WHILE the Canberra Symphony Orchestra is busy promoting its coming concert as both “astrological” and “astronomical”, virtuoso didgeridoo player Mark Atkins has his feet firmly on the ground.

I caught up with Atkins by phone at his Tamworth home as he prepared to join 86 performers on stage in Peter Sculthorpe’s composition “Earth Cry”, the opening work in a CSO concert that will also feature Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and Mozart’s stellar “Double Concerto for Violin and Viola”.

A descendant of WA’s Yamitji people, Atkins is a long-time collaborator of US composer Philip Glass, with whom he co-wrote “Voices” for didgeridoo and organ to mark the inauguration of the refurbished Melbourne Town Hall organ.

He performed live for the Sydney Opera House season of the film “Naqoyqatsi” and toured with Glass’s “Orion”, which premiered at the Cultural Olympiad in Greece. His solo work “Grungada” was commissioned by the Melbourne Festival and toured Australia and the world, but he retains a local music base as a founding member of the indigenous contemporary music Black Arm Band.

Atkins has been living in Tamworth and enjoying its musical life since the late ‘80s, when he left WA because of “too much politics”. All his five children are musicians, with one son already playing the didge in WA.

He rejects the widespread view of the didgeridoo, which he took up 20 years ago, as “just a drone instrument”, preferring to use it “for droning, percussively and for solo work”.

A former percussionist and still an aficionado of rock ‘n’ roll, techno, jazz and reggae, he likes to surprise his audiences, but he believes his encounters with Sculthorpe and Glass have been particularly stimulating because the work they create, is “out-of-the-box… they haven’t got the blinkers on”.

Atkins is well aware that the instrument originates from Arnhem Land, but notes that it travelled down into the Pilbara and north-east Queensland through storytellers and into broader culture via “classical” musicians such as Sculthorpe.

There’s a special feel to playing the didge, he says, “people ask me don’t I get homesick with all the travelling. Well, playing the didgeridoo takes me right back to Australia”.

Llewellyn Series 12:3, at Llewellyn Hall, 7.30pm, August 22 and 23. Free pre-concert talk at 6:45pm. Bookings to 1300 795 012 or www.ticketek.com