The Fall Of The House Of Usher: Intermezzo - 1987 Remix

"The Fall Of The House Of Usher" is one of two instrumental songs on The Alan Parsons Project's debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (the other being "A Dream Within A Dream"). It's a musical suite composed of five parts and fills up most of the album's second side. Running over 15 minutes long (the exact length fluctuates by a few seconds depending on the release), it includes "Prelude," "Arrival," "Interemezzo," "Pavane," and "Fall." Like all the songs on the album, it's based on a short story by American horror-genre pioneer Edgar Allan Poe. Written in 1839 and also titled The Fall Of The House Of Usher, the story is about Roderick Usher, a man dying of an unknown illness. His physical and mental degeneration is paralleled by the crumbling of his house, which might or not be supernaturally alive (we're never sure if Usher is simply going insane). Usher plays and writes music, but he's highly sensitive to sound and can only tolerate a narrow range of stringed instruments. In a 1976 interview with Fred Dellar and New Musical Express, Parsons explained that The Project wrote the song to be listened to while reading Poe's story: "If you read the story while listening to the music then it's quite a revelation." He further stated that the concluding "Fall" section of the song "is supposed to represent that stringed instrument thing. It's all Hungarian and Greek stringed instruments."

This is the only song on Tales of Mystery and Imagination written by Andrew Powell, Alan Parsons, and Eric Woolfson. All others are credited to just Parsons and Woolfson. Powell arranged and conducted the orchestra for the song.

Parsons remixed Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 1987 and added two monologues from Welles, one of which precedes this song. Welles seems to have composed it from Poe's Poems of Youth and his essay titled Marginalia. In the monologue, Welles states that music combined with a worthwhile idea is poetry, whereas music without such an idea is "simply music." He then muses about the importance of music in human life, stating, "Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallor, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are for but for a moment motionless."