On 7 March Simone Young conducts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Peter Sculthorpe’s Sun Music III at the Sydney Opera House. Young made her debut with the orchestra thirty years ago with Sculthorpe’s 13-minute work. The March concert marking three decades of collaboration between orchestra and conductor.
The Sun Music cycle, consisting of four works composed between 1965 and 1968, is among the landmark works of Australian orchestral writing. The Sydney Symphony were the first orchestra to perform the 44-minute Sun Music as a standalone work in 1969, following the scenic debut of the work in 1968 in the form of a dance work by Robert Helpmann. The cycle give expression to Australia’s stark yeast beautiful landscape and climate. It also draws together Sculthorpe’s interest in experimental techniques from the European avant-garde and his studies in the traditional music from across Asia, which he began to teach at the University of Sydney in the 1960s.
Sun Music III (1967) was the most radical of the set and represented an important advancement in both Sculthorpe’s compositional language. Written in a wintry upstate New York, Sculthorpe was drawn to imagine the warm sun of Bali and the sound of its Gamelan; Sculthorpe would later call it "the first work in which I really did something about my interest in Asian music” and would prove the blueprint for cultural syncretism of his subsequent music. Accordingly, the vibraphone, flute, and percussion play a leading role, suggesting the ensemble that accompanies the traditional shadow puppetry of Bali. Sculthorpe would again employ the string clusters of Sun Music I, but in a sweeter mode, suggesting a very different kind of sunlight.
The set would lend its title to Sculthorpe’s 1999 memoir, published by ABC Books, underlining its significance as one of the capstones of his musical career. The series would also give rise to a non-orchestral piece for voices and percussion also under the title Sun Music (1966). The 9-minute work has stark, ritualistic character, with metal percussion – cymbal, tam-tam, and gong – complemented by wordless utterances from the chorus and piano whose strings are struck with mallets. It was most recently performed in 2021 by the Sydney Philharmonic Choir by a massed chorus of 120 voices.
The Sun Music cycle was recorded in 2001 by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Porcelijn, and by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2011 with John Hopkins. Its constituent movements have received over 200 performances internationally over the years. Sun Music III has recently received performances from the Bendigo Symphony and Luke Severn in March 2024 and in June 2025 from the Philharmonische Orchester Regensburg and Tom Woods.