Claude Debussy was a major figure in the classical music of the turn of the 20th century.
Quick digression, but one that will nevertheless help contextualise my choice for this one — Tales of the Sea giveaway:
US Residents only.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that Debussy composed an orchestral piece called La Mer (that’s French for “the Sea”). However, I want to focus on another one of his ocean-themed pieces, La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral), due to being one of my favourite Debussy pieces.
The Cathedral in question is the Cathedral of Ys, a mythical city in Brittany, now part of France, but historically an independent Duchy or Kingdom with a distinct Celtic culture. It’s not for nothing that “Brittany” looks like “Britain” — both names refer to the ancient Celtic Britons.
In brief, Ys is basically Breton Atlantis, cataclysmically swallowed by the sea. The immediately important part of the legend is that the Cathedral of Ys is said to be visible underwater on clear, calm days and its bells can be heard ringing underwater.
The whole point of the piece, as impressionistic music, is to invoke the idea of the legend through the tone and colour of the music. Basically, telling a story without words.
I can definitely make the connections between the music and tolling bells, and the fact that the music it’s mostly pretty soft does help to make it feel like it’s coming from underwater, though I’m not sure my first thought would be “underwater church” if I didn’t know the story ahead of time.
Incidentally, I’m not satisfied with that header image. I don’t think there are many underwater churches in real life, and any of the images I could find that were created to represent the Sunken Cathedral were freely available to re-use, so I took a page out of Mario 64‘s book an superimposed a picture of water over a real-life building.
In Mario 64, the skybox of Wet-Dry World (as seen here) is a photo of Shibam, Yemen (with the Muhammad Ali Mosque in Cairo added to the photo), with some water and lighting effects added to reflect the level’s theme of “City with Variable Water Level.”
Admittedly, I probably spent less time than Nintendo’s artists did, just making a stock photo of water transparent before putting it over a photo of a big church and adjusting the colours a little, but it looks more like blue fire than water to me…
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