Listener Carol asks:
"I want to find some good 'springtime' music to accompany the home video I'm making for friends back East. Spring hasn't started for them yet. I know the widely used Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' is an obvious choice, but with so many recordings? And what about other pieces?
I love it. By the time your friends are digging their flowers out of the May snowstorm, your video of exploding Seattle cherry trees will be their fireside relief. Nice!
Spring is a time of extreme contrasts, so let's pick two pieces that couldn't be farther apart. Why not start with your Vivaldi, and add Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." They're both graphic representations of spring, and they both have track records as film music. So you're on proven ground.
Why is Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" an obvious choice? Because even in 1723, Vivaldi was writing for video. Didn't you know? No, seriously, few people realize that the Italian Baroque composer was writing what we call "program music" today. Yes, each "season" has the form of an abstract violin concerto in that typical fast/slow/fast format.
But this composer included poems, in sonnet form, describing what's coming in the music. Letter A: "Spring has come, and joyfully the birds welcome it with cheerful song." That's the famous opening music, whose melody your video audience will recognize: da TA didi dah dah TA dah.
Its subliminal rhythmic pattern was prophetic: "I Can't Watch Another Car Ad." By the time we get to Letter D in the sonnet, about thunder and lightning, Vivaldi makes sure his musicians know where they are in the drama, putting letter D in the musical score. Play rain!
Other than the violent moistening from the elements, the spring affair is a rather civilized one, with nymphs and shepherds and 'the gentle rustle of leaves and branches.' Vivaldi's spring has plenty of time to unfold. Excellent for your slow-panning Seattle shots.
Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" is the other kind of spring. The violent Russian spring, which seemed to "begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking." In 1911, Igor Stravinsky had a dream in which a young girl danced herself to death to appease the pagan god of spring. He wrote this sacrificial vision, "Le Sacred du Printemps," straight to music.
The music was for a ballet, and the show caused the most famous riot in classical music history. I mean fist-fights and hurled produce of the rotting variety. It was the Paris of genteel ballets, and the old model of civilized spring was overturned in one night. Stravinsky couldn't hear his music over the protests. He was furious: how could they not hear that he was writing the very sound of the earth itself?
They did, 20 years later, in the same concert hall, and the composer was paraded down the Champs-Elysées, on a warm, spring night. From the green tendril of the opening solo bassoon playing so high it sounds like a distant saxophone to the insect and bird feeding frenzies of violins, flutes and oboes, to the throbbing swamp mobs of brass, to the cumulonimbus doomsday of percussion, this is... descriptive music, maybe? Walt Disney thought so when he used it for "Fantasia." Stravinsky, just like Vivaldi, put indications in the score where things were happening: Where he says "Glorification of the Chosen One," you have no choice but to obey.
So Disney used Stravinsky, but if you're going to use Vivaldi, you had better hurry, Carol, before the movie comes out next year. They're shooting in Venice right now, and Vivaldi will be played by that Shakespeare who was SO in love, Joseph Fiennes. I'm not undelighted that Jacqueline Bisset will flesh out the story.
Malcolm McDowell and Gérard Depardieu will add their bulk to the plot. Oh, and did I mention Jackie Bisset? So, when do I get to see your video?
Your questions? E-mail me at SeanM@King.org. Sean MacLean can be heard weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on www.king.org and 98.1 KING-FM.[[In-content Ad]]
