All things considered, this is a fairly recent repost. But, one, it ties into the Tales of the Sea giveaway, which will be wrapping up in the next couple days, so it’s a chance to remind you about that:

And, two, I was tinkering with the image I used as the header for this post. Quick recap: 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.”

I tried to do something similar, slapping a transparent image of water over an image of a church. It, uh, it wasn’t great.

I played around with the general concept, adjusting the transparency, adding some colour filters, and trying to figure out the best approach to adding lighting effects. And, well, it took three attempts, but I got one that actually looked pretty good:

I’m sure an actual graphic designer could do significantly better, but I least managed to make an image that actually looks like a church underwater, rather than just a church with a transparent image over it…

FYI: here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two versions:

With that (finally) out of the way, here’s the actual music I wanted to write about today: Claude Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral.

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Claude Debussy was a major figure in the classical music of the turn of the 20th century.

One of Debussy’s better-known compositions is the orchestral piece called La Mer (that’s French for “the Sea”). But 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.

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