Welcome to my Web-site. I hope you find the information and links useful and informative.
Please click on the ‘Composer’ tab for information about my sheet music which is available for purchase through the Australian Music Centre online. Please ‘Contact me’ for further detail in regard to commissions.
Cathy Applegate was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1959, but grew up in Melbourne, Australia. Her family fostered a great love of the arts and she was given the opportunity to study piano and the theory of music to an advanced level with private teachers. Cathy opted to study medicine at a tertiary level, but has never stopped pursuing a lifelong passion for music and literature, particularly composition.
In 1982, the warmth of the tropics, and an interest in indigenous health, led to a move to Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, and here she has had many opportunities to develop her skills in composition and performance. Darwin has a lively and supportive music community and since the 1990s Cathy has played with the Darwin Symphony Orchestra (she took up cello in order to take part). She has had support from the School of Music at Charles Darwin University (CDU – formally NTU) and other groups throughout the community. Cathy has taken part in several International Guitar Festivals hosted at CDU in the past where she was able to take advantage of teaching and advice from many high profile composers, including the late Peter Sculthorpe.
As a pianist, Cathy has performed with the Darwin Chorale, Arafura Ensemble and Ad Hoc Ensemble, and as a repetiteur for productions by the Centre for Youth Music, the DSO and local schools. She has worked as an accompanist for students undertaking exams and competition.
In her role as a composer, Cathy has representation with the Australian Music Centre where her work is held in a library available for purchase and hire. Cathy’s major works include The Wetlands Suite – written for the Darwin Youth Orchestra. This work received an Honourable Mention in the 1998 CACS National Awards for ‘An Outstanding Contribution to Australian Culture’. The DSO and DYO have recorded this work and performed it many times over the years.
Felicity and the Bunyip and A Gecko’s Tale are family musicals that were performed in 2000 and 2004 respectively by CDU.
Cathy has had other commissions for full symphony orchestra: WindRose, Pipeline, Fourteen Lines (Shakespeare’s Sonnets), and Piano Concertantrum – a piano concerto written for virtuoso pianist Michael Kieran Harvey and premiered by Michael in Darwin in March 2015. She wrote an orchestral work – Dysdiadochokinesis for the Australian Doctors Orchestra and this was premiered in Darwin in 2016.
She has composed numerous other works for smaller ensembles and choral groups. Flamenco for Strings, a string quintet, was premiered by the Arafura Ensemble in 2013. A virtuosic work for solo violin and tape (a compilation of NASA sounds), Space, is anybody out there?, was commissioned by Monica Naselow in 2018 and premiered at the Darwin Festival. Her work Conversations About the Impossible, a work for Pierrot ensemble, was premiered in 2020 as part of a chamber concert by players from the Darwin Symphony Orchestra. In March, 2021, a four violin arrangement of Flying Foxes from the Wetlands Suite was commissioned and performed by the Arafura Collective.
Her ballet, The Brolga and the Star was commissioned by the Palmerston Association of Dancing and performed November 2016.
Cathy has had novels and picture books published both in Australia and in America.
Her novel Red Sand, Blue Sky has been re-printed many times and her picture book, Rain Dance, was short listed in the Children’s Book Council Awards: Picture Book of the Year in 2001.