70. Musical Recycling
from The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Hosted by Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Vivaldi: Concerto for Orchestra in C Major, FXI No. 25 Ives: Sonata No. 2 (“Concord”) Today’s program begins with Antonio Vivaldi’s very short Concerto for Orchestra in C Major. A prolific composer, Vivaldi often re-used part of one piece in another work – and indeed the second movement of this piece was repurposed in his Double Trumpet Concerto. This borrowing of musical material is a common compositional practice, but no composer is more famous for the quotation and recycling of musical snippets than Charles Ives. The piano sonata that we’ll hear next, officially titled “Concord, Mass. 1840-1860,” recalls the 19th century Transcendentalists. Each movement of the sonata represents one of the great thinkers of the time: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Throughout the piece, Ives draws on a range of musical styles and sounds, from folk songs and austere hymns to ragtime melodies and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, to create these musical portraits.
Embed this episode
No transcript yet.