Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

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Work Overview

Sky is a beautiful word. It suggests endlessness. One can sound it on a long breath too.

Iceland has beautiful high skies, their grey in greyness can be beautiful particularly when a lone bird, scarcely discernible at first, wings its way above silent fields. Australia has high skies too, infinite and intense, as also our winter sky, often ablaze with gold and pink. However Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet and philosopher, was interested in a sky that showed variety and uncertainty. "A sky dotted with small clouds is perhaps more pleasurable than a totally clear sky." we read in his notebook, the "Zibaldone". Rainer Maria Rilke turns to the sky in his poem "ah, not to be cut off" when he reflects "The inner-what is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds…" Locked away as we were during the last two years, it feels wonderful to look ahead, look up, look further. As in the beautiful and comforting Psalm number 121. "I to the hills will lift mine eyes…". Reference is also made to a Ukrainian Song known to us as the Carol of the Bells by Ukrainian composer Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych.

Catalogue of Sky remains a hopeful work, hopeful that the skies will again become peaceful for all.

Cathy Milliken - 2022

Work Details

Year: 2022

Duration: 8 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Commission note: Commissioned by Sydney Symphony Orchestra.. Commissioned by Sydney Symhony Orchestra's through its 50 Fanfares Project, supported by Gary Holmes and Anne Reeckmann.