I went to see a performance at the Duke Energy Center by the North Carolina Symphony. Three works were performed at this concert. The first piece was Musica celestis by Aaron Jay Kernis, and featured a full orchestra. The second piece was Seeing is Believing by Nico Muhly and featured a chamber orchestra and a solo electric violinist. The final piece was The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi and featured a full orchestra accompanied by a solo violinist for each season. Musica celestis and Seeing is Believing were composed in 1990 and 2007, respectively. The Four Seasons was composed during the Baroque period. The audience seemed to enjoy all of the pieces. Melody refers to a succession of pitches perceived by a listener as a single entity. …show more content…
The Four Seasons is a group of four violin concertos, each representing a season of the year. Photographs of North Carolina’s state parks accompanied the piece. The poems that Vivaldi wrote to exemplify what the music intended to evoke was also shown. This is an example of program music. Program music is instrumental music where the composer wants you to hear a story. Form is how a piece begins, develops, and ends. The form of The Four Seasons would be a multi-movement form called a concerto. A concerto is an instrumental piece that features one or more solo instruments among a full orchestra. It generally contains three movements in contrasting tempos. Tempo is the speed at which music progresses. Each concerto represents a season. For example, the “Summer” concerto consists of three movements in three different tempos; Allegro non molto, which means not very cheerful, Adagio, a leisurely slow tempo, and Largo, a slow and stately tempo. The genre of this work is Baroque. The Baroque period lasted from 1600 to 1750. The valued aesthetics during this time included complexity, elaboration, and direct emotional expression. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is one of the most famous works to come out of the Baroque