Full of the festive spirit, and wondering what kind of entertainment will keep the children off my back over Christmas, I thought I’d take a swipe at one area of music which has been bugging me for years – the music in musicals. When a musical gets it right and the music is passionate and the dancing and singing and staging all work together, they can be a magical, joyful experience, but of late musicals have been a series of pastiche experiences. Pastiche comes from the Italian word pasticcio which is apparently a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients, and the theatrical equivalent is music that has all the dynamic texture of pâté and sounds like every other musical you’ve ever heard. I watched the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels recently in Sydney and while the acting and production were great, the music in the show was like some old 1950s generic score taken out of the freezer covered in frost and congealed fat, reheated in the microwave and served up as a new dish. As soon as a song begins you know exactly what is going to happen, every chord, every rhyme. You could even just start the song……

Crowd-pleasing confection delights audience’s taste but its flavours lack complexity

  YouTube is the most extraordinary repository of documentaries on all sorts of subjects. I found myself last night watching a feature-length report from American news anchor Dan Rather investigating the mess that is the Detroit Public Schools system. Schools closed and falling into ruin like modern day Stonehenges, a totally dysfunctional school board, infighting and misappropriation of funds, no text books , teachers who are demoralized and at the bottom of everything students who have given up, are semi if not fully illiterate and who will make up a lost generation, unable to fund work or a future in the crumbling, fire-wrecked mess that is Detroit, a city that used to be the fourth largest in the richest country on earth. Of course, we have problems here in Australia (and there would be some Aboriginal communities who would look at the Detroit experience and feel they’d seen it all before) but we are living in a paradise compared to downtown Motown. But as this column is called a Soapbox and my natural human inclination is to complain about everything, here we go. It is depressing that music has dropped off the education radar in Australia. Not in the well-funded private…

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We often think that all the magic in a performance happens on the stage, but I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that the excitability of the audience is as much to do with a successful concert as the performers themselves.  Recently we had two packed houses at the Sydney Opera House for the Australian version of the Last Night of the Proms. In our Australian way, we have none of the other concerts of that great London festival, so our first night is also our Last Night. On a Friday in Sydney, I walked out as conductor and already you could tell that the audience was ready to combust. It was like dense bushland with tinder dry leaves and dead wood littered everywhere, waiting for a match in order to burst into life. You can tell from the way you enter. If the applause is warm with a few whoops and you have to wait for them to calm down before you start, you know you are on to a winner. If on the other hand the audience barely claps long enough to get you to the podium, and you turn around in silence to acknowledge the applause after it…

As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Gladstone in Queensland, looking out on the astonishing heavy-machinery activity of a waterfront dominated by LNG terminals and power station smokestacks. I’m on tour with the Queensland Symphony and we have an education concert and then a big free outdoor event this evening at the Marina Stage. We’ve already been in Rockhampton and the concerts there were almost full at the Pilbeam Theatre by the pretty Fitzroy River. The reason they were full is that they were free. Over the last years the paying audiences on the orchestra’s yearly northern tour have started to contract, but this new free model means audiences have returned like water to Lake Eyre, all due to some passionate corporate sponsorship. ERM Power does wonderful things for the QSO. Instead of a sponsorship being an amount of money, the company buys tickets and gives them to schools and people who maybe wouldn’t think of going to a concert, or wouldn’t have the resources to go. Sometimes, like Australia Pacific LNG in Gladstone, it underwrites the entire concert which means that it becomes a free event. A free ticket is a lovely thing – it…

I used to wonder what it would have felt like to be a horse wrangler in 1893 in Massachusetts as the first American petrol-powered car drove past. You’d have had a sinking sense that things were not going to be the same, that a revolution was taking place, that horses were on the way out. I didn’t have to wonder for too long, because it turns out we are living in our own digital revolution right now, which is affecting the way we listen to and think about music. The first major change is the democratising of music. Because recording was a big, expensive operation requiring studios and massive 24-channel desks, corporations were in charge of access to who got recorded, and at the other end, radio only played the people who had been allowed through the gateway. All of that is now gone. Sure, there are still people who make decisions about what is heard or recorded, but they are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and this change is also affecting broadcast radio. In a sense, a station like ABC Classic FM is still like an old totalitarian state – everyone will listen to what is chosen for them to listen…

Fiona Campbell’s Handel and Guy Noble’s delightful comic song, complete with a surprise tap-dance solo. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Stuart Maunder directed, compèred and played the patter roles very adroitly and the cast was largely in good form.

On the centenary of WS Gilbert’s death, Tom Ford sheds light on the life without Sullivan. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in