The Music Show

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.

Saskia Rao-de Haas took her Dutch cello to India, learnt the complex raga system and stayed. She’s modified the instrument whose ‘voice’ sits curiously well in the world of Indian classical music. With her musical partner and husband Shubhendra Rao they’re in Australia performing ‘jugalbandi’, blending the music of northern and southern India. And they pay respects to their musical gurus Pandit Ravi Shankar and Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia.Mark Isaacs is impossible to pigeon-hole as one of Australia’s most talented musicians. Once he was a jazz pianist.  But things change.  He’s written three symphonies,  conducts, composes film music and he fiddles impressively with standards.  Mark sits down at the piano to preview his latest work Sonata.  And he gives us a bonus rumination on Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now which is part of a forthcoming concert re-imagining songs by Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, and others.

Screen composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is becoming a household name, having written the music to films such as The Joker, Tár and series Chernobyl. Most recently, she has crafted an eerie score to accompany the latest instalment in Kenneth Branagh's film series based on Agatha Christie's Poirot. In the soundtrack for the new film, A Haunting in Venice, Guðnadóttir incorporates plainchant-like themes and darkly jarring melodies. She brings us into the world of screen music and different ways in which she has worked with directors to bring these stories to life.Melbourne-based new music outfit Rubiks Collective join forces with choreographer and dancer Gerard van Dyck, visual artist Sal Cooper and composer Kate Neal for the premiere of A Book of Hours. We speak to co-Artistic Directors of Rubiks Collective Kaylie Melville and Tamara Kohler about the expanded forms of music they commission, as well as brushing their teeth; and Kate Neal looks at time through the music of Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin.