Have you ever stood at a window just to watch the snow fall?
Apparently Claude Debussy’s young daughter loved to watch snowflakes dance as they fell, and in her honor, in “Children’s Corner Suite," he captured the image in the piano piece he called “The Snow is Dancing.”
He created the effect with swirling staccato notes with strange accents and rhythms.
In fact, in one place, the right hand plays triplets while the left is playing sixteenth notes.
Debussy was so right about snowflakes dancing.
Technically, a snowflake can fall at speeds approaching 9 mph, but as they float and swirl, their speed is closer to 1.5 mph, or 1-6 feet per second.
Large flat flakes can act like parachutes, and they tend to drift more slowly than needles or snow pellets.
But assuming the crystals develop in clouds above 10,000 feet in elevation, it usually takes a flake between 45 minutes and an hour to reach the ground.
There is a lot of turbulent air up there so flakes are often swept into updrafts.
The odds are great that during their descent, each flake will experience countless collisions - sometimes their arms are broken off, and in other circumstances during their arduous trip, colliding snowflakes get bigger.
Some flakes contain as many as 200 snow crystals by the time they land.
So if, like Debussy’s daughter, you watch snowflakes, you will see that they don’t plummet, but drift and dance.
But now it is March, and yet winter is not over.
We know that someday, maybe this month … or not … like in Debussy’s music, the snow will abruptly end.
And then, and it won’t be too soon for me, we can exchange dancing snowflakes for the "Waltz of the Flowers."
