Music Appreciation: Music of the Seasons

Whether it’s older works such as Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Haydn’s The Seasons and The Creation or, more contemporarily, Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, composers have always looked to summer, the sun, as well as to place and travel for their inspiration. On this online 10-week course we will listen to, explore and enjoy a range of classical music that relates to summer and to the seasons more generally, along with those other themes. Listening will be drawn from the Baroque period through to the present day and will by well-known and more neglected composers. Each week we will engage with at least one work on this seasonal theme along with several other individual works in different forms and from different eras to think about the circumstances of and reasons behind their creation, and the particulars of the sonic landscape they offer through genre, style, technique and arrangement, this will place each piece in context and allow us to dive into the way it was constructed and is received. To complement this we will also pay attention to the life and background of the composers encountered and how their approach to composition contributes to a distinctive oeuvre. Other genres such as world, jazz, film music, contemporary classical, ambient and electronic music will be paired alongside this.