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Music is ever-changing, but seldom in a straight line. We’ll look at three composers from each of the three past centuries with little in common with each other or anybody in between. Music from Mozart to Schoenberg this week — and others along the way.

Antonio Vivaldi liked the springtime and autumn of the year; summer and winter, not so much. Regardless of whether he was reveling in the new greenery or kvetching about the sleet, he was one who could turn observations of the weather into an art.

This week finds us at Number 21 in our chronology of the 41 symphonies of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; we’re over the hump in a project begun last July.

We go back as far as the 11th century for a telling of the Christmas Story in music of the Middle Ages in an imaginative collection realized by the Waverly Consort to open this week’s program.

When the Pilgrims left Southampton in 1620, they left behind a thriving European musical scene. Not that the Pilgrims listened to much music; actually they tended to frown on it. But just for fun, we’ll listen to some of the tunes they might have heard if they had been listening — which they weren’t.

Early in the 20th century, Bela Bartok headed for the villages around Hungary, lugging along an Edison wax cylinder recorder, to capture the folk melodies of the countryside before they were gone forever.

It was in 1896 that Richard Strauss tried to express Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophies through music. We’ll go light on the Nietzsche as we see what Zarathustra has to say this Sunday.

We conclude two series this week with the final of Bach’s six cello suites, recorded by Pablo Casals in 1936, and another of Aaron Copland’s American West pieces. And then we’ll hear a most unfamiliar version of a most iconic piece of American music.

We go back to Colonial and Federal America this week with music from the Revolutionary era, and what they were listening to in England at around the same time, and then in the third hour, we’ll see what all this eventually led to: American music of the modern era.

We’re going way back in time this Sunday with music that is Medieval or that has Medieval roots, beginning with the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos and their sleeper best-seller CD of Gregorian chants released nack in 1994.