St Andrew’s Cathedral School

2008 Music Tour

It is an honour to bring greetings to you from the 1300 students and staff of St Andrew's Cathedral School, which is located in the very centre of Australia’s largest and most beautiful city.

Our students are very proud to represent their School in Europe, in the very places where the great composers lived and worked. For many months we have been in rehearsal to prepare for this tour and we thank you for your support in attending our concert.

We are a young people and we come from a young nation. We enjoy a warm and temperate climate under the southern sun that draws everyone outdoors. Sydney is a city beside the sea and homes of all those on our touring party lie between the plunging gorges of the Blue Mountains to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east. We are coastal dwellers and our city is built from the honey coloured sandstone of the early colonial days and from the glass and steel of the modern era. Our school operates in two high rise tower buildings that are beside the first Cathedral in Australia.

We are a new people but our land, Australia, is old and it is vast. Our land stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean, from the South East Asian peninsula to the wild Southern Ocean and the Antarctic. We have the oldest continuously surviving indigenous culture on the planet. For more than 40,000 years the culture of the Aboriginal people of Australia was undisturbed by foreign settlers. There has been so much to learn over the past two centuries and our history has not always been easy. Yet our young people stand ready to build a new future based on mutual respect and acceptance.

You will sense these influences in the programmes during our concerts. They will hear powerful European heritage and traditions that gave birth to the modern Australian nation. They will hear the fresh and new sounds of contemporary Australian composers and musicians. And they will hear the hauntingly beautiful echoes of our ancient indigenous cultures. These sounds create images of the Australian landscape – the incredible beauty of the inland deserts and the endless motion of the sea.

We deeply appreciate the kindness of our host venues on this tour. Thank you so much to all of you who have come to hear us play. We are so honoured to perform in such beautiful places and although we are so far from home, we have been made feel very welcome everywhere we have gone.

Click here to view the Tour itinerary.

Read the Tour Logs below, written by the Assistant Tour Coordinator, Leo Grey.

sacs.nsw.edu.au