Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

Perhaps surprisingly for a piece with 'the sun' in its title, much of The true ceremony of the sun is a nocturnal piece, and this apparent paradox sets up a series of oppositional cycles - night and day, winter and summer, life and death - that animate the work and its form.

The title of the piece comes from the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown's description of a famous Neolithic burial chamber, Maeshowe, on the Orkney Islands, north of mainland Scotland. This underground ceremonial chamber is oriented such that it captures the light of the sun on the winter solstice - providing numinous illumination of the dark chamber at the darkest time of the year. Although never stated explicitly, Mackay Brown's point is that the true ceremony of the sun is the finding of light in darkness.

The subtitles of the three movements are all drawn from Mackay Brown's writing or writing about the ceremonial chamber. To begin, we descend - into the tomb, but also into night, winter, darkness, and beyond. In the middle movement, the so-called 'doorway to another world' opens, as - like a flame - light fills the darkness, and finally, in the last movement (the emotional core of the piece) we return to the night transformed by the light.

The piece unfolds as a series of cycles within cycles. The first and last movements are more connected to one another than the middle, and all three movements unfold in three parts, so that we are perpetually in motion, always returning to the beginning again.

Work Details

Year: 2024

Duration: 15 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Dedication note: Dedicated to Flinders Quartet

Commission note: Commissioned by Flinders Quartet.. Commissioned and premiered as part of the 'Ascend' program.

First performance: by Flinders Quartet — 30 Nov 24. Ian Potter Centre for the Performing Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC