Stravinsky’s famous springtime piece is so famous, powerful, and legendary, that it’s easy to forget that it didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. The Rite of Spring sounds the way it does because music had actually been headed in that direction for a quite while. Don’t believe me? Well, a couple years before The Rite was premiered, Claude Debussy wrote Images for Orchestra, which, though not as primitive and raw, sounds very similar. Coincidentally, both pieces have a section called “Spring Rounds.”

what goes around, comes around?

A few months ago, there was a story about a church in Mexico that reappeared after lying at the bottom of a reservoir for centuries. Similarly, there’s a church in Venezuela that is sometimes wet, sometimes dry. Pretty cool stuff!

French impressionistic composer Claude Debussy was dreaming of this stuff one hundred years before. His “Submerged Cathedral” is a staple of the piano repertoire. Large chords remind us of tall stone towers, dominating a murky landscape, portrayed by murmuring notes in the bass. The image in this video looks like the church where King Triton would take Ariel and his daughters. No doubt, Sebastian played a mean bubble-organ there.