Episode 049: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

In which we discuss romanticism, Stephen Sondheim, and scary movies

Feb 20, 2024

I’ve mentioned I live on a lake? Every once in a while during the cold months, when it is unseasonably warm with snow still on the ground, the whole town fogs up like a ghost story.

Fog. Fog REALLY upset me when I was a kid. Makes me a little uneasy to this day, despite finding it so fascinating.

In a good fog, you can’t see for more than a few feet. A wall of white, like being lost in a cloud. The air is damp…sticks to your skin. Sounds seem muffled.

Eerie.

Maybe it will lift soon? Or maybe it will stay all day? No way to know. All you can do is wait…

wait…

Ok, now that I have sufficiently freaked myself out, remembering how I felt when I was a kid, I suppose I should take a stab at writing some foggy-sounding music.

Only one fog-related work of art to consider here, one of my favorite paintings in the history of forever: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

I’m in love with this piece of classic, full-on romanticism.

For years I believed this was Chopin with his back turned. Of course, it was painted when Chopin was 8 years old. So...

Also, it kind of looks like the over-the-shoulder view in every single dungeon-crawler RPG I’ve ever played, which makes me happy.

Art, boy, sometimes you don’t know why it hits you the way it does. From this fantastic piece on Friedrich and Wanderer:

“Even if you haven’t studied the art, you feel it,” Koerner says about the particular magic of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. “You feel that those summits that you see in the fog are not just figments of an artist’s imagination. They’re not made in the studio. Each of these peaks and valleys, each rock, each tree, has been observed and then refigured and restaged in the painting.”

As to my reduction: the limited color palette is also something I admire about this. You know those movies that have that overall blue palette [Blade Runner comes to mind]? Just a few colors with some shading can tell this big of a story. Wow.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Reduction

You would think this painting might call for sweeping strings and crashing and booming, yes? Something very capital-R Romantic? But I kept coming back to the disjointed, fuzzy-sounding idea I started with. I think I scrapped it three times during the process, starting something entirely different and then returning. No idea why, but this is what the painting sounds like.

Really, all that is going on here is a pretty standard chord progression with the main theme and piano solo raised up a full step. There are technical ways to describe it (which would bore everyone, including me), but really it's just me playing the melody in A major while the harmony is in G major.

Hanging on those minor 9s sounds weird and creepy. Like fog.

I think if you played everything in this beat ‘right’ and sped it up, it would sound like a pretty passable run at a show tune. But after the different keys and the strange guitar sound used to play the theme, and the wobbly effects, and the spooky wordless voices…well, Stephen Sondheim I’m not.

So, back to being frightened of fog.

What really terrorized me when I was a kid was John Carpenter’s The Fog. Nothing like a good ol’ ghost story. It’s got everything: I mean, come on, fisherman corpses bent on revenge? Old priests? Golden crosses?

Also: Adrienne Barbeau.

It was one of those movies that was on HBO when HBO had only around 10 movies to play, over and over and over.

Scary every time it was on.