Sky Be Dark (天黑黑) for solo cello

Folk Music, Free Sheet Music, Intermediate Cellists, Pop Music
First published on Jul 6, 2026 by Seb
Last updated on Jul 6, 2026 by Seb

This is an unaccompanied cello fantasy on 天黑黑, as sung by 孫燕姿 (Stefanie Sun). Written by 李偲菘 and 吳慶隆, the song single-handedly launched Stefanie’s career in 2000, first in Taiwan and eventually across much of Asia. Although its official English title is Cloudy Day, the recomposer believes that Sky Be Dark better captures the spirit of both this 21st-century song and the traditional Taiwanese folk song of the same name from which Stefanie’s version borrowed.

This song is notable for its use of the chord Csus2(no3), which permeates the piano accompaniment. In the original key of A♭ major, the notes are A♭–E♭–B♭, with each successive note a perfect fifth above the previous one. Also known as a “power chord with an added 9th,” or Cadd9(no3), this sonorous yet subtly dissonant sonority has been employed to memorable effect by Bach and Copland, and has long been a characteristic feature of Celtic music.

In Sky Be Dark, the piano introduction opens with this I–V–II sonority, which continues beneath the vocal line as Section A begins. Even the brief quotation of the traditional Taiwanese folk song is transformed by this sonorous chord in Section B. At times, the music shifts the power chord from the tonic to the subdominant (IV), producing the similarly voiced sonority D♭–A♭–E♭, as heard, for example, at the end of Section C.

For best results on the cello, this music has been transposed from A♭ major to D major, allowing the open A, D, and G strings to resonate naturally within the two dissonant yet sonorous chords that define the arrangement: D–A–E and G–D–A.

Find below sheet music, with annotations by the recomposer on his own approach to playing this piece as an amateur cellist himself. Notes are slurred with suggested bowings. The recomposer also marked fingering positions suitable for an intermediate cellist. But you can, and probably should make your own annotations. Clean sheets with just notes are found further down this post. Following are PNG and PDF versions with annotations.

If you are an advanced cellists, you will want to figure out your own slurrings, bowings and fingerings. Find below clean sheets with only notes. Feel free to further revise this recomposition. Both PNG and PDF versions are available.

If you plan to improve on this music, start with Musescore files which you can further edit in the free Musescore app. But since you can’t download most Musescore files on the commercial Musescore’s website unless you are a paid user, we store .mscz files on this site whenever we can, so you can freely download them here. They are saved here as .zip files because WordPress does not accept .mscz files. Just download them and unzip:

This recomposition itself is made available for all to play under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

You may also consult IMSLP’s excellent discourse on how Creative Commons licenses apply to work of music and derivative work such as recordings of a composition. In short, you can freely use, share, perform and record this work, so long as you credit the composer, and continue to share you derivative work under the same CC BY-SA license, even if you do it for profit.