In the early 1700s, the baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi dropped some absolute fire in the form of four violin concerti titled The Four Seasons. If that doesn’t ring a bell, the music itself almost certainly will. Across three movements for the four concerti, each representing a season – moving from the stirring buds of Spring through the lazy heat of Summer and its breaking, the restlessness of Autumn, the tempest and chill of Winter – some of classical music’s most indelible moments were introduced to the world.
There have been hundreds of recordings and reinterpretations of it over the centuries since Vivaldi’s masterpiece first entered the public consciousness (this one is a banger, for example), but the cycling community of the Polish town of Jarocin can lay claim to one of the most unique iterations. On the occasion of World Bicycle Day – maybe even at the exact same time that Turkmenistan was holding its latest insane bicycle parade! – 927 cyclists gathered in a town square in Jarocin to perform the first movement of Vivaldi’s Winter (Allegro non molto [in F minor], to give it its full and proper title) on bicycle bells. You can watch the video here.
There are reasons why the little town of Jarocin opted for a musical tribute to the bicycle: the town is one of Poland’s leading musical lights, having hosted the defining Eastern Bloc alternative music festival during the Cold War era, an event that continues to this day. The town is also home to the Polish Rock Museum. But even against this illustrious backdrop, getting almost a thousand people to ring their bells along to Vivaldi makes a pretty impressive play for Jarocin’s most noteworthy musical moment.
How well that musical moment was accomplished is probably dependent on your taste for whimsy, in direct correlation to your tolerance for reinterpretation of baroque music’s most hallowed artefact. Most bicycle bells, as you might be aware, lack tuneability: the ding you get is the ding you get, unless it’s one of those old-timey ‘ding dong’ ones, and from the video of the Jarocin bicycle bell orchestra ‘performance’ it doesn’t appear that there was any organisation of bell position by tone emitted. This means that, melodically, the backing track (of an actual orchestra playing Winter) does most of the heavy lifting. Some bicycle bell dings rise above the frenetic strings, but it’s not so much a performance of Winter as it is a lot of people ringing their bicycle bells along to it.
Cards on the table: that really doesn’t bother me, because would you just look at all of these happy people with their bikes, in the sun, doing a thing together:
Still, I wondered if there were ways that you could do a serviceable performance of one of the most famous Vivaldi movements with bicycle bells, without extensive autotuning after the fact. I didn’t have 927 bells or the cycling community of Jarocin, but I could muster up a range of bells from bikes scattered about the garage and mount them on a handlebar in a work stand.
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