Poul Ruders

Gong

The word GONG is saturated with associations: the splendour of the Orient, mysticism, drama, loud metallic clangour, violent impact, etc. The present piece draws upon all those connotations, but it is primarily a symphonic drama about the life and behaviour of the sun, our closest star and prime source of life on Earth. Describing the sun in music is not a new idea, of course; during a visit to Greece, Carl Nielsen was inspired by the orbit of the sun and its very un-Danish ferocity and thus wrote the 'Helios Overture'. GONG is a 'Helios Overture' too, of sorts, albeit more abstract. Recent astronomical research shows, that the surface of the sun reverberates like a gong, in four different, simultaneous tempi (not directly depicted in the score, though); the sun looks like a GONG, - the O in the written work looks like the sun; there is even a solar research group called GONG (Global Oscillation Network Group). Formally the composition follows the life and fate of the sun, from the initial explotional birth through the hyper-activity as energy source as we know it today to the final, predicted flaring up and collapse into a so-called 'white dwarf'. But - being a musical composition, not an astrophysical thesis - GONG is brought to its compositional conclusion by a 'real concert-ending', a chord taken from the middle of the piece and sustained over several bars, from virtual nothingness to full force.