In 1965 Peter Sculthorpe’s Sun Music I premiered with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Hopkins, as part of the Commonwealth Arts Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The 10-minute piece would give rise, over the following years, to the 44-minute Sun Music cycle – an orchestral landmark that defined Australian music in the sixty years since its premiere.

Sun Music I sees dense string clusters – hinting at the influence of orchestral techniques developed by Penderecki – swirl alongside murky, atavistic writing for brass and percussion in an orchestra shorn of woodwinds. Its landscape is harsh and forbidding – a stark Australian pastoral that attests the punishing as well as dazzling power of the Outback sun. The impression of an impersonal vista devoid of human intervention, setting aside ideas of the self, is quintessential Sculthorpe.

In 1963 Sculthorpe began teaching courses on Asian music at the University of Sydney, developing his fascination with both Balinese music and Japanese traditional music; indeed, the use of percussion in Sun Music I is suggestive of the drumming that features in Noh theatre.

The set articulated the growing importance of non-European musical traditions as a source of inspiration for Sculthorpe, and set out the geographic and cultural breadth of his frame of reference. Sun Music II is subtitled ‘Ketjak’, named for a Balinese circular dance which evolves from the vocal and rhythmic accompaniment to the trance-ritual sanghyang, and Sculthorpe’s percussion writing is again highly suggestive of Balinese traditional music. It was created, fittingly, as additional material for Robert Helpmann’s staging of Sun Music for The Australian Ballet in 1968, and first performed as a standalone work by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1969. Sun Music IV (1967) would evoke the landscape and history of Central America, lying under the Mexican sun and in the shadow of the temples of Teotihuacan.

Sun Music III (1966-67), the most radical of the set, represented an important advancement in both Sculthorpe’s compositional language and the imagination of modern Australian classical music. He wrote the 13-minute work in a wintry upstate New York and was drawn to imagine the warm sun of Bali, as well as 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 II was taken up in May 2022 by the Melbourne Symphony and Graham Abbott, and Sun Music III by the Bendigo Symphony and Luke Severn in March 2024. In June 2025 it will receive two performances from the Philharmonische Orchester Regensburg and Tom Woods.