The Music Show

• Pokey LaFarge takes us to Rhumba Country, and the radical spirituality of Sofia Gubaidulina

  Credited with “making riverboat chic cool again”, Pokey LaFarge brings his band in live to the Music Show studio. Pokey talks to Andy about how old Black gospel, his Christian faith and working on a farm have all influenced him on his latest album, Rhumba Country. Oľga Smetanová joins Andy to remember the composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has died at the age of 93. Gubaidulina’s music has been described as “holy modernism”, which was a powerful provocation in the Soviet Union of her early career. The theological and musicological throughlines of her composition paint a dramatic picture, which Ol’ga reflects on with her knowledge of the woman herself.

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• Three centuries of chamber music by women with Anna Goldsworthy, and where blues and zydeco meet

  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 & Creole music, gospel and the blues. Dom Turner, one of Australia’s finest blues guitarists, explores the deep relationship between Zydeco and blues in a new collaboration with New Orleans accordion and harmonica player Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes. Sunpie is also the Big Chief of the Northside Skull & Bone Gang—a parade group that kicks off every Mardi Gras season by dressing as skeletons and waking people with song and dance, a New Orleans tradition that’s over 200 years old. And we remember Alan Lamb, the Perth-based composer, sound artist and GP, who has died at the age of 81. Lamb’s exploratory music included recordings of ‘singing’ telegraph wires on his outback property, an instrument he dubbed the Faraway Wind Organ. Hear Lamb talking to Andrew Ford about this work from the 2001 Classic FM/Radio National series Dots on the Landscape.

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• 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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• 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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