What did people do before the invention of motion pictures to visualize the devastations wrought by natural disasters? From God’s fury on earth manifested in hurricanes and fires to the final cataclysm of the Last Judgment, musicians were long charged with conjuring vivid of tableaux of death and destruction. Nowadays we often witness on television catastrophic events unfolding in real time. Before the advent of instantaneous mass media, newspapers could describe events and disseminate information soon after the fact, but the job of evoking visceral reactions to earthquakes, typhoons, and tidal waves was left to the preacher and the composer.
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