By The Landlord
“Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.” – Thomas de Quincey
“A sunset is the sun’s fiery kiss to the night.” – Crystal Woods
“There is nothing is more musical than a sunset.” – Claude Debussy
“Don’t forget: Beautiful sunsets need cloudy skies.” – Paul Coelho
“The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past.” – William Shakespeare. Richard II
"What could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets?" – John Glenn
With the gradual stirring of crepuscular life, and lengthening, vespertine shadows, the extent of late, lingering light always feels a little strange at this time of year. Or at least if you're in the north and western hemispheres. Perhaps the sheer speed of sunset inversely seems surprising much further south and on the other side of world. But here at least, just over the yardarm of the solstice, the sun lingers long, and after it, come gradual periods of twilight, a time of adjustment, preparation, being half indoors, half out, with mixed emotions, or clinging on to catch final refracted light of the day. So this week seems like the perfect time to capture such moments, sights, and feelings through the lens of song.
In the distant past the sun has been touched on previously as a topic, and three years ago, the evening itself, which resulted in these radiant playlists by the much missed regular to this establishment, philipphilip99, whose personal sunset tragically arrived a couple of years ago.
But this time our topic is about that interim period between day and evening.
Sunsets are often seen as beautiful, but they can also represent melancholy, a sense of an ending, a metaphor of foreboding, dread, or even death, but also relief, as well as wonder and excitement. A sliding indicator of clock, there's a delicious ambiguity about the time of twilight, an otherworldly period after burning skies moving into shadow and tricks of the light.
So what does sunset summon up for you in song? From gentle, poetic folk borne from ancient evenings, to the loud glamour of Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, and everything in between?
Sunset is defined as the disappearance of the sun below the horizon caused by Earth's rotation, visible all year round unless you life close to the poles in winter, where they can be continuous darkness, or summer, where there's almost no sunset at all. The light changes due to atmospheric refraction causing distortion, especially when the solar disk is halfway below the horizon, and enhanced by breaking through cloud cover into various colours.
Sunsets appear of course different on other planets. On Mars, for example, due to a further distance in the solar system, the sun looks smaller but lingers far longer, and can appear bluish in colour with the Martian atmosphere thinner than that of Earth, and lacking oxygen and nitrogen, although the planet's red dust can also affect the solar appearance.
The strange cold, bluish light and tiny look of a Martian sunset …
But then comes twilight, scientifically categorised into three rather poetical stages. Civil twilight comes just after the sun has disappeared below the horizon until it descends 6 degrees below. Nautical twilight arrives between 6 and 12 degrees below the horizon, and finally astronomical twilight, between 12 and 18 degrees below, before the onset of darkness.
No wonder then that this twilight period has inspired metaphors of otherworldliness, of change, or parallel worlds, inspiring a certain psychological supernatural TV series and its spooky music by The Monterey Radio and TV Philharmonic Orchestra:
The installation artist James Turrell's entire career is inspired by the changing of light at such a key time of day: "We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it," he explains, and tricks of the light play with our perceptions in his Colorado and other spaces where visitors can experience profound changes as the sun sets, as seen for example in his Green Mountain Falls Skyspace:
Two contrasting colour changes in James Turrell’s Green Mountain Falls Skyspace
The refraction of light also plays a key part in the brutal beauty and melancholy of John Steinbeck's Depression era dustbowl classic, The Grapes of Wrath:
“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
This time of the day is also captured across the ocean in Herman Melville's Moby Dick:
"An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea."
Sunsets are among biggest inspirational images for poets and lyricists. They bring a wide variety of emotions from despair to hope, a sense of farewell to renewal, and they are always unique. "There's never one sunrise the same or one sunset the same," remarks Carlos Santana.
Bali impressionism
“Yet my soul is an empty carousel at sunset,” announces Pablo Neruda.
“Bring me the sunset in a cup,” replies Emily Dickinson.
“Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn,” adds Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow now tries outdo his fellow writers gathering in the Bar today.
“Nature paints not;
In oils, but frescoes the great dome of heaven;
With sunsets, and the lovely forms of clouds;
And flying vapors.” .
But others are more prosaic about sunsets. Oscar Wilde for instance, mischievously tells us they are something of a cliché: "Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on," he snorts, dismissively.
John Milton meanwhile captures sunset is pretty down-to-earth terms:
“Come to the sunset tree!
The day is past and gone;
The woodman's axe lies free,
And the reaper's work is done.”
Ogden Nash kills the romance of the sunset somewhat with a bit of doggerel about a certain famous Italian explorer:
"So Columbus said, somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it,
And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it,
And the fetters gave him welts,
And they named America after somebody else."
Marcel Proust's perspective on sunsets is as changeable as the light itself:
"I have a horror of sunsets, they're so romantic, so operatic. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art."
And yet also comes this from Swann's Way, also capturing a a spectrum of emotions like the dying of the light.
“... the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate. more human - filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight…”
Blazing skies
So sunsets can be as profound as they can be vulnerable to cliche. Playing on both, here’s a mischievous farewell ending in the Mel Brook’s brilliant 1974 satirical western Blazing Saddles starring Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder:
So then, what will your perspective on sunset and twilight summon up musically? Capturing all of these views, we welcome back to our pub garden viewing platform the all-seeing and hearing Shiv Sidecar! Please place your songs in comments below until the deadline sun sets on Monday at 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week. It'll all come to light ...
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