This week, Lady May and Old Man Winter joined us for a game celebrating the seasons. The leaves are turning, but our playlist features music for Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. 

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) The Seasons, Hob. XXI:3: Der Herbst [Autumn] No. 9 Heyday Heyday The changing seasons have always been a source of inspiration for artists: there are countless cycles of paintings and frescoes, poems and odes, and of course, the famous Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi, the musical archetype of seasonal depictions. Vivaldi likely inspired many of the other seasonal musical cycles—several of which we’ll hear this hour, so be forewarned—but it probably didn’t directly influence Haydn’s oratorio. Instead, Haydn was inspired by the four-part poetic cycle The Seasons by Scottish poet James Thomson, which were immensely popular around Europe in translation. Thomson’s poems were adapted into an English and German libretto for Haydn by Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a patron to Mozart and Beethoven, who also wrote the libretto to Haydn’s Creation, which premiered just a few years earlier.

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) A Winter Idyll When it comes to seasonal music, Holst’s major success was a setting of In the Bleak Midwinter which first appeared in The English Hymnal in 1906, and continues to be sung throughout the world. Before composing that piece, and even before his master work The Planets, he composed this Winter Idyll, in 1897. Although the work already shows a command for orchestral writing (with some preference given to the trombones, Holst’s instrument of choice) He was still crafting music under the influence of his composition teacher at the Royal College of Music, Charles Villiers Stanford, whom Holst had gone to great lengths to study with. Stanford could be a harsh critic, sometimes describing his student’s works as “damn ugly,” but his teaching would ultimately spark the success of several notable composers: Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells, and Ralph Vaughan Wiliams.    

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) Four Seasons of Buenos Aires: I. Primavera Porteña [Spring] Although Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires at first seems like a  clever analogue of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, that was not Piazzolla’s original intention. It started with a piece called Buenos Aires Summer, which Piazzolla composed as incidental music for a play. It was his usual tango piece for bandoneón, violin, electric guitar, piano and bass. Several years later, Piazzolla returned to the idea and wrote pieces for the other three seasons, but never intended for them to be performed all together. After his death, the Russian composer, Leonid Desyatnikov took the four pieces and forged them into a suite that included references to Vivaldi’s Seasons. Of course, since Buenos Aires is in the Southern hemisphere, the seasons are inverted, beginning with Autumn and ending with summer!

Louis Spohr (1784-1859) Symphony No. 9 in b, Op. 143 'The Seasons': Autumn Louis Spohr composed ten symphonies, spanning nearly five decades.  His music was recognized and respected by even such fierce contemporaries as Robert Schumann. His Fourth Symphony, subtitled “The Consecration of Sound” inspired Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and even Mahler.  Spohr’s Ninth Symphony subtitled “The Seasons”, was his last completed symphonic offering.  He started a 10th but was unable to complete it, becoming yet another victim of the 9th symphony syndrome. The discrepancy in quality between Spohr’s early and late works can be traced to the period from 1831 to 1838 in which he lost his brother, his first wife Dorette, and his youngest daughter.  The loss of his wife was especially detrimental to his composing, as she had provided an intellectual sparring partner that fueled much of Spohr’s creative impulse.

John Cage (1912-1992) The Seasons: Spring John Cage was commissioned to write The Seasons for New York City’s Ballet Society in 1947. Originally written for piano, the work would also be Cage’s first attempt at orchestration, with encouragement and assistance from his contemporaries Lou Harrison and Virgil Thompson. The work consists of nine movements, with four preludes and a finale dividing the four seasons. Like many of his compositions, the piece is influenced by Cage’s interest in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, with each season representing part of the cycle of life. Winter is quiescence, spring is creation, summer is preservation, and fall is destruction. The work is also an example of Cage’s early experiments with improvisation. A few years later he would start to write piano works based entirely on a system which incorporated chance into the process of composition.  

Max Richter (b.1966) VIVALDI: THE FOUR SEASONS: Summer After the album  of Richter’s Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons dropped in 2012, Ivan Hewett of The Telegraph had this to say: “…after years of tedious disco and trance versions of Mozart, the field of the classical remix has finally become interesting.” Hewett’s thought was shared by many listeners, including NPR, who hosted the US premier of Richter’s work as a live-streamed event in New York City. With a  postmodern approach to composing, Max Richter heard in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons the same love for repetitive pattern-making that inspired his own minimalist style. Although only about 25 percent of Vivaldi’s music is used in the re-composing of the violin concerti, Richter states that Vivaldi’s DNA is omni-present in the material.   

Sheng, Bright (b.1955) Spring Dreans: II. Spring Opera The Chinese orchestra is a relatively new invention from the 1950’s, when traditional Chinese instruments were collected and grouped into an ensemble mirroring the Western orchestra. There was very little repertoire written specifically for the Chinese orchestra until the 1990’s, one of the landmark pieces being Bright Sheng’s Spring Dreams. Commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma as a cello concerto with chinese orchestra accompaniment, the work was later reworked for a violin soloist. Chinese and Western musical idioms are seamlessly interwoven in the composition, a testament to Bright Sheng’s knowledge and mastery of both. Bright Sheng was taught piano by his mother when he was four, however he also spent seven years performing as part of a folk music ensemble near the Tibetan border. The artistic philosophy he developed while studying composition in New York emphasizes blurring the boundaries between the two traditions.

Paul Moravec (b.1957) Autumn Song Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec has written over 200 works, which include operas, cantatas, orchestral and chamber music and solo concert pieces. While he does not shy away from the complex and dizzying chromaticism demanded by modern music, his work is imbued with a deep sense of beauty. With its elegant restraint and lyricism, his Autumn Song for flute and piano is aesthetically linked to a Romantic-era song without words. The flute begins the piece a cappella before being joined by a pensive piano, who switches between providing accompaniment and an answering melody to the flute.  

Pete Seeger (1959)Turn! Turn! Turn! The folksong Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There is a Season) became ubiquitous with the American folk music revival of the 1950’s and 60’s after it was frequently covered by some of the movement’s most popular musicians, including Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and Judy Collins. Marlene Dietrich even recorded a German version of the song in 1963 with orchestral accompaniment conducted by Burt Bacharach. The song was penned by Pete Seeger around 1961, who took the lyrics from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. The first commercial recording of Turn Turn Turn was released in 1962 by the Limelighters before Seeger recorded it later for his live album The Bitter and The Sweet. Judy Collins covered the song a year later for her third album, accompanied by future Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn on 12-string guitar.