Vivaldi's Four Seasons and the Globalization of Musical Taste

Abstract

"Vivaldi's Four Seasons, or at least parts of it, can be recognised by enormous numbers of people on this planet, and its sounds seem to come from almost every elevator shaft, mobile phone, restaurant and television advert in the world. It stands as the very epitome of a globalized artwork, and therefore it would be reasonable to suppose that globalization theories would be a great help in explaining its success. That this may not be the case is one of the main points of this paper -�� but before we get to that, there are two matters that have to be set in place. The first is to define the characteristics of the Four Seasons as a global commodity (note that I refer to it in the singular, since the four individual pieces come as a package); the second is to describe the main tenets of globalization theories and some of their chief generating ideas. Trying to map the characteristics of the work onto the assertions of the theories will be the main business of this paper, and this process is designed not only to illuminate the work, but also to test the theories." (Excerpt, introduction