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The Music Show

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All kinds of music and all kinds of musicians in conversation with Andrew Ford.

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0:54:14

Cover Story: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

The Music Show ·

2025/10/18

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was made famous by the version Roberta Flack recorded for her 1969 album First Take, which was then used in Clint Eastwood's 1971 film Play Misty for Me. But it started life as a relatively simple folksong British folk singer Ewan MacColl wrote for and delivered to American folk singer Peggy Seeger down a phone line at the start of the 1960s. From folksong to torch song to torture device (sorry, Barbra Streisand), it's a song that has robustly

0:54:07

From Mao's Last Dancer to Master and Commander:...

The Music Show ·

2025/10/17

Composer Christopher Gordon is being handed the Distinguished Services to the Australian Screen award at this year's Screen Music Awards. Responsible for big scores to films like Mao’s Last Dancer, Ladies In Black, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Christopher has also written for television, ballet and the concert hall. He tells Andrew about catching his first big break (a score for miniseries Moby Dick) and how he’s kept up such a varied composing and

0:54:06

Cover Story: The Times They Are A-Changin'

The Music Show ·

2025/10/11

Ahead of new episodes of Cover Story (dropping very soon!) we bring you one of our favourites from season one.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.

0:54:06

Inside a showtunes sing-along bar, and composer Fritz...

The Music Show ·

2025/10/10

When was the last time you gathered around a piano to belt out showtunes with friends or strangers? Marie's Crisis Cafe is a beloved New York City sing-along piano bar that's been bringing musical theatre lovers together for decades. The bar is popping up in Melbourne and Sydney and we'll meet resident pianists Kenney Green-Tilford and Adam Michael Tilford who'll perform a couple of showtunes live.Fritz Hart (1874 - 1949) was an English composer, conductor and teacher (and critic,

0:54:06

Shellie Morris sings for our little ones and Tim...

The Music Show ·

2025/10/05

Wardaman and Yanyuwa woman Dr Shellie Morris AO grew up speaking English in her adopted family, but has since gone on to learn over 20 First Nations languages. Her new album Singing For Our Little Ones is in Warumungu, and it's a collaboration with Elders in Tennant Creek as well as the local recording studio and a whole bunch of musicians. Shellie's cultural advocacy and leadership recently earned her a Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement, and she's back on The Music Show to

0:54:06

Meow Meow's The Red Shoes and saxophonist Tessie...

The Music Show ·

2025/10/04

Post-post-modern chanteuse Meow Meow returns to The Music Show to talk about The Red Shoes, the third show in her series of Hans Christian Anderson adaptations. She goes into both the music and the research behind the show, including the revelation of a Danish ballet dancer whose "feet ran away with her", that may have inspired the tale. Alto saxophonist and composer Tessie Overmyer has released her debut album as bandleader, Tidelands. She explains to Andrew Ford why she composes

0:54:06

Red Headed Stranger: how Willie Nelson's obsession...

The Music Show ·

2025/09/28

Willie Nelson first encountered the song Red Headed Stranger in the 1950s, working as a DJ at radio station KCNC in Fort Worth TX. It was a jaunty number, sung by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and His Cracker-Jacks, about a less-than-jaunty subject. The stranger of the title rides into town on “a raging black stallion” leading a second horse, a bay, that had belonged to his dead wife. He meets a woman who tries to steal the bay and shoots her. Willie not only played the song on his

0:54:06

Stormy skies, Bulgarian voices, and Mervyn Peake with...

The Music Show ·

2025/09/27

Neko Case's dazzling voice and kaleidoscopic band sound have developed slowly and assuredly over her 30 year recording career in what she calls "country noir", and her latest album Neon Grey Midnight Green is the latest instalment. She joins Andy to talk about the way her voice has changed over the years, her adoration of unconventional guitars, and the surprising literary inspirations behind her songwriting.The legendary upright bass player Danny Thompson has died at the age of

0:54:06

Modern monodramas: deconstructing Pierrot Lunaire and...

The Music Show ·

2025/09/21

Laura Bowler is often described as a "composer, performer, and prevocatrice". That may be the perfect combination for "deconstructing" Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which she's done and is getting its Australian premiere for Ensemble Offspring's 30th birthday concert. She joins Andy to talk about her relationship to Schoenberg's original work, the "extractive" process of wrapping your identity up in your art, and what live electronics bring to her music.The Big Idea is a monodrama

0:54:06

Recovering and uncovering: early Black music from...

The Music Show ·

2025/09/20

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

0:53:57

Bleak Squad: a supergroup with DNA from Magic Dirt,...

The Music Show ·

2025/09/14

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,

0:53:57

Irish trad-punk for the 21st century with the Mary...

The Music Show ·

2025/09/13

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,

0:54:03

Bold performances in music new and old: Carolyn...

The Music Show ·

2025/09/07

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

0:54:04

Music teachers on screen, and how to score a film

The Music Show ·

2025/09/06

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

0:54:07

80 years since the end of WWII: the Music of...

The Music Show ·

2025/08/31

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

0:54:06

A musical portrait of Guinea-Bissau, and pianist...

The Music Show ·

2025/08/30

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

0:54:07

"I have seen rock and roll's future and its name is...

The Music Show ·

2025/08/24

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

0:54:06

Beyond bluegrass with Molly Tuttle, and harpist...

The Music Show ·

2025/08/23

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

0:54:06

Liz Pelly on the Spotify machine, and remembering...

The Music Show ·

2025/08/17

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

0:54:06

Leading an orchestra with Jaime Martín and putting...

The Music Show ·

2025/08/16

It's Poetry Month and our Middle of the Air competition (run in collaboration with Red Room Poetry) is in full swing. Two of our listeners who submit the winning poems will have their words turned into songs and recorded by rapper/composer DOBBY and singer songwriter Leah Senior. Both musicians are on The Music Show to talk about their different approaches to word setting, their favourite lyricists, and how poetry has influenced their songwriting.And The Melbourne Symphony

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