The Music Show

The Music Show comes to you from Canberra International Music Festival this week. Percussionist Niki Johnson is no stranger to unusual instruments (she's played vacuum cleaners and ceramic bowls on The Music Show before), and her latest collaborative project Shock Lines is all about glass. Working with sound designer and composer Natasha Dubler and glass artist Caitlin Dubler, Niki explores all the different sounds and textures you can get out of glass by scraping, hitting, crunching and ringing. We meet the trio at Canberra Glassworks where they're doing a site-specific performance as part of the festival.Mark Atkins invites us to sit beside the campfire with him to experience Mungangga Garlagula. Co-composed with Finnish-Australian musician Erkki Veltheim, the collaborative project blends spoken word, yidaki, violin, electronics and nature soundscapes to create a work that blends the lines between storytelling and music. Mark Atkins has had an impressive and wide-ranging career as a musician, composer, instrument maker and storyteller, and he reflects on working with the likes of Black Arm Band, Led Zeppelin and Philip Glass, ahead of the Canberra performances of Mungangga Garlagula.

We're live at the National Film and Sound Archive on Ngunnawal Country. As part of the Canberra International Music Festival’s MOSSO: Music in Motion program, we’re tuning in across the building. From the courtyard outside, where Breton piper Erwan Keravec will demonstrate France’s answer to the highland bagpipes, to the cinema where pianist Sonya Lifschitz will give the world premiere of Damian Barbeler’s Duet for One, in which a filmed version of Sonya plays alongside the real thing. The festival’s Artistic Director, Eugene Ughetti, talks to Andy about his first year at the helm of the festival, and soprano and composer Jane Sheldon gives us a preview of her sonically-enveloping set of works Flowermuscle and the River Styx.And will there be any mention of the federal election? Not a sausage. 

French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote his most famous piece, Quartet for the End of Time, from the prisoner of war camp where he was interned in 1940. A devout Catholic, Messiaen was a church organist, a Conservatoire teacher, and an ornithologist -- so his music is full of birdsong, modernism, and God. His peers accused him of mixing “the bidet with the baptismal font” (Poulenc), of writing “brothel music” (Boulez), and “sacroporn” (Richard Taruskin), but as Robert Sholl argues in his new critical biography, he was committed to “revealing his world”. Robert joins Andy to traverse the great distances of that world. 

The Music Show goes Deep Inside the Blues with photographer and writer Margo Cooper, who’s assembled a beautiful book of photographs and interviews with blues musicians from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta. She joins Andrew on The Music Show to outline a sprawling, searching and ultimately living tradition, plus interviews with Blues legends from the Music Show archive.

What do an actress mired in scandal, a grieving political dissident, a previously enslaved African celebrity, and a court composer have in common? They’re all integral to the story of Messiah becoming a cornerstone of the musical repertoire. Heard now more often at Christmas, it was premiered at Easter in 1742 after three rapid weeks of writing by Handel, and it suggests, as author Charles King says, the staggering possibility that things might turn out all right. Charles joins Andy to reveal the characters in his book Every Valley, which in the American edition comes with the pleasing subtitle The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. 

The bouzouki has been a feature of Irish folk music since the mid-1960s, and one of the instrument’s finest modern exponents is Daoirí Farrell. He’s also a singer and a song collector, and he's brought his instrument into our studio to demonstrate how the three things fit together. Daoirí Farrell is currently on his fourth tour of Australia, playing the National Folk Festival this weekend, and then dates in Sydney, Avoca, St Kilda, Bendigo, Upwey, Adelaide and Perth. Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C. have had a huge year: they’re currently in the midst of a world tour, with their album Romance topping 2024 best of lists all over the place. Carlos O’Connell talks to Andy about the ten years since they formed in the city of Dublin (the D.C. in their name), and the way that the band’s collaborative approach helps them keep pushing the boundaries of their sound.

The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!Annie & the Caldwells make music that could equally be at home in the church or at the club. The family band from West Point, Mississippi, fuse gospel with soul and disco. Their debut album Can’t Lose My (Soul) was released last month to critical acclaim and features Annie Caldwell out front, her husband of fifty years on guitar, her daughters singing, and her sons holding down the rhythm section. Andrew speaks to Annie and daughter Anjessica about making music as a family, holding onto their day jobs, and how God is helping them deal with their new-found fame.Tibetan multi-instrumentalist Tenzin Choegyal is one of Australia’s most open-minded and in-demand collaborators, working with the likes of Phillip Glass, Patti Smith and now Matt Corby. Matt and Tenzin join Andrew to talk about Snow Flower, their meditative new album that fuses Tenzin’s dranyen lute, Matt’s Moog One synth and lyrics and mantras from the key tenets of Tibetan Buddhism.Plus, a cello and mezzo-soprano duet, and a track to remember Amadou Bagayoko, the Malian musician who died this week aged 70.Annie & the Caldwells are performing at City Recital Hall in Sydney on June 5 and at RISING Festival in Melbourne on June 7.The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!

The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!Zubin Kanga is known as the ‘cyborg pianist’, because throughout his career he’s been using technology to expand the idea of what the piano is and what it can do. As part of his major research project, Cyborg Soloists, he has commissioned dozens of experimental works, including one by composer Tristan Coelho. Andy drops in on them both at rehearsal for Ensemble Offspring’s Lumen Machine, where they demonstrate the honeycomb-like Lumatone keyboard and a small but powerful motion-sensor ring that responds to Zubin’s hands on and off the piano.And as the Earshift Orchestra prepares to perform Julius Eastman’s expansive, ‘organic’ work Femenine, saxophonist and bandleader Jeremy Rose and percussionist Niki Johnson meet Andy in front of Femenine in Nine, a series of paintings by the American artist Julie Mehretu, inspired by Eastman’s work.Ensemble Offspring’s Lumen Machine is at ACO on the Pier in Sydney on Saturday 12 April and Newcastle Conservatorium of Music on Sunday 13 April. The Earshift Orchestra perform Femenine at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney on Thursday 17 April as part of Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory. The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!

Who hasn't sung a canon or round at some point in their life? 'Frère Jacques', 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' and 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree' are among the best-known children's songs and they're all meant to be sung as rounds. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, composers loved playing with canons in both sacred and profane music (some of it very profane indeed). The University of Queensland Chamber Singers has just made an album of music from the 14th to the 16th centuries, and Denis Collins of UQ's School of Music joins us to talk about it.Aotearoa singer songwriter Marlon Williams has just released Te Whare Tīwekaweka, his first album sung entirely in te reo Māori. Collaboration is at the heart of the record, with Marlon crediting his friend and Māori language teacher Kommi Tamati-Elliffe, as well as long-term band the Yarra Benders and singer Lorde, for creating this record ‘by committee’. Taking five years to write and record, Marlon opens up to Andrew Ford about his experience of reconnecting with language and culture, and how it felt having a film crew follow him around for much of that time. The documentary Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua - Between Two Worlds is out next month.

Almost every description of South African singer, cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe starts with a phrase like “genre-defying”, but Abel refers to himself as genre defining. He’s here to perform with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and he brings with him a lifetime of musical influences ranging from his childhood in Sebokeng, a township outside Johannesburg, to adolescence at Soweto’s African Cultural Organisation of South Africa, to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. His classical cello chops, his Xhosa throat singing, his improvisational spirit and his storytelling combine in an open, blossoming sound on his new album Hymns of Bantu.Noongar composer, conductor, musician, academic and programmer Aaron Wyatt returns to The Music Show to catch up with Andy on his multifaceted career. With his first string quartet, subtitled ‘Under the Canopy’, set to be premiered across two concerts in Melbourne and Shepparton, he reflects on new ways of describing the landscape through old forms of music.