The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea is the 19th novel by Iris Murdoch. It won the Booker Prize in 1978.

Plot summary

The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Murdoch's novel exposes the motivations that drive her characters – the vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Charles Arrowby, its central figure, decides to withdraw from the world and live in seclusion in a house by the sea. While there, he encounters his first love, Mary Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since his love affair with her as an adolescent. Although she is almost unrecognisable in old age, and outside his theatrical world, he becomes obsessed by her, idealizing his former relationship with her and attempting to persuade her to elope with him. His inability to recognise the egotism and selfishness of his own romantic ideals is at the heart of the novel. After the farcical and abortive kidnapping of Mrs. Fitch by Arrowby, he is left to mull over her rejection in a self-obsessional and self-aggrandising manner over the space of several chapters. "How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality... Yes of course I was in love with my own youth... Who is one's first love?"

Sea

A sea is a large body of salt water that is surrounded in whole or in part by land. More broadly, "the sea" is the interconnected system of Earth's salty, oceanic waters—considered as one global ocean or as several principal oceanic divisions. The sea moderates Earth's climate and has important roles in the water cycle, carbon cycle, and nitrogen cycle. Although the sea has been travelled and explored since prehistory, the modern scientific study of the sea—oceanography—dates broadly to the British Challenger expedition of the 1870s. The sea is conventionally divided into up to five large oceanic sections—including the IHO's four named oceans (the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic) and the Southern Ocean; smaller, second-order sections, such as the Mediterranean, are known as seas.

Owing to the present state of continental drift, the Northern Hemisphere is now fairly equally divided between land and sea (a ratio of about 2:3) but the South is overwhelmingly oceanic (1:4.7).Salinity in the open ocean is generally in a narrow band around 3.5% by mass, although this can vary in more landlocked waters, near the mouths of large rivers, or at great depths. About 85% of the solids in the open sea are sodium chloride. Deep-sea currents are produced by differences in salinity and temperature. Surface currents are formed by the friction of waves produced by the wind and by tides, the changes in local sea level produced by the gravity of the Moon and Sun. The direction of all of these is governed by surface and submarine land masses and by the rotation of the Earth (the Coriolis effect).

The Sea (band)

The Sea are a rock pop band formed in Cornwall, England in 2007. The band comprises brothers Peter Vine-Chisholm (lead vocals, guitar, keyboard) and Alex Chisholm (Drums, percussion and backing vocals). They are signed to Lusty Records in the UK and Popup Records in Europe.

History

Love Love Love and Get It Back

By April 2008, the duo won the XFM unsigned competition to play at Brixton Academy to 5000 people and went on to support The Enemy at London’s Brixton Academy. By October that year they completed their first extensive tour of the UK AND were invited to play the CMJ Music Marathon in New York.

The Sea’s debut single Love Love Love on their own label Lusty Records sold out within two months of release in January 2009, receiving critical acclaim in the UK music press from NME,Kerrang!,The Fly and was one of Pete Cashmore's singles of the week in The Guardian.

In April 2009 their debut album Get It Back was released in UK on Lusty Records and on Pop Up Records in Europe.

La mer (Debussy)

La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (French for The sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra), or simply La mer (i.e. The Sea), is an orchestral composition (L 109) by the French composer Claude Debussy.

Composed between 1903 and 1905, the piece was initially not well received, but soon became one of Debussy's most admired and frequently performed orchestral works.

Composition

The work was started in 1903 in France and completed in 1905 at Grand Hotel Eastbourne on the English Channel coast. The premiere was given on 15 October 1905 in Paris, by the Orchestre Lamoureux under the direction of Camille Chevillard.

Eastbourne was also where Frank Bridge was to complete his suite The Sea in 1911.

Debussy arranged the piece for piano for four hands in 1905, and in 1909 his publisher Durand presented a second edition of La mer with the composer's revisions.

Instrumentation

La mer is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tamtam, glockenspiel, 2 harps and strings.