Enjoying "Spring" in Autumn

Since last week's music was a slight disappointment due to our lack of the proper respect for the harpsichord, I hoped for better things this week as we studied Antonio Vivaldi. Vivaldi is the first individual composer studied in A Young Scholar's Guide to the Composers, so we had our first go at filling out the Composer Cards, doing map work, and looking at the timelines.



We started by listening to The Four Seasons in the van on Tuesday as we headed for gym class.  I had intended to read about Vivaldi and work on the notepages that day as well, but life sort of got in the way.  We redeemed the time by listening to the CD while driving, and nobody complained!  On Wednesday we listened to "Gloria in Excelsis" from Gloria in D on youtube while reading and filling out notepages, maps and timelines.  Today we finished up our composer cards and had another listen to "Spring" and discussed the different elements represented in the music.  Did you know that Vivaldi wrote a poem to accompany each of the four seasons in his composition?  The poem for spring gave us some clues as to what was 'happening in the story' as we listened - birds, brooks, a coming storm, a goatherd having a nap with his dog, and shepherds dancing to a bagpipe tune.  Of course, we'd already picked out the birds and the storm easily on our first listen.

Kennady wondered how long a violinist would need to study their instrument before being capable of playing the solo parts of the concerto, and I had no idea but I figured it would probably be a l-o-n-g time.  I asked a friend of ours who is a very gifted musician, and she pretty much backed me up on that!

We did get back to our piano lessons as well, but are having trouble remembering to do the lesson on Monday.  I might have to just switch lesson day to Thursday.  Why fight it!?

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This post is linked at ~a teaching heart~ where we are keeping each other accountable for making time for music in our homeschooling!