Send Breeze
Music for rivers, fountains, sea air and London flats in June
It’s been quite the week here in London. I’m sure you’ve either experienced it yourself, or heard that Europe has been more or less engulfed in a heatwave. And for anyone in North America or Down Under preparing to say, ‘this is nothing’, please refrain. The UK is not built for this kind of heat. I think I can count on one hand, or possibly one finger, the number of people I know with air conditioning at home.
I have, as a result, become a slightly worse version of myself. I’ve been closing curtains during the day like a Victorian ghost, pointing fans in various directions with the misplaced confidence of someone who has read one article about airflow, and spending a surprising proportion of my adult money on watermelon. It has been a serious respite, though I am also quietly lamenting the fact that London melons are really not great. If anyone has an explanation, I am genuinely open to it.
The problem with heat in London is that it doesn’t feel glamorous. It doesn’t feel like white linen, sea views and a cold glass of something under a striped umbrella. It feels like a bus that refuses to move, a flat that has turned into a storage heater, and the slow realisation that opening a window has somehow made things worse. By the evening, I’ve found myself craving not just cold, but the idea of movement: air, water, breeze, anything that might shift the heaviness a little.
So, please forgive the slightly whingy tone this week. The heat has gone to my head, and I am simply trying to survive. Apparently today might be the last day in the over-30s zone for the foreseeable future, and as I’ve been thinking of ways to cool down, it felt only right that music should play its part too. Not an icy playlist, exactly, but music that feels like water, sea air, spray, fountains, breeze and the very distant hope of a cooler room.
Water Music, Suite No. 2 - G. F. Handel
Let’s begin with the most literal water music on the list. Handel’s Water Music was written for an outdoor royal event on the Thames in 1717, when King George I travelled by barge from Whitehall to Chelsea, accompanied by musicians playing on another boat nearby. Which, even in this heat, I can admit is quite a fabulous image: a floating orchestra, a summer evening, the river turned into a concert hall, London before the invention of both Spotify and portable fans.
Of course, this is not water music in the sense of waves, spray or emotional depths. It is water as spectacle. Public water. Ceremonial water. A river with trumpets. Suite No. 2 has that bright, outdoor quality that Handel does so well: music designed to carry across air, conversation and probably a certain amount of royal showing off. It may not make the room physically colder, but it does open a window. Suddenly we are outside, on the river, with the music moving in the air.
The Sea, ‘Seascape’ - Frank Bridge
Frank Bridge’s The Sea is one of those pieces that does exactly what it says on the tin, but much better than the title might suggest. Written in the early 20th century, it is a four-movement orchestral suite, and the first movement, ‘Seascape’, does not give us a polite seaside postcard. It gives us something wider, saltier and more changeable.
What I love about this opening is that the sea is never just one thing. It glints, swells, darkens and recedes. You can almost feel the horizon shifting. There’s something wonderfully cooling about that, not because the music is especially calm, but because it reminds you of space. When the heat in a city starts to feel close and airless, this is the fantasy: not necessarily being on a beach with a towel and a melting ice cream, but standing somewhere with wind coming off the water and no buildings trapping the heat around you.
Jeux d’eau - Maurice Ravel
Ravel takes us somewhere smaller and more precise: a fountain. Jeux d’eau means ‘water games’ or ‘play of water’, and it is one of those pieces where the piano somehow stops behaving like a piano. It becomes liquid, glittering, splashing, catching the light. It’s not a grand seascape. It is water up close: droplets, ripples, spray, everything moving too quickly to hold.
Ravel apparently placed a quote from the poet Henri de Régnier at the top of the score: ‘River god laughing as the water tickles him.’ That feels exactly right. There is something mischievous about the piece, as if the water is enjoying itself at our expense. It’s virtuosic, yes, but not in a heavy way. More like watching light bounce off a fountain when you are too hot to think properly. It is the musical equivalent of standing just close enough to the spray to feel slightly human again.
The Oceanides - Jean Sibelius
Sibelius gives us water on a much larger and stranger scale. The Oceanides takes its title from Greek mythology: the Oceanids were sea nymphs, daughters of Oceanus, and the piece has that slightly uncanny feeling of a natural world that is alive, but not particularly interested in us. This is not the sea as a holiday destination. It is the sea as a force with its own private life.
The music begins with flickers and movements that seem to rise from nowhere, like glints on the surface of the water. Gradually, it gathers into something broader and more powerful, but Sibelius never makes it feel obvious or cinematic in a straightforward way. It is more mysterious than that. You sense waves, wind and depth, but also distance. After the sparkle of Ravel, this feels like the playlist looking out beyond the shore, towards water that cools you partly because it reminds you how small and temporary your own discomfort is. Which is admittedly a dramatic thought to have while sitting in a flat with the curtains closed, but here we are.
‘Silent Noon’ from The House of Life - Ralph Vaughan Williams
And finally, we move away from literal water into air. Vaughan Williams’ ‘Silent Noon’ is not a piece about the sea, a river or a fountain, but it absolutely belongs here. It is a song about stillness, heat, grass, silence and suspended time, setting a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The world it creates is not breezy exactly. In fact, part of the point is that everything seems to have stopped. But after all this water and movement, I love ending with a piece where the cooling comes from stillness.
There is something almost physical about the way this song holds the air. The vocal line opens out slowly, while the piano seems to shimmer beneath it, as if the whole landscape is too warm to move. And yet it never feels oppressive. It feels tender, spacious and quietly radiant, the kind of summer stillness that only becomes beautiful once you are no longer actively melting. If the rest of the playlist is water in motion, this is the moment afterwards: the room settling, the light softening, and the body finally remembering how to breathe.
I hope this brings at least the illusion of cooler air into your day. May your fans be effective, your curtains firmly shut, your watermelon properly cold, and your rooms slightly less oven-like by the time this reaches you.
As ever, I’d love to know what you’d add to the playlist. What’s your go-to piece of music when you need a bit of water, wind or breathing space?
Have a good weekend! x
Long drive today, so I’ll enjoy listening to these selections! Stay cool!