The great French classical composer Claude Debussy (1982-1918) wrote a number of tone poems and what he termed "symphonic sketches", much of his work based on the piano. In 1974 ISAO TOMITA arranged some of Debussy's tone poems into an album compilation using the Moog synthesizer and other electronic sound equipment, titling it SNOWFLAKES ARE DANCING after the first track. It's my #9 all-time favorite album, but from the end of 1974 and through the next year I was mesmerized by it. My local South Florida album rock radio station, WSHE, played one of its pieces, Arabesque No. 1, repeatedly in its rotation and even one night played the album in its entirety. By the way, Jack Horkheimer, the director of the Space Transit Planetarium in Miami, used Arabesque as the theme music for his long-running five-minute PBS star gazing show. The songs on the album are all instrumental, naturally, but Tomita does generate imitations of human singing on some of them: Arabesque, Golliwog's Cakewalk, Passepied and The Engulfed Cathedral. Some tracks send the listener down the proverbial musical rabbit hole with their dreamlike mysticism: Gardens in the Rain, Claire de Lune and The Engulfed Cathedral stand out. In 1975 I bought this album and played it so much that I concluded it was exerting too much influence over me, so I took it and smashed it, that's how significant it was to me (later on I bought another copy). The songs on Snowflakes are Dancing have an insidious way of getting under my skin, but I no longer let myself get carried away by them...that's good because I can hear it on YouTube whenever I like...
Here are the tracks on Snowflakes are Dancing in the order of my liking:
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