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Dark Sun - August, 1945 (1995) |
large amateur chorus - 20'
in memoriam: the victims and survivors of our nuclear ageCommission: Contemporary Music Making for Amateurs with funds provided by the Arts Council of England. First performance: 11 August, 1995, Bretton Hall College, Yorkshire, UK, during the 50th anniversary week of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The COMA Summer Music School Orchestra and Chorus, Stephen Montague, conductor. On Monday, August 6, 1945 a single American B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. It detonated at 09:15:15, nine hundred meters above the city instantly incinerating 78,150 of the 240,000 inhabitants (including 23 American prisoners of war). Over 70,000 additional inhabitants were critically burned and gravely injured.Dark Sun is a threnody for this tragic event, its victims and survivors of our nuclear age. The recordings you will hear nested in the orchestral textures are from radio broadcasts of the period. At one point in the work individual members of the orchestra create a collage of music which might have been played somewhere in the world on the 6 August, 1945. The radio to your right is a Japanese propaganda station featuring "The Zero Hour" with Tokyo Rose as she was known to the Allied soldiers. Her mission was to make the Allies homesick with popular music of the day and stories from "back home". The central radio is the BBC with broadcasts from the war in the Pacific, ending with a RAF observer's rather detached account of the atomic bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki. The radio station to your left plays an American children's programme called "Terry and the Pirates" set against a backdrop of the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s. All these, however, are used only as audio textures for the larger sonic fabric- a distant echo, crackling and resonating from a dark period of the world at war. Dark Sun was commissioned by Contemporary Music Making for Amateurs (COMA) with funds provided by the Arts Council of England. It is scored for a large orchestral and vocal ensemble of flexible instrumentation and varying individual performance standards. The work is dedicated to Chris Shurety, the Director of COMA.
© Stephen Montague