Ellen Reid composed wrote West Coast Sky Eternal – a paean to the Californian landscape – through a difficult pregnancy, and it reflects the grit she needed to write it.
An excerpt from our program for Pekka Kuusisto: Legends & Luminaries, written by Fiona Wright.
When Ellen Reid wrote West Coast Sky Eternal she was in the middle of one of the “most challenging physical experiences” of her life. Reid composed the piece while she was pregnant, a pregnancy that was “really rough”. She was sick all the time, for months on end; and was on the cusp of massive, unimaginable changes to her life and practice. “And I think,” she says, “you can hear that grit and struggle in the music.”
What strikes me most when Reid describes the piece – its opening vista of “a city from above”, its descent down to the human level of the street before a swoop back up and out to regain distance and perspective – is how her whole body becomes animated as she speaks. How her contained, serious-seeming self – she has an intense gaze, sits with her hands squarely folded – suddenly grows expansive, her arms thrown wide and her face alight.
West Coast Sky Eternal is a piece about a landscape, its sweeping beauty and the everyday struggle of the lives lived within it. It comes to rest, Reid says, somewhere where both of these contrasts can sit together, somewhere that isn’t simple, isn’t easy, but is all the more beautiful for it.
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Reid is well-known for the diversity of her composing practice. Her orchestral work sits alongside operas, films scores, choral pieces, avant-pop and sound design; she composes for concert halls, cinemas and open spaces. “I don’t like to do the same thing back-to-back,” she says and adds that having some distance from each newly-completed work helps her to “incorporate the learning” that comes with the creation of each piece, to “have access” to what she has discovered. “And,” she says, “it’s fun to change it up.”
I can’t help but suspect that this is only part of the reason for the breadth of Reid’s work, that part of her impulse to work across so many genres and forms comes from her student years. Reid grew up in a small city in Tennessee, one that she describes as a “science-centred place”. While her love of music was supported there – as a child she sang in the church choir, played in the school band and took piano lessons – when she arrived at university in New York City, she was suddenly surrounded by so many different kinds of music – concerts at Carnegie Hall, jazz clubs, experimental musicians in unusual spaces – that it was a revelation. She met many different traditions and practices all at the same formative time, and it “blew up the possibilities” of what music is and can be. It was, she says, “inspiration for days”, and it seems that this is working on her still.
It is a voice, Reid says, that connects all of her work together, across its extraordinary range. “A set of timbres,” she explains, “and different layers”, a “dimensionality” that she plays with within the different frames that each form offers. She says there are themes that recur across the various styles – but these she will not be drawn on.
I am certain that one of these is place. Reid is always aware, she says, of the space in which her work will be heard, always imagines being in the concert hall, feeling the physical dimensions of the music as it is played, the choreography and the performance, in order to find ways to “reach through and grab people”. Several of her more unusual projects are specifically place-based – most notably the long-running SOUNDWALK, in which Reid’s orchestral scores are geolocated to paths and sites across urban parks in the United States, Britain, Ireland and Japan. The path the listener takes dictates the music they will hear. One of the challenges of this project, Reid says, “was leaving space in the music for thinking”, to allow people to “experience the place with more sensitivity, more depth”.
The landscape at the heart of West Coast Sky Eternal is one that Reid loves – California with its views of water, its sweeping ocean cliffs, its long views over deserts and mountains. It is a place climatically similar to much of Australia, dotted too with eucalypts – “no one knows what they’re doing there” – and bougainvillea, and it is, Reid says, “really wonderful” that the piece will have a continued life in this new place.
What’s remarkable, Reid says, is that everyone experiences a piece of music differently. When listening to music, each person embarks on “their own psychological journey”, following their own thoughts, emotions and memories for which the music is only a trigger point. A composer cannot dictate a meaning, she says. What they offer instead “is an invitation to feel something”.
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Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her first book, Small Acts of Disappearance, won the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Non Fiction. Her poetry collection Domestic Interior was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and her essay collection The World Was Whole was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Her most recent book is the novel Kill Your Boomers (2026).
What strikes me most when Reid describes the piece – its opening vista of “a city from above”, its descent down to the human level of the street before a swoop back up and out to regain distance and perspective – is how her whole body becomes animated as she speaks. How her contained, serious-seeming self – she has an intense gaze, sits with her hands squarely folded – suddenly grows expansive, her arms thrown wide and her face alight.
West Coast Sky Eternal is a piece about a landscape, its sweeping beauty and the everyday struggle of the lives lived within it. It comes to rest, Reid says, somewhere where both of these contrasts can sit together, somewhere that isn’t simple, isn’t easy, but is all the more beautiful for it.
*
Reid is well-known for the diversity of her composing practice. Her orchestral work sits alongside operas, films scores, choral pieces, avant-pop and sound design; she composes for concert halls, cinemas and open spaces. “I don’t like to do the same thing back-to-back,” she says and adds that having some distance from each newly-completed work helps her to “incorporate the learning” that comes with the creation of each piece, to “have access” to what she has discovered. “And,” she says, “it’s fun to change it up.”
I can’t help but suspect that this is only part of the reason for the breadth of Reid’s work, that part of her impulse to work across so many genres and forms comes from her student years. Reid grew up in a small city in Tennessee, one that she describes as a “science-centred place”. While her love of music was supported there – as a child she sang in the church choir, played in the school band and took piano lessons – when she arrived at university in New York City, she was suddenly surrounded by so many different kinds of music – concerts at Carnegie Hall, jazz clubs, experimental musicians in unusual spaces – that it was a revelation. She met many different traditions and practices all at the same formative time, and it “blew up the possibilities” of what music is and can be. It was, she says, “inspiration for days”, and it seems that this is working on her still.
It is a voice, Reid says, that connects all of her work together, across its extraordinary range. “A set of timbres,” she explains, “and different layers”, a “dimensionality” that she plays with within the different frames that each form offers. She says there are themes that recur across the various styles – but these she will not be drawn on.
I am certain that one of these is place. Reid is always aware, she says, of the space in which her work will be heard, always imagines being in the concert hall, feeling the physical dimensions of the music as it is played, the choreography and the performance, in order to find ways to “reach through and grab people”. Several of her more unusual projects are specifically place-based – most notably the long-running SOUNDWALK, in which Reid’s orchestral scores are geolocated to paths and sites across urban parks in the United States, Britain, Ireland and Japan. The path the listener takes dictates the music they will hear. One of the challenges of this project, Reid says, “was leaving space in the music for thinking”, to allow people to “experience the place with more sensitivity, more depth”.
The landscape at the heart of West Coast Sky Eternal is one that Reid loves – California with its views of water, its sweeping ocean cliffs, its long views over deserts and mountains. It is a place climatically similar to much of Australia, dotted too with eucalypts – “no one knows what they’re doing there” – and bougainvillea, and it is, Reid says, “really wonderful” that the piece will have a continued life in this new place.
What’s remarkable, Reid says, is that everyone experiences a piece of music differently. When listening to music, each person embarks on “their own psychological journey”, following their own thoughts, emotions and memories for which the music is only a trigger point. A composer cannot dictate a meaning, she says. What they offer instead “is an invitation to feel something”.
-
Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her first book, Small Acts of Disappearance, won the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Non Fiction. Her poetry collection Domestic Interior was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and her essay collection The World Was Whole was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Her most recent book is the novel Kill Your Boomers (2026).
