Music

It is dreadful to lose one’s voice. Most of us can mime our way through an episode of laryngitis or the anaesthetised numbness that follows dental surgery, confident that normalcy will return. But imagine knowing that normalcy was gone for good. As Flora Willson recently put it, there is an ‘intimate connection between voice and identity’. We are the sounds we make.

You can imagine the question popping up on one of those television quiz shows. What connects Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of jazz would have hand on buzzer in a flash. Answer: Kind of Blue. There is an altogether darker, and equally correct, answer: heroin.

In the winter of 1937–38, Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from National Socialism, lived in furious exile in Svendborg, a small town on the Danish island of Funen. There he wrote and compiled a collection of poems under the working title ‘Gedichte im Exil’ (Poems in Exile). Sometime between galleys and the poet’s move to Sweden following the Munich Agreement, the book was renamed Svendborger Gedichte, the second section of which begins with a simple motto:

Andrew Ford is a musical polymath. On his website he identifies as a ‘composer, writer and broadcaster’. I suspect the Australian public knows him best as a broadcaster, given his three decades at the helm of the ABC’s Music Show. That broadcasting longevity does not diminish his continuing acclaim as a composer, as seen in the rousing première of his Red Dirt Hymns before a capacity Canberra Festival crowd on 2 May. Nor does it discount his run of hundreds of essays, and a dozen or so books. Some of those books are edited accumulations of his own press articles and reviews, often drawing on his well-researched Music Show interviews. But most of his books are devoted to particular musical passions: memory, harmony, noise, and, most repeatedly, song (David McCooey reviewed Ford and Anni Heino’s The Song Remains the Same [2019] in ABR, March 2020).

My one-woman show A Star Is Torn was a sung catalogue of the great women singers who had ‘taught’ me via their recordings. Having assembled a list of twelve, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday among them, I realised that they had all died young. The original draft also included a bunch of survivors, including Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. My assessment of Ella was based on scant information. When I premièred that show in 1979, she was in her sixties and still touring the world at a phenomenal pace. The rest was largely mythology. Judith Tick’s mammoth biography is authoritative enough to make me believe I now have something much closer to the truth.

Louise Berta Mosson Dyer (née Smith; later Hanson-Dyer; hereafter, Louise) lived several lives. An eccentric Melbourne socialite, married into the money of Linoleum King, Jimmy Dyer, she moved on from the expectations of provincial charitable good works in her mid-forties to found a ground-breaking new publishing house in Paris. Les Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, or the Lyrebird Press, pioneered innovative, daring editions – of music, books, and later, recordings – sometimes at the cutting edge of technology.