The gentle string melody you hear on hold with your bank was, 300 years ago, a radical experiment designed to sound like barking dogs, drunken peasants, and terrified prey. This episode tells the biography of a piece of music: Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, published in Amsterdam in 1725 inside a collection titled The Contest Between Harmony and Invention, with four sonnets that historians believe Vivaldi wrote himself.

The conversation walks through the program music of each season, from the viola instructed to bark in Spring to chattering teeth in Winter, and explains how bulletproof Baroque counterpoint kept the sound effects from becoming cheap novelty. It then follows the piece’s 200-year disappearance, Louis Kaufman’s race to record it at Carnegie Hall before the 1948 musicians union ban, Nigel Kennedy’s three-million-selling 1989 album, Max Richter’s 2012 recomposition, and the AI-driven climate projects that rewrite the score using weather data for 2050.

• Why abstract, mathematical instrumental music was the expectation at the Mantua court
• Summer’s hailstorm and Autumn’s hunt heard from the perspective of the fleeing animal
• James Petrillo’s union strike and the midnight deadline that produced a Grammy Hall of Fame recording
• Punk hair and a Dracula cape: how Nigel Kennedy was marketed to the MTV generation
• Bach’s 1726 cantata, Piazzolla’s tango, thrash metal, and Opera Philadelphia’s 2025 The Seasons