Or should Malcolm Turnbull look to music schools if he values ideas on audiation and psycho-active emergent relationships?

Is a conductor akin to a god? Some reflections on intelligent design lead inexorably from the Deity to Herbert von Karajan.

From coffee machines to Cage, from jaywalking to joyrides, for one maestro, it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad musical world.

Everyone has an opinion on everything these days, and social media is making it all to easy to sound off.

Turns out cooking a really good French meal is akin to performing classical music; you can’t fake either of them.

How Maestro Abbott’s sluggish tempi (and that thing about onions) led to a rebellious orchestra tearing up his contract. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Or why does what seems so easy with Cheryl Barker turn out to be tricky with Teddy Tahu Rhodes? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

And just what kind of music lover should be chosen to colonise the Red Planet? Apparently 43 Australians are in the running for a position on Mars One – the plan to put humans on Mars in the year 2024. I’m glad to say I’m not one of them, as this is a one-way mission. No return is possible. Every year or so, Mars One will send more supplies and more Martians. Some 200,000 people around the world applied and now they have selected 1,000 to undergo training and psychometric testing. (I’m a great believer in psychometric testing by the way. This is the same system that determined Jonathan Shier would be an excellent managing director of the ABC, and we all remember how well that worked out.)  Eventually four Marstronauts will blast off on a one-way ride to the Red Planet.  What criteria might you use to select four people to leave Earth forever? They’d have to be healthy, but musical compatibility must be up there. Imagine being a string quartet lover and having a country and western fanatic in the next bunk – your Grosse Fuge interrupted by the strains of Keith Urban. Musical tension… Continue reading Get unlimited…

  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…

As I write this, a new season begins on television of one of the most grotesque programs to ever flit across the small screen. I speak of Big Brother. Once a chilling character in a book by George Orwell, Big Brother the TV show is the nadir of civilization. Contestants put themselves on show 24 hours a day, and the more asinine, puerile, unintelligent, psychotic and ill- adjusted they are, the better. These are not unsuspecting victims, these are people who have so little shame, so little sense of decorum and privacy that would share every minute of their vacuous little lives – humans who would offer themselves up as mice in a live TV experiment. I watched 20 minutes of it with the kids, and could feel my brain cells dying one by one. There is more goodness and humanity in three bars of Bach than in 70 hours of Big Brother, and that might be classical music’s biggest selling point. It is decent. It has structure, it has intelligence, and it seeks to rise to a higher plane, rather than plunge to the depths. Strangely, much of it was written during blood-thirstier times when humans were less enlightened. During the gore of the French……

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…

The ABC Classic 100 20th Century countdown seemed to throw up a lot of controversy last year. I must admit that until I was on air for the first session with my partner in crime Marian Arnold, I had no idea who had won. I took a peek down the list, which felt naughty, like looking at the last page of a grand novel to see how the story finishes. There it was: No 1 – the Elgar Cello Concerto. I wished I hadn’t seen it.  There is nothing wrong with the piece – it’s a lovely work – but is such a remnant of the 19th century. It seemed unbelievable that it could have won ahead of all the other magnificent and more modern pieces from the 20th century. Of course there was no point grumbling about the decision; the people voted and they got what they voted for. But it did highlight what I thought was an interesting English bias in the voting, which Julian Day also remarked on in the January issue of Limelight. Of the top five  (Elgar Cello Concerto, Holst’s The Planets, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 2) three are English……