Music for twilight

On Into the Music today we’re taking as our starting point a time of day—twilight. As day turns to night our thoughts turn to the larger issues than our daily lives. We hear the news and think about global conflict, about the quickly changing environment, about individual violences that beggar belief. Earlier this year the second Dark music festival in Hobart, also celebrated those liminal, in-between planetary shifts—particularly the solstice, when the Earth turns around on itself and begins the transition from winter to summer, from long nights to long days. The festival drew large crowds to Australia’s southernmost point, to take in a winter feast each night, with performances at midnight and dance parties til dawn. Inspired by the themes, Gretchen Miller talks with some of the performers in the festival—Diamanda Galas and Nick Tsiavos—on death and mourning. She speaks to academic Andrew Shenton about the soaring music of the world's most popular contemporary classical composer, Arvo Pärt, and she also speaks to composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood whose recordings of rivers document an ever changing environment, and immerse us in sound. We’ll hear compositions in music and in environmental sound, which help us meditate on things beyond the mundane, and connect us to the fate of the planet, and humankind.