Music class assignment

1. How do you feel listening to Vivaldi’s "Spring Concerto" from The Four Seasons? Create a visual representation of your experience listening to the piece. You could take a photo, create a painting, draw something… whatever you like! Have fun with it! The only requirement is that your creative response must be something that you created yourself for this assignment.

Include a paragraph explaining how your visual response represents your experience of the music. (5 points)

2. Drawing on assigned reading and materials, discuss the development of the printing press and the popularity of amateur-music making during the Renaissance (ex. madrigals). Consider: How did the development of the printing press influence the popularity of amateur music-making? How can the influence of the popularity of amateur music-making be seen (or not seen) in the Arcadelt’s Il bianco e dolce cigno.

Cite specific ideas taken from the assigned reading and material using parenthetic citations with page numbers or titles. There is no need to cite information from lecture or lecture slides. Your discussion of Arcadelt’s Il bianco e dolce cigno should be specific, identifying characteristics of the music, but there is no need to use time-stamps. (5 points)

3. As we discussed in class, Claudio Monteverdi and Barbara Strozzi used dissonant harmony to portray the emotional content of the texts which they set to music in their works Cruda Amarilli and Lagrime mie, respectively. In EACH piece, identify ONE example of the composer’s use of dissonance as a form of text expression. Include time-stamps for each of these moments, and a specific discussion of the relationship that you hear between text and music. DO NOT use examples already discussed in lecture/listed on the lecture slides. (Hint: Find moments of emotion articulated in the text and then listen for the moments in the music when that text is sung. There’s probably dissonance!) (5 points)