Sedna (2013)

The "planet":
Sedna is the most distant of the solar system objects to be discovered, three times farther than Pluto or Neptune. It takes Sedna 10,500 years to circle the sun once. Sedna was discovered in 2004. "It is the coldest most distant place known in the Solar System", said one of the scientist behind the discovery, "so we feel it is appropriate to name it in honour of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea, who is thought to live at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean."

The Inuit legend:
Sedna was a stunningly beautiful but also terribly vain, young girl who turned down all marriage proposals from local hunters until one day, a secretive and mysterious but seemingly wealthy stranger came along and she agreed to marry him. When the stranger turned out to be not a man but a grim raven in disguise and his home nothing but a bare island on the ocean, Sedna cried and cried to the sea and her father came in his boat to her rescue. But the raven, infuriated, followed their boat and flapping his wings called upon them a huge storm until her terrified father threw his daughter into the sea thinking only of saving his own life. Sedna still lives at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by seals and whales and it is her anger and fury against man that drums up the violent seas and storms. Therefore, the Inuit people have great respect for her and every now and then, a Shaman must swim down to her and comb her hair to appease her.

The composition:
Rather than following the story-line of the legend directly, I have tried to create a work which immerses the listener in a metaphysical soundscape of nature associating the arctic sea. One of the compositional technique is to use a harmonic universe derived from the spectral overtone series of mother nature. Also, throughout this piece I work with the element of the the wave in all sorts of musical ways. Sedna takes between 7 and 8 minutes and was composed to be performed either as a stand-alone piece or as extension of the Holst "Planets". It later also became a movement of my Third Symphony.

- Søren Nils Eichberg