Chamaeleon
Chameleon
Swarming
Compared with the northern sky, the southern sky contains considerably fewer conspicuous constellations, making it more difficult to become familiar with them. The star groupings visible to the naked eye (such as the magnificent band of stars beneath Canis Major) have been assigned different names by astronomers. As a result, similar musical motifs appear in several different parts of the cycle, while each individual piece contains a wide variety of moods. The music is impressionistic.
Both telescopic observations (such as the open clusters in Centaurus and Tucana, and the Jewel Box Cluster in Crux) and naked-eye observations (including the Coalsack in Crux and the Magellanic Clouds) have served as the basis for composing this cycle. Rather than depicting apparent constellations, the cycle reflects the regions of the sky as defined by astronomers. — Urmas Sisask
The text above is Urmas Sisask's preface to Starry Sky Cycle: Southern Sky.
The image shows the trails of stars around the South Celestial Pole, photographed over an 11-hour period in Namibia (southwestern Africa). (Photo by astronomer Josch Hambsch.)
Now let us continue our journey into the southern sky.
Many of the southern constellations are named after machines and scientific instruments invented during the Age of Exploration, as well as after things unfamiliar to Europeans at the time, such as Table Mountain in South Africa, the bird-of-paradise of New Guinea, the peacock of India, the toucan of South America, with its remarkably large bill, and the chameleon.
Starry Sky Cycle – Southern Sky was begun in 1993, six years after the composition of Northern Sky, Op. 10, and was completed in 1995.
Sisask not only travelled to Sydney, Australia, to observe the southern sky firsthand, but also met Aboriginal Australians and experienced their mythical world of the Dreamtime—their stories of the origin of life, the creation of the world, and the afterlife. Drawing inspiration from The Dreamtime: Australian Aboriginal Myths (1990), with paintings by Ainslie Roberts and text by the Australian anthropologist Charles P. Mountford (1890–1976), he went on to write the accompanying stories himself.
Starry Sky Cycle – Southern Sky begins with Chamaeleon.
In the image above, the ➕ South Celestial Pole, slightly to the lower right, marks the south celestial pole. There is no bright star marking the south celestial pole—that is, there is no southern counterpart to Polaris. Unfortunately, the outline of the constellation Chamaeleon is not shown in this image, but the constellation itself can be seen slightly above and to the right of the south celestial pole, behind the silhouette of the grass.
The Chameleon's Dark Nebulae
Chamaeleon has no bright stars and is inconspicuous, rather like a chameleon concealing itself through camouflage. The image above shows a group of dark nebulae, and Chamaeleon lies hidden among the gaps in these clouds of cosmic dust. Take a close look at Sisask’s own drawing of Chamaeleon (below) and see if you can find it.
This is NGC 3195, a planetary nebula in the constellation Chamaeleon, which is also marked on Sisask’s hand-drawn constellation chart in the first edition of the score. Its apparent size is roughly comparable to that of Jupiter, and it can reportedly be seen through a medium-sized telescope, so Sisask himself must surely have observed it.
Sisask’s image for Chamaeleon is “Swarming.” Even in this region where nebulae and dust seem to swarm, we were able to identify the constellation by its colors and shapes.
To understand Sisask’s music for Chamaeleon, however, we must first begin with the following story.
In 1987, the year Starry Sky Cycle – Northern Sky was completed, Sisask discovered what he called the “Planet Scale”—C♯–D–F♯–G♯–A—through his analysis of the motions of the planets in the Solar System. By coincidence, this scale corresponded to a Japanese pentatonic scale, and he soon used it in one of his best-known sacred works, Gloria Patri (1988).
In Starry Sky Cycle – Southern Sky, Sisask uses not only this “Planet Scale” but also his own distinctive pitch sequences, whose arrangement resembles that of the harmonic series. I also discovered that each constellation has a fundamental pitch—which I think of as its “governing pitch”—and that these pitches reflect the relative positions of the constellations and create a broad cyclical movement through the southern sky.
This may explain why the music of Chamaeleon feels particularly familiar to Japanese listeners: it uses the Planet Scale, which corresponds to a Japanese pentatonic scale. The image of “Swarming” can also be felt in the way the notes tumble and spread through broken chords, rapid triplets, and arpeggios.
Although Chamaeleon is a small constellation, the music builds to a climax of fff and is substantial in length, so it might also be thought of as a prologue to Starry Sky Cycle – Southern Sky as a whole. I would like to perform it with a sense of grandeur, imagining the trails of stars appearing to circle around Chamaeleon, close to the south celestial pole.
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