His music expanded the use of dissonance and complex harmony and rhythm, and incorporated elements picked up from the classical and jazz repertoire. Setting out on his own, Piazzolla quickly moved beyond the boundaries of traditional tango. In his teens he returned to Buenos Aires, where he studied composition with the eminent Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera and played the bandoneon, a type of accordion (with buttons instead of keys), in tango orchestras. Like the tango itself, he was born in Buenos Aires, and like the tango, he quickly went elsewhere, moving with his parents to New York’s Little Italy when he was four. Piazzolla’s roots were in the world of the tango. If the distance of time makes it hard to appreciate Vivaldi’s true importance, geographical and cultural distance obscures the position of Piazzolla, who occupies something of a fringe position in the Eurocentric classical world. Two centuries later, Astor Piazzolla faced another sort of argument about propriety.
All this extra-musical symbolism was not to everyone’s taste, and the ones who found it most distasteful were the musicians most opposed to Vivaldian flashiness in the first place. There are also descriptive directions to the players that are not in the sonnets.
Vivaldi’s “Seasons” are program music, with virtually every passage describing an event that is set out in a sonnet accompanying each of the concerti. Vivaldi’s Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter were the first four of the 12 concerti in his Opus 8, The Contest between Harmony and Invention, in 1725.
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