Midges and Summer Thunder
Categories: Music Activities for schools, Vivaldi's Four Seasons Project
Analysis and other activities inspired by study of the slow movement of Summer from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
The structure of the 2nd movement of Summer is all about a slow melody with thunderous interruptions.
- Have a look at this:
- What is it?
- What’s missing?
- Copy it out correctly either through listening to a recording (tricky option!), or by looking at the score (easy option!).
- How about this…what is it?
- It’s a beautiful melody – why not learn to play it on your instrument – you may need to transpose it to fit the register.
- What’s missing from this one?
- What’s missing? It’s the thundery interruptions.
- Compose some thundery interruptions of your own, and surround this melody with them.
The melody also has some beautiful harmonies, as Vivaldi gently passes through the tonic of G minor to the relative major, Bb major, and back again.
- Find these chord sequences in the 2nd movement:
- Bb Bdim7 Cm C#dim7 D Gm Ab D7 D9 D7 C#dim7 D Gm
- Gm D7 D Gm
- Gm Dm Cm D7 C#dim7 D Gm
- Gm Adim F7 Bb Eb Bb F Bb
- A lovely idea would be to compose a melody of your own using this lovely chord sequence.
Here’s the sonnet that inspires this 2nd movement:
- I think this sonnet directly affects the structure, texture and tempo changes in this movement.
- What do you think?
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