To the Sea

To the Sea is the fifth studio album by singer-songwriter Jack Johnson, released on May 26, 2010 in Japan, May 31, 2010 in the United Kingdom and June 1, 2010 in the United States, through Universal Republic Records and Brushfire Music Group. The album debuted at number 1 in the United States, selling 243,000 copies in its first week.

Background and recording

On January 19, 2010, Johnson and his band reported that they had entered the studio to begin work on a new album, and on February 1, the band announced that their currently untitled fifth studio album was slated for a June 1 release, to be followed by a world tour. The album was recorded over three weeks in Johnson's two solar-powered studios, The Mango Tree in Hawaii and the Solar Powered Plastic Plant in Los Angeles.To the Sea was released on Johnson’s own label, Brushfire Records, with the first single, "You and Your Heart", already released on radio and iTunes.

In the album, Johnson used more instruments than before like electric guitar, organ, Wurlitzer and Mellotron. Johnson said of the album's title "I guess it's a reference to a father leading his son to the sea, with the water representing the subconscious. So it's about trying to go beneath the surface and understand yourself".

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.