The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:

Spring (company)

Spring is the Australian arm of FremantleMedia Australia and was formed in 2011.

Current Programmes

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Spring (Rachmaninoff)

Spring (Vesna), Op. 20, is a single-movement cantata for baritone, chorus and orchestra, written by Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1902.

The work was finished after the famous Second Piano Concerto. Rachmaninoff intended to revise the cantata's orchestration but never did so.

Programme

The work is based on a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov and describes the return of the Zelyoniy shum, or "green rustle". The poem tells of a husband who, fraught with murderous thoughts towards his unfaithful wife during the winter season, is ultimately freed from his frustration and choler by the return of spring.

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Harmony

In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches (tones, notes), or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line, or the "horizontal" aspect.Counterpoint, which refers to the interweaving of melodic lines, and polyphony, which refers to the relationship of separate independent voices, are thus sometimes distinguished from harmony.

In popular and jazz harmony, chords are named by their root plus various terms and characters indicating their qualities. In many types of music, notably baroque, romantic, modern, and jazz, chords are often augmented with "tensions". A tension is an additional chord member that creates a relatively dissonant interval in relation to the bass. Typically, in the classical common practice period a dissonant chord (chord with tension) "resolves" to a consonant chord. Harmonization usually sounds pleasant to the ear when there is a balance between the consonant and dissonant sounds. In simple words, that occurs when there is a balance between "tense" and "relaxed" moments.

Harmony (Serena Ryder album)

Harmony is the sixth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Serena Ryder. The album was released on November 27, 2012 in Canada, and on August 27, 2013 in the USA. A French edition featuring bilingual versions of two songs was released for the Quebec market on September 24, 2013. It received three Juno Award Nominations in 2013, winning Adult Alternative Album with five more (pending) nominations the following year including Album of the Year.

Commercial performance

The album was certified gold by Music Canada on February 7, 2013, shipping 40,000 copies. The album attained platinum certification in July 2013.

In 2013, the album sold 74,000 copies in Canada.

Singles

The lead single, titled "Stompa", was released on September 27, 2012, in Canada, and then on February 26, 2013 to the U.S. The song peaked at #8 on the Canadian Hot 100, after spending 16 weeks on the chart. The second Canadian single, titled "What I Wouldn't Do", was released in early November 2012, and has reached #8 on the Canadian Hot 100. The song "For You" "reinterprets" Screamin' Jay Hawkins' well-known "I Put a Spell on You" and shares a songwriting credit with his estate.

Harmony (Anne Murray album)

Harmony is a studio album by Canadian Country artist Anne Murray. It was released by Capitol Records in the summer of 1987.

The disc peaked at number 9 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and sold approximately 350,000 copies in the United States.

Track listing

Chart performance

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