Music with open windows
On composer Cathy Milliken and her new work “why feather yellow” Music with open windows On composer Cathy Milliken and her new work “why feather yellow”

Oboist and composer Cathy Milliken has spent her career exploring what happens when the conventional boundaries of music-making are broken down. For the Berliner Philharmoniker, she has now written a new concerto for cor anglais and orchestra, which will be premiered in mid-September by Dominik Wollenweber and the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.

Milliken is not only a highly sought-after oboist and composer; she also develops new concert formats and experimental ways of making music. Making boundaries porous – between composition and improvisation, between musicians and audience – is one of the declared aims of her work.

Participation – active involvement – is central to Milliken’s thinking. “I began with questions: how can participation be shaped so that it moves seamlessly between listening and taking part, allowing everyone to participate, create, perform and listen? How do you create a work that makes people want to perform it together? And above all, how do you write a composition that remains open – with windows for improvisation, collaborative composition or unforeseen outcomes – while still holding everyone’s attention?”

It sounds like an experiment, like a challenge to conventional ways of creating and performing music. Milliken has never confined herself to the role of instrumentalist or composer. She is constantly exploring innovative formats, new media- and site-specific performances, and as-yet untested forms and models of musical collaboration.

Oboe studies, Ensemble Modern and her first compositions

Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1956, Cathy Milliken studied oboe and piano at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music before moving to Europe to continue her training with Heinz Holliger in Freiburg. This also brought her into the world of contemporary music, and in 1980 she became a founding member of Ensemble Modern – then one of the very few ensembles devoted exclusively to new music. There she worked with many of the leading composers of the time, including György Ligeti, Helmut Lachenmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Frank Zappa, and gave numerous world premieres with the ensemble.

Milliken began composing her own works in 1995, most of them experimental in character. They included music theatre, works for radio and instrumental music with live electronics or tape. While still a member of Ensemble Modern, in 2005 she took over the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Education Programme, established by the orchestra’s then chief conductor, Sir Simon Rattle. In this role, she developed numerous pioneering music education projects. “In the education projects, we often worked on inventing music. And it’s remarkable how completely young people can turn things around. If you ask them, for example, to produce the opposite of a beautiful sound, they can find that just as beautiful as the beautiful sound itself. It’s this freedom to invent and listen to sounds without preconceptions that I almost envy them.”

Sharing music, time and again

Milliken, with her understanding of music as an open process of shared experience and composition as a living part of social reality, was ideally suited to her role at the Berliner Philharmoniker, where she led the Education Programme until 2012. “As a composer, I enjoy the challenge of creating something collectively, of exploring musical outcomes together,” she says. “It also means sharing authorship and enabling democratic relationships – and taking pleasure in devising different approaches and new formats.”

One example is Night Shift (2021), based on William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which playfully brings together the audience, an amateur choir and an instrumental ensemble. “Audience participation includes improvising with musical instruments, using the voice and taking part theatrically, as well as responding to creative writing prompts,” Milliken explains. “Sometimes the audience interacts with the amateur choir, sometimes with the musicians, and sometimes it takes on an independent role.”

In Earth Plays, Milliken takes audiences to sites resonant with human history, such as Iceland’s legendary assembly site of Thingvellir or the ancient Greek theatre of Epidaurus. “These are two very special places where people have created something together as a community,” she says.

A cor anglais concerto: “why feather yellow”

Milliken, who has lived in Berlin for many years, has now written a comparatively traditional concerto for cor anglais and orchestra, commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation. Sir Simon Rattle conducts the world premiere on 17 September, with Dominik Wollenweber as soloist. For Wollenweber, the new work is particularly welcome given the instrument’s limited solo repertoire. “There are very few genuine solo concertos for cor anglais,” he says. “There simply isn’t a huge repertoire to draw on. All the good pieces have been written in the last 30 years, so I’m always interested in new works. I was immediately excited by the idea of Cathy writing something for me. In a very short time, she has established an outstanding reputation as a composer.”

Milliken and Wollenweber first got to know each other while she was head of the Education Programme. “I’ve known Cathy for a long time as an outstanding oboist and specialist in contemporary music,” says Wollenweber. “Apart from the fact that we like each other, what connects us above all is our shared instrument.” And what Milliken asks of the cor anglais in why feather yellow plays very much to Wollenweber’s strengths. “What I particularly value in her new piece is its sensuous, lyrical quality. It brings out the strengths of my instrument. The cor anglais is, after all, essentially a melodic instrument, and that comes through beautifully in the new concerto.”