Glass percussion with Shock Lines and campfire storytelling with Mark Atkins
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.
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54:06
Music in Motion: Live at the Canberra International Music Festival
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.
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Modernism, Catholicism, and Birdsong: Olivier Messiaen
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.
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54:05
Deep Inside the Blues
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.
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54:04
Messiah
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.
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