Commissioned and performed by Speak Percussion with soprano Jessica Aszodi and a ‘crowd’ of trained and untrained musicians, Liza Lim’s recent large-scale composition, Atlas of the Sky, draws upon a cosmos of ideas and sounds to explore the human relationship to rituals, patterns, and stories. Central to Lim’s ambitious work are the poems of Eliot Weinberger and contemporary Chinese poet Bei Dao, which explore the question, What are the stars?, and meditate on our connections to the universe.

Atlas of the Sky. All photographs © Bryony Jackson

Lim’s interest in ancient religious and spiritual traditions is clear from the opening of Atlas of the Sky, during which a semantron features prominently. In use as early as the 6th century AD, a semantron is a percussion instrument consisting of a large plank of wood or metal suspended by chains and struck with a mallet, and is traditionally used in monasteries as a call to prayer. Biblical narratives recount that God instructed Noah to make such an instrument to summon workers to the ark, to call them to dinner, and to invite them to rest, and the semantron is particularly important in Syrian Orthodox tradition. Indeed,...