A Little Hurricane Music

Deadline day finds me stranded in the wake of Irene, without power, and, so, without access to the usual digital lineup of upcoming musical events to report to you. Go to the Compass Calendar for listings. But in my brief life as a shut-in, I came to think about musical depictions of meteorological events. Like “Stormy Weather,” Harold Arlen’s song of heartbreak has to top the list. It’s been covered countless times and made more than a few Grammy-winners. Ethel Waters was the original, though perhaps Lena Horne is best associated with the song, which she sang in the movie of the same name. (Bonnie Raitt’s beautiful “Storm Warning” is in somewhat the same vein, though softer and less jazzy.) Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony: The depiction of a violent storm in the penultimate movement is one of the most spellbinding moments in classical music, and represented a significant breakthrough in Beethoven’s style. He uses rumbling double basses and then rolling kettle drums for thunder, piccolos for wind, and startling dissonances and piled-up chords to dramatize the height of the gale. For the finale, the sun comes out and a beautiful major-key song prevails. Then there’s “La Mer” (“The Sea”). Few composers were better than the French impressionist Claude Debussy at painting pictures with music. While this signature symphonic piece does not, strictly speaking, contain a storm, each of its three sections paints a specific scene: “From dawn to midday on the sea,” “Play of the waves,” and “Dialogue of the wind and the waves,” which is anything but a calm “dialogue,” and ends with blaring brass and crashing chords. “Grand Canyon Suite,” Ferde Grofe’s romantic composition evoking one of the wonders of the American landscape, includes a stirring “cloudburst” that owes much to Beethoven’s model, but is even more literal, with swirling strings and piano blowing wind, cymbals as lightning and drums for thunderclaps. Of course, we cannot end this list without mentioning the folk ballad “Irene, Goodnight,” as we say goodbye to she-whose-eye-passed-right-overhead. It was first recorded by an early 1900s blues artist — and criminal — named Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, at the instigation of the great folk musicologists, John and Alan Lomax, but is said to be based on a song that dates back to the previous century. It was Pete Seeger’s group, The Weavers, who made it famous in the 1950s, in a slightly less bleak version. This is a song, lest we forget, in which the narrator threatens to “jump in the river and drown.” Fortunately, having been spared a really bad blow from Irene, we can forgo such a notion.