The Music Show

New Zealand composer Annea Lockwood has become a staple in the American experimental community over the last 60 years. Her extensive body of work includes Piano Transplants – a series that includes her well-known Piano Burning and Southern Exposure – the premiere of which went awry when the piano went AWOL in Perth… The Music Show goes to the art gallery, where Annea is rehearsing for the premiere of a new piece, created with Brisbane composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson at the AGNSW’s Volume Festival. We chat about her career, listening to rivers and her latest release – Tête-à-tête – a record made with her late partner Ruth Anderson.

Jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant's latest album Mélusine brings together the high-concept dreaminess of her lockdown album Ghost Song with the powerful band leadership of her earlier work. Cécile joins Andy ahead of her tour to Australia to draw a line from her Kate Bush covers to her 12th Century Occitan folk song renditions.Author Stephen Downes reveals the strange and shortened life of the American pianist William Kapell, who died in a plane accident seventy years ago.Violist Henry Justo is the 2023 recipient of one of Australia’s major instrumental prizes, the Freedman Classical Fellowship, which gives him a grant towards a major performance project. Henry stops by The Music Show studio to reveal his plans for the fellowship and how Debussy clinched the final competition for him.

No-No Boy is a project conceived by academic and musician Julian Saporiti that channels his research on Asian-American histories into song. His music is built on samples he has recorded at Japanese-American interment camps, in national parks, and with museum archives. Julian has just released his third album, Empire Electric, which is a melting pot of American folk, field recordings and a melange of English, French and Vietnamese languages. And The Music Show takes a trip to Art Gallery New South Wales to meet some of the artists performing at their new festival of sound and vision, Volume. We speak to Japanese sound artist FUJI||||||||||TA who has travelled to Australia with his hand-fabricated Pipe Organ for his southern hemisphere premiere. We also get a sneak peek of his performance at his sound check in the Oil Tank Gallery of Sydney Modern, the new wing of the Art Gallery of NSW.  

Iranian composer and pianist Shervin Mirzeinali’s opera Panbe Zan recreates the process of preparing cotton to be turned into cloth, featuring traditional Persian music interleaved with the rhythms and timbres of the Panbe Zani’s ritual. He’s also set to open the inaugural Iranian Music Festival in Sydney, and brings in the co-founder and setar player Ehsan Kachooei to demonstrate some of the music the audience will get to hear at the Festival.Christopher Sainsbury’s new opera The Visitors is the latest in a series of interpretations of Jane Harrison’s play of the same name. Christopher tells Andy how the score is inspired not only by the play text but by the sound world of Eora and Dharug Country, from the echoes of sandstone gullies to the song of the butcherbird.

“When you’re singing Byrd’s music today, you’re just taking his instructions from four hundred years ago, but you’re making contemporary music with them”.William Byrd was a composer of sacred – and secret – Catholic music in Protestant England. To mark 400 years since his death, Andy talks to Early Music specialist Christopher Watson, who is gearing up to perform his work with the Song Company, and we’ll hear Byrd’s biographer Kerry McCarthy from the Music Show archives.

South African vocal group the Soweto Gospel Choir consider Australia to be a kind of second home. They’re on a mammoth four month tour of the continent, performing at venues across NSW and Victoria across October, via a stop to sing for us live in the Music Show studio.The baryton is a small character in the history of music – you’d be forgiven if you’d never heard of the instrument, let along heard it played. Melbourne-based Laura Vaughan is a specialist early music performer who plays the baryton in the Gryphon Baryton Trio, alongside Katie Yap on Viola and Joesphine Vains on cello. They are presenting a concert of pieces for baryton trio by the instrument’s most prolific composer Joseph Haydn, and join us in the studio to give us a taste of music from the Esterházy court.And we remember Australian opera singer Jacqueline Dark who has died at the age of fifty five.

Can The Music Show do an entire decade in an hour? We’re certainly going to give it a go with the help of Tony Wellington, former Mayor of Noosa, current bird photographer, and author of Vinyl Dreams: How The 1970s Changed Music.From the collapse of the 1960s dream with the end of the Beatles, the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, to the arrival of rap and the Walkman at the end of the decade, it was a time of change, prompting at least one 70s artist to ask: What’s Going On?

Jim Denley and the natural environment have been longtime collaborators, in fact, he is perhaps one of the very few musicians who has played outdoors more than inside. Over the past few years, he’s been documenting those collaborations across various locations, including the Budawangs and the city of Sydney, and recently released two albums. Sydney Chamber Opera stages a triple bill of one act operas for single singer in a program called earth.voice.body. Director Clemence Williams and soprano Celeste Lazarenko join Andrew to reveal their treatment of works by Francis Poulenc and Kaija Saariaho that pull apart the operatic form and the human psyche.

Author Oliver Soden tackles the public and private personas of Noël Coward in his biography Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward. He joins Andy on to unpack the way that life yielded one of the most productive artistic careers of the 20th century.Including scenes from Private Lives, performed by Geraldine Turner, Dennis Olsen, and Guy Noble from The Music Show archives. 

Led by husband and wife Mohamed and Anna Camara, Jarabi Band fuses West African instruments with jazz to explore stories of contemporary African and Australian musical culture. They are releasing their debut album Duniama, which features songs written in Guinean languages Malinke and Susu.And the Alma Moodie Quartet, featuring violinists Kristian Winther and Anna da Silva Chen, take their name from one of Australia’s great historical violinists. They perform live in studio ahead of gigs at the Sydney Opera House and Baroque Hall Adelaide, revealing how Moodie’s legacy feeds into what and how they play.