Ode to the Sun (2017)

Written for SSAA choir and organ in 2017. Commissioned and premiered by Vox Musica under the direction of Daniel Paulson. Set to poetry by Scott Christopher Mehner. Live visuals by Chris Wood.

Ode to the Sun is found in Mehner’s recent publication, Illustrated Poems, which is a collection of his poetry that has been illustrated by twenty other artists and calligraphers from all around the globe.

Ode to the Sun by Scott Mehner:

Oh you to whom the world still turns
For guidance through dark treacherous time,
Sole beacon of the wayward soul of man:
My heart by your example learns
The lessons of true love, and burns
In harmony with th’ stars in heavens span.
In accents artfully sublime
My kindred spirit kindly yearns
To eternize you in immortal rhyme.

With dawn forever at your feet
And sunset hard upon your heels,
Like to a honeybee in Jove’s sky flower,
You dwell in your own nectar sweet 
While Mother Nature, held in heat,
Your children bears in her own homemade bower;
For your lifeblood divinely steals 
Through every heart that ever beat.
Before your grace each star, all barren, kneels.

You gild the ashen moon and dye
The downy clouds fair rosy hues
And dry the dewy tears which strew the morn.
The hardest heart dare not deny
The loving kindness you apply
That breathes new life into the dead reborn.
Your luster you shall never lose;
Your praise shall saturate the sky:
Enshrined you’ll shine, the green Earth’s golden muse.

The sun gives us all life on earth, but it also holds a fearsome power. It is the delicate balance that earth’s life forms keep with this behemoth that make our planet just barely habitable. The physical traits of the sun inspire how I set Mehner’s text. In the past, I had sort of loosely pictured an enormous ball of fire when I thought of the sun, and all other stars, but in researching what stars actually are, I found that their actual make-up is so much more complex and awesome. Stars are formed of rivers of plasma so large that they form their own magnetic fields, which are constantly exploding from the surface of the sun. I imagined these plasma rivers as intercrossing glissandi, and the explosions of magnetic fields as pulses of volume on wide stretching sonorities.