The Music Show

Seraphim Trio have been making chamber music together for over twenty years. Pianist Anna Goldsworthy  joins Andy to talk about her relationship with violinist Helen Ayres and cellist Tim Nankervis, as well as the women composers – famous and lesser known – they have recorded as part of their new album Radiante. Originating in rural southwest Louisiana, Zydeco music is a blend of Cajun & Creol...

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 t...

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 B...

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 “bro...

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 sa...

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 th...

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...

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 Trista...

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...

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 Cul...

Saxophonist, composer, improviser and master looper, Adam Page , has brought a bunch of looping pedals and instruments into our Adelaide studio to show us how he builds layers of music on the fly. Adam's just finished a run performing a live improvised score for Australian Dance Theatre’s A Quiet Language, which sampled percussive sounds captured by the dancers' bodies in rehearsal. He’s also work...

Allison Russell’s jazz, blues, and folk influences create a sound that seems infinitely adaptable across her many projects. Her collaborators include Joni Mitchell, Annie Lennox, Hozier, Brandi Carlile, and Orville Peck, as well as making music with her husband JT Nero, and with three other banjo players (including Music Show alumni Rhiannon Giddens and Leyla McCalla). She talks to Andy ahead of h...

People talking about the French composer Pierre Boulez tend to wear out the word iconoclast pretty quickly. To celebrate the “High Priest of Modernism” on the occasion of his centenary, The Music Show looks beyond Boulez’s clockwork reputation to the sensuality and emotion of his music and his kind, collegiate relationship with other musicians. Authors Edward Campbell and Caroline Potter, pianist...

Melbourne historian and musician Lisa MacKinney has written the first full-length history of 1960s New York pop group The Shangri-Las. They were responsible for hits like Leader of the Pack and Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand), teenage soap opera songs that sounded like nothing else on radio at the time. MacKinney’s book Dressed In Black: The Shangri-Las and their Recorded Legacy flips a lot of the...

In the years since it originated in New York City in the late 1970s, hip hop has become a global music phenomenon. Reaching Australian shores in the early 1980s, tensions quickly arose between those looking to emulate their American rap heroes, and those using their own Australian accents. Dr Niall Edwards-FitzSimons takes us on a potted history of Australian hip hop and the 'accent debate' that c...

For a band that weren't around very long and only really put out one studio album, the cultural and musical impact of the Sex Pistols is staggering. Guitarist Steve Jones opens up to Andrew Ford about starting the group when he was just a kid, how it feels to be considered a guitar hero now, and why he thinks we're still talking about the band fifty years on. Sex Pistols tour Australia next month...

The Music Show is back on Kaurna Land at Adelaide's Botanic Park for WOMADelaide 2025, a festival celebrating music from all over the world. Named after a group of powerful grandmas in the 1970s and 80s who sold wax print fabrics at the Lomé central market and drove a Mercedes Benz, Nana Benz du Togo are a five-piece band with three female lead vocalists. PVC pipe percussion, a DIY drum kit and Ko...

Alice Keath presents The Music Show for International Women’s Day, with some of the great international and local women on the WOMADelaide line-up. Latin American pop and classical sensibilities meet in the music of Cuban cellist and singer Ana Carla Maza. She joins Alice to explain why producing her own record was an act of power in the male-dominated Latin music industry. Mudburra and Garrawa wo...

In the final episode, for now, of Cover Story, singer and rapper Ziggy Ramo and musician and broadcaster Alice Keath look at Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ – a political anthem just vague enough to apply to the US civil rights movement, the Velvet Revolution, Perestroika, and in some cases seemingly nothing at all. Music details: The Times They Are A-Changin'Composed by Bob DylanOrigina...

Aspirations of modernity, progress and innovation drove music through the 20th century. For French composer Maurice Ravel, inspiration from (and imitation of) his peers, of the voices and styles around him, made him a true original. He pulled from Spanish music, 18th century music, Viennese waltz and jazz, and yet within seconds it’s always possible to hear Ravel’s own, distinct, voice. To mark th...

In 1987, Steve Kilbey and Karin Jansson were living together, and armed with a joint and a piano, one night they came up with the bones of Under The Milky Way. It became a hit for The Church as part of their fifth studio album, Starfish, and since then it’s featured in almost every list of great Australian rock songs (and a fair few car ads too). On Cover Story, Andy is joined by poet, singer-song...

Sisters Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes have been making music as Charm of Finches since they were children. Now seasoned touring artists with four albums under their belts, they swing by The Music Show studio to play live and tell Andy about the joy of singing in unison, and why they’re drawn to really dark stories.  Comprised of five female musicians The Cloud Maker transports listeners through son...

In 1985, Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love album made a moderate showing in the pop charts. In 2022, the single Running Up That Hill burst back into the charts after a particularly impactful needle-drop in the Netflix show Stranger Things. So perhaps it’s no surprise that there are dozens of cover versions from around 2022 - as well as a handful from earlier in the song’s 40 year lifespan. Cover Story th...

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this program contains the name and voice of someone who has died.  Written from the small shed on his allotment in Northern England, the lyrics on Richard Dawson’s new album End of the Middle are filled with small observations and rich characters. He's a prolific and verbose songwriter, likening his habit of jamming too many syllable...