Composing With a Tropical Year

NOX LUX began with a deceptively simple question: what would happen if musical form were derived from the movement of the Earth rather than from traditional compositional structures?

Most music is organized around familiar frameworks. Songs are divided into verses and choruses. Classical works are organized into movements. Even many experimental works ultimately rely on structures inherited from earlier musical traditions. Marcos Lutyens and I became interested in the possibility of using a different organizing principle altogether—one rooted not in music history, but in astronomy.

The project grew out of conversations about cycles, perception, ritual, and the passage of time. We were particularly interested in the way human beings experience seasonal change. Although we often think of the year as a fixed calendar, our actual experience of time is deeply connected to shifting patterns of daylight and darkness. The length of a day changes almost imperceptibly from one sunrise to the next, yet over the course of months these small changes accumulate into profound transformations.

We began wondering whether those transformations could be translated into sound.

The resulting work uses the tropical year as its primary compositional framework. Rather than organizing the music around conventional musical sections, we mapped key points in the solar calendar—the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days—as structural markers. These events became less like dates and more like harmonic destinations.

The project eventually took shape as two complementary sides: LUX and NOX. LUX follows the gradual expansion of daylight from winter toward summer. NOX traces the return journey from light toward darkness. Together they form a complete cycle, not unlike an inhalation and exhalation.

As the concept evolved, frequency became another important component of the work. We became interested in creating a gradual movement between specific tonal centers across the seasonal arc. On one side of the cycle, frequencies slowly rise from approximately 396 Hz toward 528 Hz, paralleling the increasing duration of daylight. On the return journey, the process reverses.

What interested us was not the frequencies themselves so much as the idea of continuous transformation. The listener is unlikely to perceive a specific numerical value. What they may perceive, however, is a gradual change in energetic character. The music is always moving, but often so slowly that the movement becomes difficult to notice in real time.

In many ways, this mirrors the experience of seasonal change itself. No individual day announces the arrival of spring. No single sunset declares the beginning of winter. These transitions emerge through accumulation rather than event. The project attempts to operate according to a similar logic.

Throughout development, we also became increasingly interested in ritual. Historically, solstices and equinoxes have served not merely as astronomical observations but as moments of communal meaning. They mark thresholds between states. They create opportunities for reflection, celebration, mourning, preparation, and renewal.

While NOX LUX is not intended as a recreation of any specific ritual tradition, it is informed by this broader understanding of cyclical time. The music is designed less as a sequence of compositions and more as an environment through which the listener passes. The goal is not simply to hear the work, but to inhabit it.

This perspective became particularly important during live presentations of the project. Rather than treating performance as the delivery of a finished musical object, we began exploring ways of transforming listening into a shared experience. Processions, movement through space, changing light conditions, and collective attention all became part of the conversation. The audience was no longer positioned solely as observers. They became participants in a temporal event.

The title itself reflects this duality. Nox and Lux—night and light—are often understood as opposites. Yet the project gradually revealed something more subtle. Neither exists independently of the other. Each defines the other. Light contains the promise of darkness. Darkness contains the promise of light. The two are locked in a perpetual cycle of transformation.

This realization ultimately became the emotional center of the work.

Although the project incorporates mathematical relationships, astronomical data, and carefully constructed frequency systems, those elements serve a larger purpose. They provide a framework through which larger questions can be explored. How do we experience time? What does it mean to move through a cycle? How can sound alter our perception of duration, transition, and change?

I often think of NOX LUX less as an album and more as a clock. Not a clock that measures hours or minutes, but one that measures larger rhythms—the gradual expansion and contraction of light, the movement of seasons, and the continual transformation of the world around us.

The music does not attempt to stop those processes or represent them literally. Instead, it offers a way of listening alongside them.

For Marcos and me, that became the true subject of the project: not astronomy, not frequency, and not even music itself, but the experience of being situated within cycles far larger than our individual lives.