The Beaufort Scale, in marine terminology, is a qualitative measure of wind force and the empirical description of its various effects first on the sails of 19th century frigates and later, with the advent of steam engines, on the changing behavior of the sea. In contemporary composition, “Beaufort Scales” is also the preter-scientific title to Christopher Cerrone ’s newest release, published on the Cold Blue Music label. Yet the inspiration from pre-instrumental science is far from gratuitous.
In near-Wordworthian fashion, Cerrone aims to capture the terrifying beauty of crescendoing winds, from the first movement – “Sea like a Mirror” – to the climactic “The Air is Filled with Foam and Spray.” He transcribes Francis Beaufort’s rather prosaic observations into the spiraling language of his very own musical idiom, adapted to treble voices and electronics. Cerrone, in short, “wanted to do what art does best: document the precognitive feeling of something so strange and eerie and new, for which language does not exist yet.
” The Anatomy of a Storm By no means can the setting to music of a seascape be considered novel. Between Wagner and the unjustly neglected Alberto Franchetti the Romantics have captured every possible iteration of the sea, be it as tumultuous as it will. Cerrone is a different kind of Romantic whose jargon, however, seems less appropriate to convey the grandiosity of nature, if only for the surgical sound of the electronics.
The latter .
