Omar Musa is an author, artist, poet, and woodcutter making music and art from Borneo to Brooklyn. He is back in Australia to talk about his latest album The Fullness. His third album touches on the environment, culture, religious identity, and mortality. He creates poetry from a spoken-word background, melding hip-hop, jazz, and electronic sounds with earnest lyricism. Gillian Dooley joins us on The Music Show to talk about her latest book She Played and Sang, which explores the music of Jane A...
May 19, 2024•54 min
Australian tenor Stuart Skelton returns to The Music Show as he prepares to sing Mahler’s Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Looking over his increasingly heroic career from oddball roles like the titular Peter Grimes to the pantheon of Wagner’s men, Stuart reflects on growing into his voice, and what he learned from the conducting and musical leadership of the late Andrew Davis. Story of Another Soul is a “decolonial dreaming of new futures that see...
May 18, 2024•54 min
Andrew is at the Canberra International Music Festival, where we get to catch up with an Australian who lives in the UK, a Belgian who tours the world, and another Belgian who lives in Australia. Lotte Betts-Dean, Aussie mezzo-soprano now based in London, makes a trip home to perform a series of form-expanding vocal works from composers like Michael Finnissy, one of the masters of so-called "new complexity". Belgian jazz pianist Bram de Looze invites The Music Show into the Belgian Embassy where...
May 12, 2024•54 min
Rainbow Chan returns to The Music Show to discuss her latest audio-visual project, The Bridal Lament. In an attempt to preserve her mother's mother tongue, Rainbow has spent the last five years researching and learning the Weitou language, an endangered Cantonese dialect, through learning traditional bridal laments. Rainbow talks to Andy about the defiant tradition of performing these laments in the face of arranged marriages, and her process of learning the language through song from the 'grann...
May 11, 2024•54 min
Bringing huge amounts of energy, musicianship and a sense of humour to the Australian folk scene is Apolline. They chat to Ce Benedict about their trio's unusual line up (fiddle, cello, bass), their approach to arranging and layering tunes, and having varied musical influences—from jazz to Scandi folk and Eurovision. They'll also perform two sets of tunes live in The Music Show studio. American jazz pianist and singer Blossom Dearie would have turned 100 this week. We revisit a delightful interv...
May 05, 2024•54 min
Norwegian trumpet player Tine Thing Helseth returns to The Music Show as she prepares to play with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. She talks to Andy about the peculiarities of trumpet concertos, about composers writing for her versus writing for her instrument, and about expanding her musical life to include playing and writing. Maanyung is a proud Aboriginal man with strong connections to Gumbaynggir and Yaegl nations. His songwriting comes from Language and Country – he’s a surfer, a youth w...
May 04, 2024•54 min
It's been forty years since the 1984–5 United Kingdom miners' strike and The Music Show has dug into the archives for a special program looking at the role that music played in this political, industrial and personal struggle. From Peggy Seeger to Paul Weller, Billy Bragg to brass bands—there's music supporting the striking miners, songs tormenting strikebreakers and tracks referencing (and sometimes sampling) National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill and Prime Minister Margaret Thatc...
Apr 28, 2024•54 min
For over fifty years, Sir Andrew Davis (1944–2024) was one of the world's busiest conductors, He conducted in the opera house and the concert hall and his repertoire ranged from Bach to Birtwistle. In the mid 1970s, he became chief conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, then took on Glyndebourne Opera, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Chicago - always for long stretches. From 2012 to 2019 he was chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and thereafter the orches...
Apr 27, 2024•54 min
Beethoven's five sonatas for cello and piano span his career - two from the beginning, one from the middle and two from his late period - so they provide a good framework for talking about the composer. Timo-Veikko Valve and Aura Go have recorded them alongside the complete music for cello and piano by Anton Webern (three works, together lasting under ten minutes) and they'll be in the studio to talk about them and play excerpts. Alison Cotton is a London-based experimental artist whose viola/dr...
Apr 21, 2024•54 min
In Southern Louisiana, a few hours from New Orleans, Ann Savoy has spent a lifetime studying, playing and collecting Cajun music. She's best known for her trio Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band, her duet album with Linda Ronstadt Adieu False Heart, and touring and playing festivals with the Savoy Family Band. Ann has just released her first ever solo album, Another Heart, which pays tribute to her early musical loves, the English and American singer songwriters of the 1960s and 70s, but with a Cajun twist...
Apr 20, 2024•54 min
Duo Windborne are two of Australia’s finest recorder players: Rodney Waterman and Ryan Williams. Their debut album, Venus Bay Fireside Sessions, is a record of their improvisational partnership. Originally intended to be recorded outside as a direct response to the natural world of Venus Bay, the weather drove them indoors and beside the fire – hence the title. They join Andy in studio with a fraction of their huge instrument collection to talk about their relationship with nature, their collabo...
Apr 14, 2024•54 min
Benjamin Northey picked up the baton as Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra only a few years after the devastating 2011 earthquake. In a wide-ranging conversation he talks to Andrew Ford about the rebuilding of the musical life of the city (there was a period where the CSO performed at an Air Force museum after many performance venues were damaged). He also looks back on his years learning under the great Finnish conductor Jorma Panula, and why starting his career as a saxopho...
Apr 13, 2024•54 min
Four pieces of music written in the years after World War II – Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, and Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, ‘Babi Yar’ – paint a complicated picture of how European composers memorialised war in Jeremy Eichler’s new book Time’s Echo. Jeremy joins Andy on the show to trace the connections and conflicts in the ways that a German, a Jewish Austrian in exile, an Englishman, and a Russian looked back at the war(s) and the Holoc...
Apr 06, 2024•54 min
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this program contains the name of someone who has died. Melbourne double bassist Sam Anning’s latest album is dedicated to Archie Roach. The album’s title Earthen comes from a remark Roach made from his hospital bed about instruments being ‘earthenware’—coming from the earth, carrying music and then returning to the earth. The septet on this record is made up of Anning's friends and long-term collaborators and he reflects on writin...
Apr 06, 2024•54 min
Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is most of the way through an international tour that sees him playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations almost a hundred times, including his first ever performances in Australia. He joins Andy in the studio, in front of the piano, to talk about finding infinite variety in those Variations. We remember the late pianist Maurizio Pollini who died this week. “With Pollini things were never simple,” says Víkingur Ólafsson, “Chopin became the musical architect, Stockhaus...
Mar 31, 2024•54 min
In the 1960s, the Les Girls Revue made Carlotta a star, and earned her the moniker “Queen of the Cross”. In Sydney’s red light district, she made a name for herself before hitting the road – she’d be the first to remind you that Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is at least partially based on her rural tours. Now she’s contemplating (but not committing to) retirement, she looks back at her career as an entertainer with Andrew Ford. Maria Grenfell is a composer for the concert hall and for film, and...
Mar 30, 2024•54 min
From the rattling charge of The Lone Ranger to the slick, warbling vocals of White Lotus, music for television has been beckoning us to the couch for the best part of a century. In Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring , Jon Burlingame has charted the history of music for telly in the form of an elegiac sort of look back at the medium as streaming overtook network TV and the 2007 writers’ strike looked to have changed the medium forever. Now a new edition, rel...
Mar 24, 2024•54 min
Peter Garrett has still got a fire in his belly at 70. The True North, his new solo album, tackles similar ground to an Oils record—the climate crisis, politics and addiction to technology, but it's his own songwriting voice out front. The songs contain messages of hope and anger in equal measure. The music is provided by The Alter Egos (which includes Midnight Oil alumnus Martin Rotsey and The Jezabels' Heather Shannon) as well as his daughters Grace and May on backing vocals. Opera Australia i...
Mar 23, 2024•54 min
It was hard to miss Corinne Bailey Rae’s ubiquitous track from 2006 'Put Your Records On'. And it’s still heard in coffee shops the world over. The English singer songwriter released her fourth studio album late last year and it represented a complete left turn in both sound and subject. Black Rainbows is her first album not on a major label and spans genres like rock, jazz and punk. It's a celebration of Black history and resilience, with each track inspired by books, photographs and objects th...
Mar 17, 2024•54 min
Simone Young, who has just renewed her contract with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for another two years, talks about conducting Gurrelieder for the first time. Schoenberg's late-Romantic extravagance is one of the most sumptuous works of the twentieth century, and one of the biggest - such a concert hall rarity that Simone herself has never heard it live. We also talk about her forthcoming cycles of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung at the theatre Wagner himself built in Bayreuth, Germany. Eleanor ...
Mar 16, 2024•54 min
An hour with two Irish living legends, singer songwriter Lisa O’Neill and concertina master Cormac Begley. Both stalwarts of the Irish traditional music scene, they united for an intense, wailing version of All the Tired Horses which was used in the final moment of Peaky Blinders. They play live and talk to Andy about what tradition means, how new writing can sing alongside the old songs, and the highs (piccolo) and lows (bass) of having a concertina collection. Including live performances of: A...
Mar 10, 2024•56 min
The Music Show is back on Kaurna Land at Adelaide's Botanic Park for WOMADelaide 2024, a festival celebrating music from all over the world. Marta Pereira da Costa was the first woman to make a career as a Fado guitarist. From Lisbon, Portugal, she gave up a career as a civil engineer to pursue the music full time and keep Portugal’s major musical tradition alive. The Good Ones formed in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as a way of processing, healing and finding hope. There is a uni...
Mar 09, 2024•56 min
Windborne are a vocal quartet from New England in the US. Their tagline is 'old songs, bold harmonies' and their varied repertoire puts Corsican polyphony next to 17th Century English protest songs. They’ve found a huge following online in recent years, thanks in part to a performance outside of Trump Tower. They’re in the country for a string of local shows and festival appearances and they perform live in our music studio. Yorta Yorta musician and storyteller Allara is also in our studio this ...
Mar 03, 2024•54 min
With sixteen albums and five Grammys under her belt, Angélique Kidjo doesn’t need much of an introduction. She’s back in Australia to perform songs from her 2021 album Mother Nature as well as gems from her catalogue that highlight her infectious energy, dazzling array of influences and multi-language pop music. Supporting most of her tour is Maatakitj (the stage name of Noongar song-maker, composer, and academic Clint Bracknell). In this special double-header interview Angélique and Clint refle...
Mar 02, 2024•54 min
The Music Show is about the creation and enjoyment of music.
Feb 25, 2024•54 min
Joseph Keckler creates operatic monologues that cover subjects such as psychedelic mushroom trips, haunted houses, and buying a jacket. He also does Schubert lieder. He’s about to tour to Australia with no-wave legend Lydia Lunch and joins Andy to unpack his unique sound and influences. Mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis makes her Australian debut with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and conductor Jaime Martín for Mahler’s 3rd Symphony. She’s a booked and busy opera performer too, with repertoir...
Feb 24, 2024•54 min
Arooj Aftab’s 2021 album Vulture Prince took her ten years to write, and for the final two she had to shut all other music out of her life. “I just was trying to make a thing that didn't have a blueprint" she says, of an opus that combines jazz, experimental electronica and Sufi devotional music with her own unique voice. She's about to tour the album here and looks back at over a decade of work with Andy before she hits Australian stages. When Notre-Dame caught fire in 2019, playwright Alana Va...
Feb 18, 2024•54 min
Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson on the band's latest and fifth album V, which combines reggae with Hawaiian music and psychedelic rock. But rather than being a deliberate fusion, V is instead a reflection of Nielson's roots, ranging from a family legacy of Hawaiian reggae, Māori and Hawaiian heritage, and Auckland's punk scene's DIY ethics. Soprano Katharine Dain's album Forget This Night takes Lili Boulanger's sensual song cycle Clairières dans le ciel as a springboard for a collection...
Feb 17, 2024•54 min
Lonnie Holley has dedicated his life to art, but his music career – as a recording artist at least – only started at the age of 62, decades after he became a sculptor displayed at the White House and collected by The Met, The Smithsonian, and the Art Gallery of NSW. He grew up in Jim Crow era Alabama and suffered a huge amount of abuse at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, which has always informed his art and his music. His first album came out in 2012 and his most recent, Oh Me ...
Feb 11, 2024•54 min
Embarking on a nautical adventure this week, Andy is welcomed onboard the ‘floating cultural platform’ known as the Arka Kinari, sailed by musical duo Grey Filastine and Nova Ruth. Made of steel intended for a Nazi U-Boat, this seventy-tonne schooner has been fitted out as an eco-touring venue, and after leaving home waters in Indonesia last month is currently visiting Australia for a run of shows. Pitjantjatjara singer and songwriter Frank Yamma was born into music, and has since had a long and...
Feb 10, 2024•54 min
