Antonio Lucio Vivaldi: Most Renown Baroque Composer

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, an italian composer born in Venice, one of the most renown Baroque composers over in history. Mostly known for his many instrumental concertos composed mainly for the violin. Vivaldi was born on March 4, 1678 to Giovanni Battista Vivaldi and Camilla Calicchio. His father was originally a barber and became a professional violinist. Of the nine children in the family, Vivaldi was the only one who became a musician. Vivaldi was taught the violin by his father. Becoming a priest at the age of twenty-five he obtained an interesting nickname, “the red priest” for his red hair that he inherited from his parents. Vivaldi was trained for priesthood in the local churches of S Geminiano, where he would achieve his fame as a composer

Early electronic music composers were very inspired by Vivaldi’s Allegro non molto movement in Winter, so much that two composers even created rearrangements of his original piece. In 2007, Takayuki Ishikawa, also known as DJ Taka released a rearrangement of Vivaldi’s first movement of winter. In 2015, another artist seeked to recreate Vivaldi’s Winter movement in a completely different way. At this time electronic dance music started to become more and more popular with the younger generations. A japanese composer by the online name Memme created a “drumstep” remix of Vivaldi’s Allegro non molto movement named “Avalanche”. Both of these rearrangements became popular in japanese music games over the years. I don’t think Vivaldi saw himself becoming more famous because of a Japanese music game that was to come out centuries after his

The movement is in a minor key and is highly dissonance causing a very harsh feeling as the melody progresses through the piece. The beginning tempo sounds like it is mimicking the trudging through the snow. Around half way through the movement, there is a huge shift in tempo and dynamics that sounds akin to “Our teeth chattering in the extreme cold”. The solo violin with the sonnet creates an image of teeth chattering as the tempo and dynamics increase