The Year Without Summer

In 1816, a year after the eruption of Mount Tambora, the northern hemisphere had no summer. Crops failed, the sky was coloured strangely for months, and a group of writers shut indoors by the rain invented the modern ghost story. The Year Without Summer, a four-minute piece for orchestra written for the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in 2021, takes that season as its image.

The orchestra is asked to behave like weather that has forgotten how to warm. Sustained string clusters lie over the hall like low cloud; woodwind and brass breathe through their instruments without pitch; a rhythm tries to start several times in the percussion and is each time dispersed. When a melody does arrive it is in the wrong register — high, thin, and cold — and it does not develop but simply hangs there, the way light hangs in a year without sun.

The piece was written during the second pandemic winter, when the world had its own year without summer, and was premiered on 4 February 2021 by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra under Wim Henderickx.