Setting Up Your Audience

1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4. Four/four time. Hear that count on violin strings. B-B-B-B, repeated, repeated eight more times; take a step downward to four As; down again to eight Ds, and then up to eight Es, followed by eight D-sharps, Es again, and back down to D-sharps. Listen to the beginning of Vivaldi’s Winter that sets the tempo on violin strings that play measures of eight notes. The beginning is a crescendo of repetitive notes, four at a time, that rise to a feverish bowing of a trill followed by that 4/4 beat.


You want to set up your audience, structure what you say the way Vivaldi structured Winter. Even the ostensibly boring use of the same notes becomes a lively presentation.


Think the method doesn’t work to capture an audience? Bob Seger uses the same method in Hollywood Nights. Both Vivaldi’s Winter and Seger’s Hollywood Nights run in 4/4 time; both begin with repetitive notes, and both hit the listener with an abrupt change.


Of course, Seger’s work differs from Vivaldi’s in that the singer uses the human voice whereas the famous composer uses the “voices” of violins. But there is a similarity as both march the listener to the message. Listen to both and realize that the same kind of compositional structure can produce different kinds of messages effectively.


Just suggestin’. 


*YouTube. Vivaldi. Winter.
**YouTube. Bob Seger. Hollywood Nights.