Antonio Lucio Vivaldi

Antonio ViVAldi

(b. March 4, 1678, Venice, Republic of Venice [Italy]—d. July 28, 1741,

Vienna, Austria)

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer and violinist who left a decisive mark on the form of

the concerto and on the style of late Baroque instrumental music.

Life

Vivaldi’s main teacher was probably his father, Giovanni Battista, who in 1685 was admitted as a violinist to the orchestra of the San Marco Basilica in Venice. Antonio, the eldest child, trained for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703. He made his first known public appearance playing violin alongside his father in the basilica in 1696. He became an excellent violinist, and in 1703 he was appointed violin master at the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned or orphaned children. The Pietà specialized in the musical training of its female wards, and those with musical aptitude were assigned to its excellent choir and orchestra.

Vivaldi had dealings with the Pietà for most of his career: as violin master (1703–09; 1711–15), director of instrumental music (1716–17; 1735–38), and paid external supplier of compositions (1723–29; 1739–40).

Vivaldi’s earliest musical compositions date from his first years at the Pietà. Printed collections of his trio sonatas and violin sonatas respectively appeared in 1705 and 1709, and in 1711 his first and most influential set of concerti for violin and string orchestra (Opus 3, L’estro armonico) was published by the Amsterdam music-publishing firm of Estienne Roger. In the years up to 1719, Roger published three more collections of his concerti (opuses 4, 6, and 7) and one collection of sonatas (Opus 5).

Vivaldi made his debut as a composer of sacred vocal music in 1713, when the Pietà’s choirmaster left his post and the institution had to turn to Vivaldi and other composers for new compositions. He achieved great success with his sacred vocal music, for which he later received commissions from other institutions. Another new field of endeavour for him opened in 1713 when his first opera, Ottone in villa, was produced in Vicenza. Returning to Venice, Vivaldi immediately plunged into operatic activity in the twin roles of composer and impresario. From 1718 to 1720 he worked in Mantua as director of secular music for that city’s governor, Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt. This was the only full-time post Vivaldi ever held; he seems to have preferred life as a freelance composer for the flexibility and entrepreneurial opportunities it offered. Vivaldi’s major compositions in Mantua were operas, though he also composed cantatas and instrumental works.

The 1720s were the zenith of Vivaldi’s career. Based once more in Venice, but frequently traveling elsewhere, he supplied instrumental music to patrons and customers throughout Europe. Between 1725 and 1729 he published five new collections of concerti (opuses 8–12). After 1729 Vivaldi stopped publishing his works, finding it more profitable to sell them in manuscript to individual purchasers.

In the 1730s Vivaldi’s career gradually declined. The French traveler Charles de Brosses reported in 1739 with regret that his music was no longer fashionable. Vivaldi’s impresarial forays became increasingly marked by failure. In 1740 he traveled to Vienna, but he fell ill and did not live to attend the production there of his opera L’oracolo in Messenia in 1742. The simplicity of his funeral on July 28, 1741, suggests that he died in considerable poverty.

Instrumental Music

Almost 500 concerti by Vivaldi survive. More than 300 are concerti for a solo instrument with string orchestra and continuo. Of these, approximately 230 are written for solo violin, 40 for bassoon, 25 for cello, 15 for oboe, and 10 for flute. There are also concerti for viola d’amore, recorder, mandolin, and other instruments. Vivaldi’s remaining concerti are either double concerti (including about 25 written for two violins), concerti grossi using three or more soloists, concerti ripieni (string concerti without a soloist), or chamber concerti for a group of instruments without orchestra.

Vivaldi perfected the form of what would become the Classical three-movement concerto. Indeed, he helped establish the fast-slow-fast plan of the concerto’s three movements. Perhaps more importantly, Vivaldi was the first to employ regularly in his concerti the ritornello form, in which recurrent restatements of a refrain alternate with more episodic passages featuring a solo instrument. Vivaldi’s bold juxtapositions of the refrains (ritornelli) and the solo passages opened new possibilities for virtuosic display by solo instrumentalists. The fast movements in his concerti are notable for their rhythmic drive and the boldness of their themes, while the slow movements often present the character of arias written for the solo instrument.

Several of Vivaldi’s concerti have picturesque or allusive titles. Four of them, the cycle of violin concerti entitled The Four Seasons (Opus 8, no. 1–4), are programmatic in a thoroughgoing fashion, with each concerto depicting a different season of the year, starting with spring. Vivaldi’s effective representation of the sounds of nature inaugurated a tradition to which works such as Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony belong. Vivaldi also left more than 90 sonatas, mainly for stringed instruments.

Vocal Music

More than 50 authentic sacred vocal compositions by Vivaldi are extant. They range from short hymns for solo voices to oratorios and elaborate psalm settings in several movements for double choir and orchestra. He composed some 50 operas (16 of which survived in their entirety) as well as nearly 40 cantatas. Many of Vivaldi’s vocal works exhibit a spiritual depth and a command of counterpoint equal to the best of their time. Moreover, the mutual independence of voices and instruments often anticipates the later symphonic masses of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Josquin des Prez

Josquin des Prez

(b. c. 1450, Condé-sur-l’Escaut?, Burgundian Hainaut [France]—d.

Aug. 27, 1521, Condé-sur-l’Escaut)

• Josquin des Prez was one of the greatest composers of Renaissance Europe.

Josquin’s early life has been the subject of much scholarly debate, and the first solid evidence of his work comes from a roll of musicians associated with the cathedral in Cambrai in the early 1470s. During the late 1470s and early ’80s, he sang for the courts of René I of Anjou and Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan, and from 1486 to about 1494 he performed for the papal chapel. Sometime between then and 1499, when he became choirmaster to Duke Ercole I of Ferrara, he apparently had connections with the Chapel Royal of Louis XII of France and with the Cathedral of Cambrai. In Ferrara he wrote, in honour of his employer, the mass Hercules Dux Ferrariae, and his motet Miserere was composed at the duke’s request. He seems to have left Ferrara on the death of the duke in 1505 and later became provost of the collegiate church of Notre Dame in Condé.

Josquin’s compositions fall into the three principal categories of motets, masses, and chansons. Of the 20 masses that survive complete, 17 were printed in his lifetime in three sets (1502, 1505, 1514) by Ottaviano dei Petrucci. His motets and chansons were included in other Petrucci publications, from the Odhecaton (an anthology of popular chansons) of 1501 onward, and in collections of other printers. Martin Luther expressed great admiration for Josquin’s music, calling him “master of the notes, which must do as he wishes; other composers must do as the notes wish.” In his musical techniques he stands at the summit of the Renaissance, blending traditional forms with innovations that later became standard practices. The expressiveness of his music marks a break with the medieval tradition of more abstract music.

Especially in his motets, Josquin gave free reign to his talent, expressing sorrow in poignant harmonies, employing suspension for emphasis, and taking the voices gradually into their lowest registers when the text speaks of death. Josquin used the old cantus firmus style, but he also developed the motet style that characterized the 16th century after him. His motets, as well as his masses, show an approach to the modern sense of tonality. In his later works Josquin gradually abandoned cantus firmus technique for parody and paraphrase. He also frequently used the techniques of canon and of melodic imitation.

In his chansons Josquin was the principal exponent of a style new in the mid-15th century, in which the learned techniques of canon and counterpoint were applied to secular song. He abandoned the fixed forms of the rondeau and the ballade, employing freer forms of his own device. Though a few chansons are set homophonically—in chords—rather than polyphonically, a number of others are examples of counterpoint in five or six voices, maintaining sharp rhythm and clarity of texture.

Guido d’Arezzo

Guido d’Arezzo

 (b.  c. 990, Arezzo? [Italy]—d. 1050, Avellana?)

Guido d’Arezzo was a medieval music theorist whose principles served as a foundation for modern Western

musical notation.

 Educated at the Benedictine abbey at Pomposa, Guido evidently made use of the music treatise of Odo of SaintMaur-des-Fossés and apparently developed his principles of  staff notation there. He left Pomposa in about 1025 because his fellow monks resisted his musical innovations, and he was appointed by Theobald, bishop of Arezzo, as a teacher in the cathedral school and commissioned to write the  Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae . The bishop also arranged for Guido to give ( c. 1028) to Pope John XIX an antiphonary he had begun in Pomposa.

 Guido seems to have gone to the Camaldolese monastery at Avellana in 1029, and his fame developed from there. Many of the 11th-century manuscripts notated in the new manner came from Camaldolese houses.

 The fundamentals of the new method consisted in the construction by thirds of a system of four lines, or staff, and the use of letters as clefs. The red F-line and the yellow C-line were already in use, but Guido added a black line between the F and the C and another black line above the C. The neumes could now be placed on the lines and spaces between and a defi nite pitch relationship established. No longer was it necessary to learn melodies by rote, and Guido declared that his system reduced the 10 years normally required to become an ecclesiastical singer to a year.

 Guido was also developing his technique of solmization, described in his  Epistola de ignoto cantu . There is no evidence that the  Guidonian hand , a mnemonic device associated with his name and widely used in the Middle Ages, had any connection with Guido d’Arezzo.

Guido is also credited with the composition of a hymn to St. John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, in which the first syllable of each line falls on a different tone of the hexachord (the first six tones of the major scale); these syllables, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la, are used in Latin countries as the names of the notes from c to a (ut was eventually replaced by do). His device was of immense practical value in teaching sight-reading of music and in learning melodies. Singers associated the syllables with certain intervals; mi to fa, in particular, always represented a half step.

Before Guido an alphabetical notation using the letters from a to p was used in France as early as 996. Guido’s system used a series of capital letters, small letters, and double small letters from a to g. Guido’s system also came to be associated with the teaching of the gamut—the whole hexachord range (the range of notes available to the singer).

In addition to his innovations Guido also described a variety of organum (adding to a plainchant melody a second voice singing different pitches) that moved largely, but not completely, in parallel fourths. Guido’s work is known through his treatise the Micrologus.

Musician

MUSICIAN

( DESCRIPTION )

Wwhat is influence? Is it the power that one individual holds to change the world? Is it prestige—the glimmering reputation earned by those who have achieved excellence or superiority? Or is it that sense of immortality bestowed on certain people who, through their lives, their actions, and their accomplishments, have climbed pedestals so high and prominent that they are virtually guaranteed a place in the books of history?

Influence can mean so many things and is therefore hard to define. But this much is clear: in a book such as this, where the subject is influential musicians, an exact definition hardly matters. Such artists may exert themselves in all kinds of ways—through their compositions, lyrics, performances, or even through “extracurricular” activities such as raising funds for charitable causes and organizations.

Just by taking the stage—whether in a local church or on the 50-yard line during halftime at the Super Bowl— musicians have instant influence. They command the ability to make people stop what they are doing—to have them clap, dance, and sing along. If musicians are truly great—be it composer Igor Stravinsky, classic rocker Eric Clapton, hip-hop rapper Jay-Z, “King of Rock and Roll” Elvis Presley, or “King of Juju” King Sunny Ade—their creations have the ability to transcend time and space, culture and nationality.

Simply put, great music is more than just music. It makes us think; it makes us feel. And over twenty, thirty, even hundreds of years, it continues to make us listen. In the world of music, that is influence.

Within these pages readers will also discover how the work of one musician inspired and motivated that of others, sometimes in groundbreaking ways. In 1791, having heard the moving oratorios of George Frideric Handel, Austrian composer Joseph Haydn set to work on his own compositions in this genre, eventually creating a composition believed to be the first musical work written for two languages, in this case, German and English. Haydn also became good friends with musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the two composers finding camaraderie in each other’s company and inspiration in each other’s work. Mississippi native Robert Johnson, who legend holds acquired his musical genius by way of having made a deal with the devil, is known to have had a major impact on musicians from Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones.

Some musicians were inspired by influences beyond music. The art of English painter J. M. W. Turner and French painter Claude Monet struck a chord with seminal French composer Claude Debussy, prompting him to create his orchestral seascape La Mer. Visits to Paris prompted a young George Gershwin to create his famous orchestral composition An American in Paris. And it was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that provided the impetus for “Tom Joad,” Woody Guthrie’s classic entry in the American songbook.

There are, of course, those musicians who, as childhood prodigies, seem not to have needed outside influence to exert their own. Frédéric Chopin began playing piano at age seven, gave his first concert a year later, and at age eleven performed for the Russian tsar Alexander I. Mozart, whose life was all too short although with an extra ordinary influence, was composing from the age of five.

Little is known about Johann Sebastian Bach’s early musical education, but in his prime he was recognized by his peers as being a talented harpsichordist, organist, violinist, and singer. He is now recognized as being one of the greatest composers of all time. By bringing together the musical traditions that preceded him and then melding those traditions to create music that was all his own, Bach built his legacy around unique innovation. After his death, students of classical music excavated, analyzed, incorporated, and emulated his work. Today Bach’s “voice” is heard everywhere, from big-city symphony halls to high school auditoriums. It is even heard in the music of Beethoven, who is said to have studied Bach’s works closely. Musicians the world over have been influenced by, and owe a debt of gratitude to, Bach.

Luciano Pavarotti is considered one of the greatest operatic tenors ever. Teaming his athletic vocal range with a lively, energizing personality, Pavarotti earned such popularity over the seven decades of his life that many credit him with single-handedly opening the traditionally upper-class world of opera to the everyday masses. In his prime, Pavarotti performed before live audiences approaching half a million people. He also won five Grammys, sang at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics, and became a fixture, along with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, in the aptly named traveling opera group “The Three Tenors.” That Pavarotti, who died in 2007, will have a lasting influence on opera is unquestioned. His millions of fans, many of whom would never have listened to opera were it not for him, are a testament to his legacy. So, too, are the new opera singers in line to be his successors. Audiences worldwide will hear a hint of Pavarotti’s voice every time the next generation of tenors performs.

Aretha. Her first name alone is instantly recognizable, conjuring the image and sound of this singular musician. The undeniably sensational Aretha Franklin, better known to many as the “Queen of Soul,” was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1987). An electrifying performer since she premiered as a teenager in the mid-1950s, Aretha Franklin has used her unprecedented vocal talent to stir deep emotions in audiences at venues as varied and far-reaching as Detroit churches, Fillmore West in San Francisco, and the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. Millions have bought her albums; millions more have not only heard but felt the energy of her voice. With songs such as “Respect,” which she borrowed from Otis Redding in 1967 and then made her own, she instantly defined the women’s rights movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the right of one performer to shout out her soul. A passionate, perennial performer, it is no wonder that she has more Top 40 singles than any other female singer.

The great Irish rock band U2 all but defines what it means to be influential. Bono, the band’s lead singer, is also cofounder of the grassroots advocacy organization ONE and a regular contributor to newspapers. Through ONE, Bono has brought together millions of people committed to fighting extreme poverty and disease, especially in Africa. But it is the band’s rock music, which Bono and a tight-knit group of friends (including David “the Edge” Evans; Larry Mullen, Jr.; and Adam Clayton) started in 1977, that has the most influence. Beginning with their first breakthrough album, War, in 1983, and continuing through How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in 2004 and No Line on the Horizon in 2009, U2 has over the years created music that is so instantly recognizable as theirs, yet also so innovative and so technologically cutting-edge, that you are practically compelled to listen. Influential? Certainly. How so? That is hard to say. In that they have reduced hunger? In that they have inspired teenagers to pick up an instrument? Or in the music that has followed their lead, from one new band to the next, and which clearly demonstrates a reverence for this celebrity group of post-punk rock stars.

For an example of this type of astronomical influence, consider Bob Dylan. Part American folksinger, part poet, part rock star, and part living icon, Dylan wields lyrics as a soldier wields his sword (or Shakespeare his pen). Throughout his career, Dylan has used the stage to deliver a full range of commentary on the issues of the day. Witty, biting, damning, and always interesting, every word he sings is laced with meaning, and every sentence he speaks comes layered like an onion waiting to be peeled. He sings of love, politics, war, exploration, and exploitation. And if an issue of import is being ignored when it should be front and center, or has been forgotten, Dylan sings about it. With his lyrics, he pulls the world together, even as he rips apart the status quo. Without a doubt, Dylan will continue to be a legend as long as people listen to music.

As for the music experience and its delivery, today is quite different than just a few short years ago. Records and tapes are all but gone, and CDs are on their way out. In the 21st century, we have ear buds and iPods, we download MP3s, and we listen to music online at Web sites such as Pandora, Jango, and YouTube. Music can enter our lives in previously unimagined ways: a new generation is being introduced to musicians and their work via various gaming platforms and programs, from a handheld gaming device such as Game Boy to the simulated guitar-playing experience of Rock Band. Music today is digital. It is fast, at our fingertips, and often it is free. The current profile will undoubtedly change in the future—it always does.

But then again, you can also be sure that much will be the same. We will always listen to music, through whatever device we choose. Music will always be a part of our lives, ringing through our ears even when it is silent and nothing but a memory. People will always sing as they shower, turn it up as they drive, and “tune out” as they try to ignore everything else in their lives. That is music, and that is the influence it has on us.

Those musicians featured in this book span hundreds of years, countless musical genres, and immeasurable distances in style, technique, and purpose. Nevertheless, they have all been, and continue to be, influential. Some are influential because they brought a unique approach to their art that others later followed. Others were leaders of an influential movement in their field—a movement that led future musicians to improvise, change, and ultimately re-create music itself. And still others, through their work, brought about social reform and societal change that has forever shaped the landscape in which we now live.

For these influential people, music was and is life. Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff. Springsteen, Sinatra, Madonna. They devoted their careers to the art, spending countless hours writing, creating, and fine-tuning. They have performed for great crowds, spoken on their beliefs, stood up for just causes, and above all, brought pleasure to the people who have listened. In doing so, each has left a mark, a stamp of influence, on the world.