The Music Show

Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo is a new book, a collaboration between Carolina Chocolate Drops founder Rhiannon Giddens and music writer Kristina Gaddy. They both join Andy to talk about what they've uncovered. 

Ensemble Kaboul is an Afghan ensemble based in Europe, and they're headed to Australia to collaborate with Van Diemen's Band on Where Everything Is Music: the Persian music of Afghanistan meeting the baroque. Rubab player Khaled Arman sketches out the region and its musical history and tabla player Siar Hashimi talks about this music as the food of the soul, coming from a nation under a regime that has banned all music. 

Adalita and Marty Brown join Andy to talk about their new supergroup with Mick Harvey and Mick Taylor - they're called Bleak Squad and with a history of playing with Magic Dirt, the Bad Seeds, Dirty Three as well as with artists like PJ Harvey and Clare Bowditch, it's a quartet with some serious power. A moody, charismatic guitar band - the likes of which you don't hear that much these days - Adalita and Marty join Andy to report that the kids are, in fact, listening to guitars, and explain how four big personalities have unified so well. American percussionist Steven Schick returns to The Music Show, and to Australia: he's here to play a series of concerts and masterclasses at the Australian National Academy of Music. He's been playing professionally for about fifty years and he talks to Andy about the repertoire that he's helped expand in that time, and his second career as a conductor.Plus Laura Bowler gives us her pick for the Top 100 Books of the 21st Century. Vote for yours at the Radio National website!

Bleak Squad are playing in Sydney, Queenstown and Melbourne in October. Find the details on their website. Their debut album Strange Love is out now. 

Music in this program:Title: RebondsArtist: Steven SchickComposer: Iannis XenakisAlbum: Percussion WorksLabel: ModeTitle: Lost My HeadArtist: Bleak SquadComposer: AdalitaAlbum: Strange LoveLabel: Poison City RecordsTitle: Blue SignsArtist: Bleak SquadComposer: Adalita (lyrics), Marty Brown (music)Album: Strange LoveLabel: Poison City Records

Title: Safe as HousesArtist: Bleak SquadComposer: AdalitaAlbum: Strange LoveLabel: Poison City Records

Title: Bone AlphabetArtist: Steven SchickComposer: Brian FerneyhoughAlbum: Born To Be WildLabel: Newport Classic

Title: AequilibriaArtist: Steven Schick, International Contemporary EnsembleComposer: Anna ThorvaldsdottirAlbum: AequaLabel: Sono LuminusThe Music Show is made on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country

Technical production by Ann-Marie Debettencor

The Mary Wallopers are in Australia, far from their hometown of Dundalk in Ireland's County Louth. They're a raucous, political band with a folk/punk inheritance from bands like The Dubliners and the Pogues. Charles Hendy, who formed the band alongside his brother Andrew, is Andy's guest.

We welcome Yorta Yorta/Yuin composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham Fraillon back to the music show to discuss the release of Eumeralla, A War Requiem for Peace on ABC Classic. This powerful requiem, sung in Gunditjmara dialects by Indigenous and non-Indigenous choirs and soloists, commemorates the brutal Eumeralla War of the late 19th century fought between Gunditjmara people and colonists in South Western Victoria. Deborah is also singing in Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs at The Sydney Opera House on Saturday September 13. 

Carolyn Sampson is an English soprano who began her career in early music (Bach and before), working with some of the world's best-known specialists in historically informed performance. These days, she is just as likely to be heard singing Mahler. She talks about her developing career in a conversation recorded at this year's Australian Festival of Chamber Music. 

Also from the Festival, the fearless Australian-born, London-based pianist Joseph Havlat. He enjoys the challenge of new music and the more virtuosic the better. But he is also a composer, his music defying categorisation, veering between the deeply serious and hilariously funny - sometimes in the same piece. He talks to Andrew Ford about his playing and composing, and how they intersect.

Was your music teacher anything like the ones in the movies? Three academics - Hugh Gundlach and Rhiannon Simpson from Melbourne University and Katrina Rivera from ANU - join Andy to interrogate cinematic depictions of music teachers. From the dictators (Whiplash) to the heroes (Mr Holland's Opus) and the chaos engines in between (School of Rock), what do our fictional music teachers tell us about music education in the real world? 

And Freya Berkhout is an Australian film composer who made a leap of faith by moving to Hollywood two years ago, and she hasn’t looked back. Freya joins Andrew Ford to talk about surviving in the film industry 'machine', her approach to scoring comedy and horror, and the prevalent use of her voice in her soundtracks. Freya scored the documentary Surviving Malka Leifer, which just premiered at Melbourne International Film Festival.

Surviving Malka Leifer is screening in the Jewish International Film Festival on September 18th (Sydney), and September 21st (Melbourne), and will be available to stream on Stan from October 5th.

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.