Commissioned by Robert Bennesh and first performed by him on the organ of Lund Cathedral in Sweden, on the 16th of September, 2023. He requested a piece about the astronomical clock in the cathedral, to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the cathedral.. Dedicated to Robert Bennesh, and the 900th anniversary of Lund Cathedral.
‘You see the Magi, who derive their ancestry from Balaam observing…their novel star, which contrary to the nature of all other stars, alone partook of motion and rest.’ St. Gregory of Nyssa, c.335-395.
The quotations in the score are by anon, JB, Wycliffe, Lancelot Andrewes (from a sermon preached on the Nativity, 1622), and John H. Hopkins (1857).
The Lund Cathedral clock was first made around the 1420s, and is in three parts: the upper dial shows the solstices, the position of the sun and moon and the current astrological sign. The lower dial shows the calendar, with the saints’ days, and the signs of the zodiac. In the middle, Saint Mary is shown, seated on a throne, with the baby Jesus, and a star above her. Twice a day a mechanism starts and two heralds appear with their trumpets, and then the three Magi, each with a servant. They are accompanied by ‘In Dulci Jubilo’ played by an organ mechanism behind the clock.
The Magi are moving through time, through space, and in a special, liminal place that exists only in our imaginations. They themselves represent the three ages of Man, and carry symbolic gifts. Now they journey musically as well, and right through the piece In Dulci Jubilo appears in different forms: inverted, reversed, in a mirror image and only stated fully in the 4th movement. Each movement is one of the Solstices or Equinoxes as the Magi make their long journey following the star. There is, as on the clock, a fanfare before the Spring Equinox, and at the end, a postlude.
I was really influenced by Breughel’s paintings of the Adoration of the Magi. There, the otherness of the Magi, their foreignness, is placed in a surrounding of the ordinary. The baby recoils from them and from what their gifts predict.
