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Music

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:

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Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony 

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
by
12 August 2024

On 4 September 2024, the classical world of music, and especially its Austro-Germanic heartland, will celebrate the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. Australia’s homage to this symphonic Titan is relatively modest, though these months do include performances of his Ninth (Brisbane, QSO, Johannes Fritzsch), and Fourth (Melbourne and Geelong, MSO, Daniel Carter; Hobart, TSO, Eivind Aadland), along with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s four performances of the Eighth Symphony, under Simone Young. Her global reputation increasingly rides on dynamic interpretations of large later-Romantic works, by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, as well as Bruckner.

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How does a ten-day festival in Townsville (Gurambilbarra) in tropical Far North Queensland, with a line-up of thirty-five top musicians from Australia and across the world, go from strength to strength in a difficult economic climate? Maybe it’s because the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, with a track record of more than thirty years, is so much more than a music event.

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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).

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Andrew Ford is a composer, writer, and broadcaster, and has won awards in all three capacities, including the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for his song cycle, Learning to Howl. His music has been played throughout Australia and in more than forty countries around the world. Since 1995 he has presented The Music Show each weekend on ABC Radio National. He is the author of eleven books, including The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (with Anni Heino). We review his new book, The Shortest History of Music.

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Angela Hewitt, one of the world’s leading concert pianists, appears in recital and as soloist with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Her interpretations of the music of J.S. Bach have established her as one of the composer’s foremost interpreters of our time. Her latest Australian tour takes in Adelaide, Melbourne, Bendigo, and Sydney, from 9 to 15 October.

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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.

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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.

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The second edition of Kathryn Kalinak’s modestly titled Film Music: A very short introduction arrives thirteen years after the publication of its predecessor, extending its chronology of film music from the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century to 2022. What makes it unique is the global reach of its documentation of significant events and developments in film music history. This offers a broad coverage from countries and cultures other than Hollywood and the West, and illustrates how practices and ideals vary globally.

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Arnold Schoenberg rarely missed a punch. Whether in music theory, composition, or the fraught polemics of his age, he communicated with a clarity of purpose verging on the tyrannical. Visiting Schoenberg in California during his last years, the conductor Robert Craft commented on ‘the danger of crossing the circle of his pride, for though his humility is fathomless it is also plated all the way down with a hubris of stainless steel’. Harvey Sachs is worried that music lovers of the twenty-first century are failing to appreciate the continuing significance of the composer despite, or perhaps because of, this armour-plating. Addressed to the musical ‘layman’, Sachs’s ‘interpretive study’ is a passionate, occasionally self-doubting essay intended to demonstrate why Schoenberg still matters. Schoenberg’s five chapters follow a chronological track, attempting to account for most of the fifty-odd opuses of Schoenberg’s oeuvre, within a rich context of his life’s turbulent course. His chapter titles dramatically reflect the struggle – battle lines, war, breakthrough, and breakaway – of both his life and his works. Sachs popularises, refreshes, and sometimes refutes the stainless-steel images passed down in the sanctioned texts of musicology, many written by Schoenberg’s acolytes.

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