You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hello, Sprouts.

Today is Wednesday, March 15th.

It's the Feast of St. Louis de Merrilloc.

And I'm Cecilia Leskowitz from the Hildegard Collective, a ministry for Catholic musicians.

We're going to be time traveling again through musical history today, from the 1600s through the early 1800s. Now yesterday we learned about the Renaissance, that huge

explosion of music and art from the 1300s to the 1500s. We learned about the Protestant

Reformation and how the church saw that music and art were

important for helping the church heal.

And we met our friend Giovanni Palestrina and learned about how he wrote some of the most

beautiful sacred music that's ever been written.

Now music began to change again in the period of time that we call the Baroque era.

There were a few very important things that happened in this time period.

Key signatures became a thing.

Key signatures are a way to organize sets of musical notes that make sense together, and we still use those today.

Instruments like the flute, the violin, and the cello became more like the way they are today,

and composers really liked to write for them. And the opera became a thing. Have you ever

watched a Disney movie with music like Frozen or Tangled or Beauty and the Beast? These are called

musicals, which are stories with songs that help move the story along. Opas are kind of like the grandma of musicals.

And we're actually going to hear about an opera in a couple of days,

but for now, we're going to head on over to Italy for a bit and meet a very special friend.

Antonio Vivaldi was a Catholic priest in Italy, who was also a very talented musician.

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