Cathy Milliken - a podcast by C Savage-Kroll and E Cheah

Cathy Milliken is an oboist, composer, and visionary educator who takes great joy in facilitating creativity and participation. She has won international recognition as a leading composer, creative director, performer and educational program consultant. She was a founding member of the Ensemble Modern Frankfurt.

As a composer, she has been commissioned by the Berliner Staatsoper, Donaueschinger Musiktage, South Bank Centre London, The Experimental Electronic Studio of Freiburg, Concerto Köln, and Musica Viva of Munich, to name just a few of many.

From 2005 – 2012, Cathy Milliken was Director of the Education Program of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Participatory compositional projects in recent years have taken her to South Africa, Japan, and Oman. She is part of the creative team for the Munich Biennale for Music Theatre and serves as an honorary member of advisory boards for the German Music Council and the Goethe Institute. Her collaborative composition Stadtlied (City Song) was premiered in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in 2019.

Elena last saw Cathy in October 2020 at the Radialsystem in Berlin, where her work Ode for All was premiered as part of a celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday. It was originally supposed to be a work for six female choirs from across Eastern Europe all composing and improvising their own odes to joy, and in the end, because of the pandemic, it became a video installation featuring the soloists of those choirs, which was very moving.

In this episode, we talk about:

• How the pandemic influenced her listening and creating


• Working with female choirs from Eastern Europe in her project Ode for All


• Meeting in Istanbul (watch the video)


• “Improvisers” vs. “readers”


• Bringing very different people together to create new synergies


• How she got into facilitating composition


• Her book Zukunft@Bphil


• How the design of a project should be like a composition


• Planning a project the way you would plan a party to make everyone feel welcome and valuable: have a structure and then throw it away if necessary


• The importance of having enough time in order to transport people out of their everyday


• How improvising helps all performers, even if it’s only playing in your own room


• The importance of good friends to help pick you up if a concert didn’t go so well, and of people who challenge you


• Knowing the difference between challenging and destructive


• Prejudice, intentional or not, against female composers


• Switching from creator to performer

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