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All kinds of music and all kinds of musicians in conversation with Andrew Ford.
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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 Holocaust.This program was first broadcast in April 2024.
As a child prodigy, pianist Ana-Maria Vera made her concerto debut when she was nine, going on to record and perform with some of the world’s great orchestras (Philadelphia, Cleveland, London Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony). In a conversation recorded at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, Ana-Maria tells Andrew Ford about spending her formative years on the stage, her significant musical relationships with violinist Ivry Gitlis and teacher Leon Fleisher, and how her organisation Bolivia Clásica brings concerts, festivals and workshops to places like the mountains of La Paz and the Uyuni salt desert. Guinea-Bissau is a small country with rich musical traditions. New documentary film Nteregu surveys the music of the country from pre-colonial and colonial times to present. Instruments like the kora, balafon (gourd resonated xylophone) and Tina (floating gourd percussion played by women) are featured, as well as the griots and musicians who pass on this music to the next generations. The film also looks to a hopeful future where the music is recognised for its cultural heritage and reaches far beyond West Africa. Andrew speaks to Manuel Loureiro, one of the film’s directors.
On the 25th of August, 1975, Bruce Springsteen released Born to Run, the "dividing line" of his career. Starting with the title track, written on the edge of his bed in a rented cottage in New Jersey, Born to Run signalled the arrival of Springsteen, and the E Street Band. A child of the Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X assassinations, Springsteen transformed classic rock and roll images - the road, the car, the girl - into something potent and virile that reflected the sense of dread in the air. Musician and academic Toby Martin and writer and critic Kerryn Goldsworthy join Andy to trace the arc of Born to Run's story through one violent night in the city, and the root system of its influences, from Roy Orbison, to the Bible, and West Side Story.
The harpist Marshall McGuire is Chair of the Australian Music Centre. He made his name playing impossibly virtuosic music by modern composers, often pieces written specifically for him. He has worked with the ELISION Ensemble for 38 of the ensemble’s 39 years, and for most of the last decade was Director of Programming at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Marshall joins Andy in the studio to talk about the harp, working with composers and the future of artistic leadership.For a long time, Molly Tuttle’s name has been synonymous with bluegrass music in the US. She was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year, and she’s taken home two Best Bluegrass Album awards at the GRAMMYs (in 2023 and 2024). But she has more to prove. Her brand new album So Long Little Miss Sunshine covers varied musical ground, and sees her bringing those bluegrass traditions into pop. She chats to Andrew Ford about her approach to guitar (flatpicking, clawhammer, fingerstyle), writing a murder ballad, and what it was like growing up in a family band.
Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist has been received as an evisceration of the streaming platform and the way it has fundamentally changed the business model of music (to its own advantage) over the past fifteen years. Liz joins Andy to talk through her investigation and look at the future of music listening. And we remember American jazz singer Sheila Jordan who died this week at 96, and Australian jazz pianist and composer Judy Bailey who died last week at 89. We'll hear delightful snippets from their interview appearances on The Music Show about discovering jazz as children, choosing repertoire, and teaching the next generations.
It's Poetry Month and our Middle of the Air competition (run in collaboration with Red Room Poetry) is in full swing. Two of our listeners who submit the winning poems will have their words turned into songs and recorded by rapper/composer DOBBY and singer songwriter Leah Senior. Both musicians are on The Music Show to talk about their different approaches to word setting, their favourite lyricists, and how poetry has influenced their songwriting.And The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Jaime Martín returns to The Music Show off the back of some guest conducting the Sydney Symphony. Andy and Jaime pick up where they left off, talking about Spanish music, French Spanish music, and orchestral leadership. Details of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's 2026 Season are available now.Leah Senior plays The Tote in Collingwood on Saturday 23 August.DOBBY's Warrangu: River Story is touring throughout August:Wellington - 18 AugustBrewarrina - 19 AugustDubbo - 20 AugustLithgow - 21 AugustWarilla - 22 AugustHe also appears at the National Poetry Month Gala in Sydney on Thursday 28 August
Gregory Porter is becoming a harder and harder singer to pigeonhole. His voice is at home in gospel, blues, soul, and R&B, but the foundation of it all, he tells Andrew Ford, is jazz. Gregory and his band are returning to Australia soon and he joins The Music Show (from vacation in Mexico!) to talk about bringing strings and a choir into his music, maintaining optimism, and his tribute album to musical hero Nat King Cole.Andy finds a moment at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music to speak with British clarinettist Michael Collins. After reaching the finals of the inaugural BBC Young Musician at the age of 16 he's had a formidable career on the concert platform. He's staying in Australia a little longer as he prepares to premiere Graeme Koehne's double clarinet concerto with Omega Ensemble in Melbourne.
Jerrah Patston is a singer and songwriter who’s part of Club Weld—a Parramatta-based studio for neurodiverse musicians run by the Arts & Cultural Exchange. Jerrah’s music contains observations about his everyday life - from local construction sites, events being cancelled due to weather, and the time he went to a Paul McCartney concert and didn't hear Mull of Kintyre. Jerrah’s just released his third full-length album Abandoned Cricket Games and we’ll meet him, as well as one of his Club Weld mentors and songwriting collaborators, Sam Worrad.Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor have been named as recipients of this year's Richard Gill Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music, which will be conferred at the APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards in a couple of weeks. They join Andy to talk about their life together, bringing their violin skills to duets with pied butcherbirds and playing the fences of remote Australia like string instruments.
Two legendary singers and favourite guests of The Music Show passed away this week at 97 years old: Tom Lehrer and Dame Cleo Laine. Dame Cleo Laine was one of England’s most acclaimed jazz singers, with a distinctive smoky contralto voice and four octave vocal range. She was also an actor, initially confined to Caribbean characters and expanding to major roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Into the Woods, and even as the voice of God in Noye’s Fludde. In this candid 2004 interview, Andrew Ford sat down with Cleo in Rochester Castle to speak about Damehood, her love of Shakespeare and jazz, and passing on music education to the next generations.Armed with a piano and microphone, Tom Lehrer took on many social and political issues of the Cold War era. His pastiche satirical songs remain startlingly relevant today. In 2000, decades after he retired from touring and became an academic, he spoke to Andrew Ford on The Music Show. He reminisced fondly about his 1960 tour of Australia which saw him threatened with jail time in South Australia if he was to perform five of his songs.
Lajamanu is one of the most remote places in Central Australia, and it’s where we meet Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, his father Jerry Jangala Patrick OAM, and the music producer Marc ‘Monkey’ Peckham. Crown & Country is a new album and film that’s come out of more than a decade of friendship and collaboration between Wanta, Jerry and Monkey. Blending Warlpiri Jukurrpa (Dreaming) songs, cultural stories, soundscapes from the desert, and electronic beats, it’s a compelling and immersive way of sharing Warlpiri culture with new audiences.Gordon Kerry is one of Australia's most frequently commissioned composers with works in every musical genre. From his home on a hill in north-east Victoria, he has recently completed a new work for clarinet, cello and piano and a Requiem for a cappella choir. He discusses both these pieces and the traditions to which they belong on today's show.
Nicole Smede is a proud Warrimay woman with Irish ancestry, whose bio includes poet, musician, singer and composer. She’s on The Music Show to talk about how all of these things have come to intersect in her work, and about the joy and strength she's found in writing across forms and languages. Nicole is a current participant of the Ngarra Burria First Peoples Composers Program, and is also the First Nations Artistic Director at Red Room Poetry. As part of this interview we announce an exciting partnership between ABC Radio National and Red Room Poetry. It's a poetry competition called Middle of the Air, where two lucky poets will have their winning poems set to music and recorded by DOBBY and Leah Senior. Entries open 1 August. Find more details here. You can register for a free lyric writing workshop with Leah Senior and DOBBY on 6 August here.And we remember Black Sabbath's enigmatic frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who died this week at the age of 76. Joel Silbersher is our guide - he’s a Melbourne-based guitarist and a songwriter, playing across a bunch of different bands since the 1980s including GOD, Hoss and with Tex Perkins. Joel explains, while not a great lyric writer, Ozzy was a "genius melodist", and Black Sabbath's influence on rock, metal and alternative music cannot be overstated.
Michael Atherton has had his fingers in so many musical pies it's hard to know how to sum him up. He is a composer, a music therapist, an educator, a writer of books and a multi-instrumentalist. Indeed, with the Renaissance Players, Sirocco, The Atherton Table Band and Southern Crossings, he has played so many instruments he must have lost count. Just turned 75, he can add memoirist to his list of achievements, and that was our cue to get him into the studio for a long chat and attempt to make sense of his varied career.Michael's memoir Never Miss A Beat is out now via Ashwood Publishing.
Brooklyn-based jazz guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has released a new album About Ghosts. Featuring her long-time improvisatory band Amaryllis, this time she’s also added two saxophonists into the mix. Mary speaks to Andrew Ford about what adding more horns allows her music to do, how an increased focus on composition has changed the way she improvises, and about some of her more surprising musical influences (people like Elliott Smith and Robert Wyatt).Together Alone is not Crowded House's most famous album, but for Barnaby Smith, it's their best. Recorded in the wild reaches of Karekare Beach in Aotearoa New Zealand, its sound and stories emerge directly from that place. Barnaby, who is the writer of 33 1/3: Together Alone, travelled to Karekare to absorb the atmosphere that precipitated the album joins Andy to make the case for this album in the output of one of Australasia's most successful bands.
Ben Lee is responsible for some of the most ubiquitous Australian songs of the last two decades (‘Catch My Disease’, ‘We’re All In This Together’, and ‘Cigarettes Will Kill You’). His breakthrough fifth album Awake Is The New Sleep turns 20 this year, and he’s on The Music Show to reflect on career longevity (forming his first band at 14), what he’s learned from joining (and leaving) cults, and why he spends so much time playing gigs in regional Australia these days. 2022 Classical Freedman Fellow Katie Yap's prize project Multitudes has seen Katie improvising, composing and performing with four unique collaborators. Ahead of its latest performances in Brisbane, a chance to hear this conversation with Katie about how birds, poetry and collaboration have informed her work.
Midge Ure is a musical chameleon, his career having taken him from boy band, Slik (stable mates of the Bay City Rollers), to punk band, Rich Kids (with ex-Sex Pistol, Glen Matlock), to singer, guitarist and keyboard player with Ultravox, penning one of the great New Romantic anthems, “Vienna”. For the past thirty years he’s been a solo artist with an ever-evolving songbook and later this year he’s bringing it to Australia. He talks to Andy about his varied career and why Ultravox was never really synth pop – not when their biggest hit contained a viola solo.Nina Korbe is Koa, Kuku Yalanji, and Wakka Wakka singer and broadcaster. She joins Andy to talk about her operatic and music theatre career on the rise, and her advocacy work introducing kids from her family's traditional lands to orchestral performance.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are warned that the following program may contain the name and voices of people who have died. Meredith Monk is the subject of Billy Shebar's documentary Monk in Pieces, which will have its Australian premiere at Melbourne International Film Festival. Monk, now 82, has a storied career as a composer, vocalist and choreographer as well as many other artistic pursuits, leading to savage reviews and bumpy relationships with traditional opera companies across her career. But her unique creativity has inspired people like David Byrne and Björk, both of whom appear as her advocates in Monk in Pieces. Billy Shebar joins Andy to trace the process by which he assembled the pieces. Australian music icon and proud Torres Strait Islander Christine Anu has just been given the NAIDOC Creative Talent Award for 2025. Last year, she released her first album of new music in 20 years. Waku-Minaral A Minalay was recorded across the Pacific in places like New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands and the Solomon Islands - utilising traditional percussion instruments like the Warup (drums), the Urub (shakers) and the Kulap (seed pot rattles). It’s a deeply personal bilingual album which includes songs written by Christine Anu, her grandfather and her daughter.
For Jaadwa composer, sound artist and electronic musician James Howard, sound, Country and identity are inextricable. His latest release is a reworking of his score for Australian Dance Theatre's Marrow, a work which interrogates our dominant cultural narratives, written amidst the 2023 referendum. He also recently had his orchestral composition Nyirrimarr Ngamatyata / To Lose Yourself at Sea premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.The Stiff Gins are 25 years into what they hope is a lifelong partnership. Yuwaalaraay woman Nardi Simpson and Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri woman Kaleena Briggs look back at a quarter century of making music together, from their first meeting at Eora college, to the changing landscape of language and touring. Back in 2023 they chatted to Andy and performed two songs live in The Music Show studio.
The Argentine composer and pianist, Lalo Schifrin, will be best remembered as the creator of the syncopated, five-in-a-bar theme for Mission: Impossible, but he was much more than that. As a child in Buenos Aires, he studied piano with Enrique Barenboim (father of Daniel) and later, in Paris, composition with Olivier Messiaen. In addition to his other TV work (Mannix, Starksy & Hutch) and film scores (Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon), Schifrin composed and arranged for Dizzy Gillespie and pioneered "Jazz meets the Symphony" concerts, with which he travelled the world. He died last week, aged 93, and we remember him with an interview from 2006.This year marks 200 years of organ music in Australia, after the first instrument was brought on a convict ship to Hobart from London in 1825. Thomas Heywood is an organist based in Bendigo and speaks to Andrew about how the gold rush a few decades later lead to an influx of pipe organs in his region, changing the personalities of the towns (and seeing Bendigo dubbed "the Vienna of the south"). The Keys Of Gold festival is happening throughout July in Bendigo, Castlemaine, Maldon and Inglewood, and Thomas speaks to Andrew about programming organ repertoire for modern tastes, and his abiding love of these grand instruments.
Brian Campeau Presents Jo Dellin And The Bone Spurs is the latest album from the Canadian-born, Melbourne-based singer songwriter. Reinventing his sound with each record, the music here forays into country and bluegrass, with songs of love and loss punctuated by fiddle, pedal steel guitar and… yodelling. Brian is in The Music Show studio to perform two songs from the album live and talk about his endless musical flexibility.And on the 100th anniversary of his death, Andy remembers Erik Satie, composer of delicate, contemplative piano works, and “obscene” operas. A true eccentric, his personal quirks (such as keeping two broken pianos on top of each other in his flat, one filled to the brim with unopened mail) paint a complicated picture when set alongside his meditative, introspective Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies. Pianist and conductor Reinbert De Leeuw speaks about the unique challenges of performing them, in an interview from The Music Show archives.Plus, hear new music from jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson, and The Rolling Stones pay tribute to 'the king of zydeco' Clifton Chenier.
1Lorde’s fourth studio album Virgin is a rebirth for a generational artist still in her 20s. Ella Yelich-O’Connor became a household name as a teenager after her debut album Pure Heroine delivered a new minimalist art-pop sound with hip hop production and a persona of magnetic self-assurance. The albums that followed represented two very different coming of age moments – 2017’s Melodrama and 2021’s Solar Power – for a young artist confronted with fame. Now, after over a decade in the public eye, Virgin walks the tightrope between experimentation and hitmaking pop, metaphorical obscurity and confessional sincerity. Ella joins Andy via zoom. Composer Christine Pan’s new song cycle The Parts We Give has already had multiple lives. It’s being performed live this weekend with two singers (Megan Kim and Wesley Yu) who perform the roles of Jiejie and Didi (‘sister’ and ‘brother’). But it’s also a DIY video game. Producer Ce talks to Christine about how operatic vocals, glitchy hyperpop, and 8-bit gameplay can tell the story of love in a Chinese-Australian home.The Parts We Give is at ESCAC by Brand X in Sydney, 27-28 JuneYou can play the game via Fable Arts here
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