William Barton joins the Australian Youth Orchestra and conductor David Robertson for an international tour of Peter Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry in July 2025, taking the 11-minute work to the Musikverein, Der Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, Rheingau Festival, Het Concertgebouw, and finally the Sydney Opera House for a homecoming performance.
A seminal work of the Australian orchestral repertoire, Earth Cry was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Company for the Adelaide Festival in 1986 and premiered by the Adelaide Symphony. It represents Sculthorpe’s attempt to reckon with the breadth of the Australian landscape – physical and cultural – and “attune ourselves to this continent, to listen to the cry of the earth, as the Aborigines have done for many thousands of years”, which he felt languished underacknowledged in the Australian imagination of the moment.
This approach is reflected in the work’s orchestration, which represented a departure for Sculthorpe, with the violins scored in unison and lower strings joined with their counterparts in the brass, to suggest the continent’s vast, open geography. As with many of Sculthorpe’s works, it draws on indigenous music, including his own setting of Aboriginal poetry The Song of Tailitnama from 1974, and of course the part for didjeridu. The four parts of the piece consist of quick ritualistic music framed by slower music of a supplicatory nature, and an extended coda, capturing the raw beatify of the landscape with drones, vibrant rhythms, and sounds of nature. It has been recorded by both the Sydney Symphony and Queensland Symphony orchestras.
William Barton, Australia’s leading didjeridu player, has played an integral in the creation of many of Sculthorpe’s works, having given over 200 performances of his work to date. As well as presenting the didjeridu part for Earth Cry (in both full and abridged versions) with major Australian orchestras (most recently with the Melbourne Symphony in 2024), he has performed the piece internationally with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Strasbourg, the Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava, and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. As well as championing Earth Cry, Barton premiered Sculthorpe’s Beethoven Variations (2006), Songs of Sea and Sky (2003) and String Quartet No.14 with the Goldner String Quartet at the 2005 Australian Festival of Chamber Music.
Sculthorpe’s music has been a mainstay of the Australian Youth Orchestra’s repertoire since the 1990s, touring works such as Kakadu, Port Essington and Sun Music II to Carnegie Hall, the Edinburgh International Festival, and Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. In 1988 they premiered Child of Australia with the Sydney Philharmonia Choir – a 17-minute work with for soprano, speaker, orchestra and chorus with a text by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally commissioned by the Festival of Sydney to celebrate the nation’s bicentenary.