Ray Grasse is a noted astrologer, photography, musician, and writer on metaphysical topics. I admire his body of work, and artist process. Check out Ray's websites, and posts. See the ~Deep Sea ~below. Jamie Forbes
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Though I grew up mainly on the rock and roll music of the 60s, my mother introduced me to a different kind of music when she played Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the piano, and later on, played a recording of his orchestral composition “La Mer” (the Sea) on the family record player.
There was something about Debussy’s work that affected me profoundly. I became obsessed with his compositions, and struggled to express similar feelings of my own on the piano, which I had some lessons in years earlier. I had also been deeply impacted by the soundtracks composed by Bernard Hermann for films like “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Jason and the Argonauts, and those influences couldn’t help but find their way into my efforts, too.
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Me at 18 playing the family piano, my father reading the paper behind.
And so was in freshman year during college that I began work on a piece I’d later title “The Deep Sea.” Things progressed slowly, and it took a full four years to complete. Not having an actual orchestra at my disposal, I used the four track recorder I bought from a college classmate to overdub layers of background voices to simulate the effects of string sections.
But it would be over 30 years before I’d actually get into a formal studio to do a fully fleshed-out recording of the piece, at my friend Bill Kavanagh’s studio in Oak Park, Illinois. With the new synthesized sounds available nowadays I was able to create more of an orchestral effect, and finally finished it in 2006.
An important twist in the story happened when I sent a copy of the recording to my old friend Rebecca Romanoff, who had married my old teacher Goswami Kriyananda (of Chicago) and moved to the south of France — not far from my ancestral stomping grounds in Grasse, France, fittingly enough. Rebecca had been playing with the visual possibilities of computer graphics, and in 2012 surprised me with a beautifully executed video to accompany my composition.
Sadly, she passed on from cancer not long after, but left us with this beautiful work. I hope you enjoy it. —R.G.
Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, and a CD of his music is available on Amazon, titled The Sea Within— https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Within-Ray-Grasse/dp/B00PK1WZPW/
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