Vivaldi: Finding mystery in the familiar

So ............ I'm a bit of a Vivaldi freak at the present. I'm going through this 'phase' where I'm craving certainty, the comfort of 'knowing', and am harking back to my days as a practising mathematician, those good old days where I once spent a whole month working on a single problem ... and ended up solving it one Friday before morning tea. It took me the rest of the day to write out the solution, but I got there in the end, and it was complete, and it was beautiful.

And, as part of this 'phase' of finding comfort in the certain and familiar, my favourite music's been on high rotation. In particular, Pekka Kuusisto's recording of The Four Seasons (with Virtuosi Di Kuhmo) has been right up there, a familiar companion during long drives through Melbourne traffic. There's a phrase which gives me great comfort, around a minute in to the sixth movement (i.e. third movement of Summer), a simple tune but with shifting harmonies underneath. I played it for a friend today - just said, "I've been wanting all week to play this for you; this is what it feels like to do real maths". I think he got what I meant. (Who can tell when you're trying to convey your inner world?)

But - a little to my surprise - I've discovered ambiguity in this very familiar music, mystery amidst the oh-so-well-known. Not in the movement I just mentioned, but the tenth (first movement of Winter).


Somehow, this seems to matter a lot: does that fragment of music have a happy ending, or not? Does the individual survive against the pressure of the masses, or is subsumed? Who wins here? I don't know. Perhaps the answer depends on my mood.

It bothers me. I wish I knew more about what Vivaldi was on about. There's just so much to learn in the world, so much to understand, and sometimes I feel there's so little time to do it in!

But sometimes 'knowing' ("book learnin'") is overrated. I guess it's my default position: want to know something? Read about it, study it, pull it apart cognitively. Perhaps, for now, I can keep this little mystery to myself. Who cares what other people have written about this scrap of music? It's a mystery to me, an enigma, something which tugs at my mindstrings, and the mystery persists even though I could probably write the whole movement out by memory. The notes mean more than their composition.

Unlike maths, there's not going to be a final reckoning here, a last line, a sense of completion.

Live with it, Catie.