'The night has its own laws of temporality': Laurence Osborn on his new cello concerto

On Wednesday 21 October at Cadogan Hall we'll be performing the premiere of composer Laurence Osborn's Sun Sundered Head: Nocturne for Cello and Orchestra. Written collaboratively with soloist Zlatomir Fung, the cello concerto sketches the span of a single night spent in a city, from dusk to dawn.

Read our interview with Laurence about his creative impulses that lie behind the work.

Where does the title Sun Sundered Head come from, and how does it inform the piece?

As well as being a cello concerto, Sun Sundered Head is an extended nocturne spanning a single night in an unnamed city, from dusk, to the dead of night, to dawn. The title derives from Martin Sorrell’s 2015 translation of the final line of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ (1912), a long-form poem in which an unnamed protagonist spends a night wandering and drinking in the streets of turn-of-the-century Paris. 

The original line from which ‘sun sundered head’ is translated, «soleil cou coupé», is almost untranslatable, because the image of the ‘decapitated sun’ appears in the form of the words: «coupé» is ‘cut’ at the ‘neck’ to become «cou». The image the line left in my mind – a deep-red, glowing semicircle peeping over the horizon, looking both beautiful and dreadful – feels important to the piece, both structurally and sonically.

You’ve described this concerto as ‘an extended nocturne that spans from dusk to dawn over a single movement.’ What attracted you to the idea of structuring a concerto around the experience of a single night?

I’ve always felt that, when experienced in its entirety, the passing of the night seems to have its own laws of temporality. Overnight, time seems to unfold from a point of maximum speed, until it reaches a point of nearly timeless stasis in the middle, before progressively increasing in momentum towards the arrival of the morning. Whatever it is you’re doing – partying, or working to meet a deadline, or spending the night with a partner, or passing a newborn baby back and forth – time passes in exactly the same way. 

Sun Sundered Head is structured as a sequence of interlocking sections in related tempi, that get progressively longer in duration and slower in tempo, until an extremely slow five-minute cadenza exactly halfway through the piece. After this halfway point, the process is reversed: the sections progressively shorten and speed up, using the same proportions of the first half in reverse. Here’s a picture of the structure to show you what I mean:

You wrote the concerto specifically for Zlatomir Fung and collaborated closely with him while composing it. How did his musicianship and personality influence the final shape of the piece

Zlatomir is a musician of extraordinary musicality, skill, and generosity, and it has been a tremendous privilege to work with him closely on this piece. The first time I heard him play was at Trinity College, Cambridge, during my time as Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts there. He was playing 19th-century repertoire: beautiful searching melodic lines that dug into the lower register in the instrument. When I learned that we were to work together on this concerto, I knew I wanted to begin and end the concerto with broad, sweeping lines like these. 

Once I’d written the first half of the concerto, Zlat and I spent three days in Cambridge working through the material together. I’d also brought along sketches for the second half involving material that I knew was likely to need Zlat’s practical feedback: techniques that push the left hand into unnatural shapes, fast sequences of harmonics, and so on. Working on this material compelled me to begin writing the cadenza, which I finished in first draft on the final morning. In the afternoon, I brought the handwritten draft to Zlat, and he played the music I’d written that morning straight off the manuscript paper. That was a really special moment.

This piece includes some unusual sounds – what should audiences be listening for that makes this piece unique?

One of the great things about the night, at least from a composing perspective, is that it offers up so many strange and beautiful sounds. In Sun Sundered Head, I had so much fun finding the right sounds for each section. Sometimes these were literal: for example, I intended the slow section beginning around six minutes in to sound like a serenade from an enormous orchestral mandolin. The first violins tremolando using plastic plectrums, while one of the percussionists uses milk-frothers on the bars of the marimba. Sometimes, these sounds work through analogy: when I wrote the string, percussion, and celesta music that accompanies the opening, for example, I was imagining lots of lamps, streetlights, and headlights blinking on one by one. 

As audiences hear Sun Sundered Head for the first time, what do you hope they take away from the experience of travelling through a musical night into the dawn?

An audience member hearing this piece for the first time could think about the city at night. The nocturnal city is held in constant tension between the ‘natural’ processes of the night – those relating to dark and light, sleep and wakefulness – and a constant flow of nighttime activity that works against these processes. This is something that I actively tried to capture in the music.