Antonio Vivaldi

We are currently studying Antonio Vivaldi. This is the first composer my kids have really been interested in (we have done several others in the past) and I think it is due to some new resources we found.

A great website is Classics for Kids which has the Classics for Kids radio programs available, as well as musical selections, biography information, etc. on a number of composers. You can find Antonio Vivaldi here. The archive of radio programs are here.

There is a great audio CD series called Classical Kids which my kids have loved and listened to over and over. Even Kurt and I have enjoyed listening to it. The one for Antonio Vivaldi is call "Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery." It is about a young orphan girl named Katarina who is coming to the orphanage where Vivaldi was the music director. With the help of Giovanni, a gondolier she meets when arriving in Venice, she searches for clues to her mysterious past. The story is set to exerpts from Vivaldi's music. The link above should take you to the Amazon page that lists all of the titles in this series.

I also always try to find a good book for my kids to read about the composer we are studying. I prefer to find one that is not just a dry biography with names, dates, and places. For Vivaldi I found a great book called I, Vivaldi by Janice Shefelman which gives biography information told from Vivaldi's viewpoint of his mother's promise at the time of his birth that he would be a priest if he lived, and his own desire to be a musician. We have enjoyed the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers series by Mike Venezia in the past, but he hasn't written one for Vivaldi. He also does a series called Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists. What I like about his series is they are written for kids and so leave out all the adult details, personal relationship stuff of the composer/artists life that kids don't need to know.

I also pick a few selections of the composers music that I want them to be familiar with. For Vivaldi I picked The Four Seasons, because we already own a cd of that music. I play the music while we are doing school assignments or eating lunch or in the car or whenever. Libraries are a great resource for music and videos, as well as books. Whatever you don't have to buy keeps that much more money in your pocket.