Music / CHAMBER / Lux Australis
Lux Australis
for STRING SEXTEt
Lux Australis ("southern light") is a suite of contemplations on the sun and the nature of light from a distinctly Australian perspective. Our sun is intense and unforgiving, providing unique challenges to those who live under it but also a striking beauty unseen in any other part of the world. It is in six movements:
I. Sunset
II. Mirror
III. Beams
IV. Shimmer
V. Pulse
VI. Sunrise
In a way, the musical language of the work traverses the old and the new, blending contemporary string techniques with open harmonies reminiscent of early music. The first and final movements, respectively titled Sunset and Sunrise, are expansive and textural. I aimed to capture a slowly evolving sense of awe in these movements, which unfold gradually over several minutes. They bookend the work, linking textures and melodic fragments while creating a kind of macro-gesture in which the overall harmonic language of the music moves from D minor to D major over twenty minutes as if traversing through darkness to light.
The four middle movements feature faster motion, focusing on various qualities of light as metaphors for interplay between the six musicians. The second movement, Mirror, features the two violinists in canon with one another while chords shift smoothly underneath, leading eventually to the ensemble breaking apart into energetic polyphony. Movement three, Beams, establishes a quick tempo in a regular violin pattern before duelling celli take turns with searing forward-moving flares. At the conclusion of this movement, flickering harmonics swell up and down like waves of light. Movement four, Shimmer, evolves gradually from silence and uses an effect, first heard in the violas, in which two lines are intertwined into a delicate filigree, mimicking the shimmering of light that might be visible on the reflection of a surface of water. The dimming close of this movement leads seamlessly into the fifth, Pulse, in which speed and intensity increase to a vigorous climax.
The entire work should be performed straight through without breaks, each movement leading seamlessly into the next.