that he'd already composed, had them nicely bound, and wrote a dedication to the Margrave of Brandenburg and sent them off to this guy, hoping probably to get a letter—bought a letter back—maybe offering him a job, which never happened. For all we know, these these six concertos probably just sat on a shelf in in this nobleman's library someplace. But today they are—they're recognized as some of the greatest orchestral works of the Baroque era. The Brandenburg Concerto number five, in particular, is is well known because it has a very, very virtuosic keyboard part. The keyboard is really featured in the Brandenburg number five. In the Brandenburg Concerto number five, you got the orchestra and the small group. The small group consists of flute, violin, and harpsichord. And toward the end of that first movement, there is a very long harpsichord solo, right? Where all the rest of the orchestra stops playing, and just the harpsichord continues on for several minutes. This kind of solo, by the way, within a concerto—this solo section—is called a cadenza, and this can—and when you listen to it, it takes a while to get to it because this movement is a—it's quite long; it's about, oh, ten, eleven minutes long—and the cadenza is at the very end, and it sounds kind of like a heavy metal guitar solo, actually, especially toward the end. It sounds like something—I don't know—Eddie Van Halen would have done back in the 70s or 80s. So listen to that Bach Brandenburg Concerto. And next lecture I'll probably talk about Vivaldi's Spring concerto and maybe also a little bit more about this Brandenburg concerto, and and I'll—we'll listen to them, and I'll point out some of the specific features. Okay, so see you next time for more about Vivaldi and Bach and concertos.