The Music Show

Richard Mills finishes up thirteen years at the helm of Victorian Opera at the end of this year, and his opera Galileo gets its concert premiere as a kind of farewell. He’s got plenty to look back on and to look forward to as well as opera in Australia and worldwide goes through a kind of sea change.And we look back at some of The Music Show’s favourite live sessions from the year with jazz piano, classical chamber music, monk punk and a vacuum cleaner plugged into a clarinet. Not to mention the banjos – multiple banjos. Music from Throat Pleats, Party Dozen, Buddhadatta and Shogo Yoshii, Mike Nock, members of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck.

2023 marks the centenary of Hank Williams' birth. Even if you’re allergic to country music, the music you listen to would likely be somehow traced back to this seminal singer and songwriter. In fact, there might be quite a few songs you’ve heard by some of your favourite legendary singers that were actually written many years earlier by Hank. Get to know Hank’s music, his life and his legacy through archive interviews with his biographer Colin Escott, a chat with Lucky Oceans from 2019, and a story from Billy Joe Shaver that he shared in 2002.And Emily Granger joins us in the live music studio with her harp to talk through the ins and outs of her instrument and share some very handy tips about writing for the harp. Emily was raised in Missouri but has called Australia home for the last seven years, and he’s just released an album of duets for harp and Sally Walker’s flute called Something Like This. She has been appointed Principal Harp at the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and is about to head down to the Mornington Peninsula for their annual Peninsula Summer Music Festival. 

British violinist Anthony Marwood returns to our shores where he’s playing a series of concerts in duet with accordionist James Crabb for the Australian Chamber Orchestra.As a soloist, chamber musician, orchestra director, and festival director he’s a man with many strings to his bow, but we’ll try not to let that horrific pun get in the way of a good, in-depth conversation between Anthony and Andrew.They talk about working with composers like Thomas Adès, Sally Beamish, learning from Emanuel Hurwitz, and collaborating with Sinead O'Connor. 

Following the release of her second studio album Hertz, Perth-based singer-songwriter Carla Geneve chats to Andrew about channelling the experiences of her bipolar diagnosis into her music and resisting the temptations of becoming the “tortured artist”. Describing the record as a “concept album,” Hertz is a continuation of her previous release Learn to Like It, but takes on a new, raw sound that still maintains an authentic Aussie twang.Reflecting the melting pot of Adelaide, Nexus Arts Orchestra adds new dimensions to the idea of “Contemporary Australian Music”. The group is made up of performers from varying musical backgrounds, and include instruments like the guzheng, shamisen and santur alongside a string section, vocals and flamenco guitar. They have just released a three-track EP, featuring co-composed music and songs by Ngaanyatjarra singer-songwriter Vonda Last.And we remember one of the greatest Irish songwriters and frontman of The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, who died this week at the age of 65. He was renowned for the powerful sound he derived from Irish traditional music and punk.

Celebrate 100 years of  broadcast radio in Australia with The Music Show in a live recording at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) in Canberra!In front of a live audience, we are joined by the NFSA's Sound Curator Thorsten Kaeding, pianist and Deputy Head of School at the ANU School of Music Scott Davie, and local experimental musician Sia Ahmad for a chat about the impact of broadcast radio on music, and music's influence on the development of media.We delve into the archives of the NFSA and the ABC to listen to recordings from lacquer discs recorded by ABC's war correspondent Chester Wilmot in Tobruk during the second world war, some of a Prix Italia winning work, and live performances by Sia and a boombox and Thorsten playing an original wax cylinder.

Ashley Naylor is guitarist who has played in many bands. He has his own bands, like Even, plays in other bands like The Church, and is even in bands on TV, like The RocKwiz Orkestra. In fact, you may have heard his guitar on The Music Show, but this time, he is on the program to talk about his most recent release - a new album of instrumental music called Soundtracks Volume 2, a follow up to his 2020 lockdown album Soundtracks Volume 1.Founding member of No Fixed Address and Mixed Relations and the godfather of Australian reggae, Bart Willoughby makes his Music Show debut. He is an alumni of CASM (Centre for Aborignal Studies in Music) in Adelaide and has toured internationally with bands like Yothu Yindi. In this interview, we journey into Bart’s incredible story as a multi-instrumentalist, and how he came to be one of the most significant figures in Australian songwriting. 

Fred Smith is that classic combo: troubadour and a diplomat. Now based back in Canberra, his career as a singer-songwriter is defined by his time in Bougainville and Afghanistan. But his new album, Look, is "a collection of songs that are not about Afghanistan", and features tributes to Leonard Cohen and Helen Garner, the latter of which he performs live in The Music Show studio. Jazz duo Claire Cross and Harry Cook's debut album for ABC Jazz, Dialect, melds her electric bass with his genre-bending piano. They join Andy from Berlin to talk about an album firmly rooted in the Australian landscape. 

Gelareh Pour and Brian O'Dwyer have been playing music together for over 10 years and have just released their debut full-length album under the project name ZÖJ. They describe the ZÖJ as an "ongoing conversation" that combines Gelareh's Persian music background and Brian's experimental percussion to create new Australian music. Their album Fil O Fenjoon was recorded in the Primrose Potter Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre.Cellist Anthony Albrecht is co-director of The Bowerbird Collective alongside Simone Slattery, a project "crossing the arts/science divide" in blending music and conservation. As they gear up for the inaugural Lyrebird Festival, Anthony talks about historical performance, finding music in nature, and whether frogs sing quite so beautifully as birds.

Robyn Archer has spent the past year touring An Australian Songbook – it’s not The Australian songbook but it takes a swathe of Australian songwriting from household singalongs to new art song and weaves a wry and touching portrait of the continent. She spends an hour with Andy looking at the songbook as it has taken shape: from First Nations folksong, to yodelling, to the menstruation blues.

‘So much of traditional jazz is about romantic love,’ says saxophonist Holly Moore. ‘I feel like there’s never really that much on friendships and the other relationships in our lives”. Her debut album for ABC Jazz, Reunion, is a five-part suite about those bonds, from adolescence to adulthood.  We catch up with 2022 Classical Freedman Fellow Katie Yap about the project she undertook with the prize. Multitudes has seen Katie improvising, composing and performing with four unique collaborators. We talk about birds, words and get an update on what's cooking in Katie's kitchen.And we get a glimpse into The Journey Down - a project that took a car wreck-turned-sonic sculpture on the road from Kununurra to Perth.