The Sound Barrier on PBS

18/08/2024

Melbourne selfie looking to Brisbane …

18/08/2024

Don’t forget to tune in tonight to PBS 106.7FM Melbourne or login via the website or app as I chat about all things Brisbane Music Festival with its Artistic Director, the marvellous and multi-talented, multi-tasking Alex Raineri, plus music from composers and musicians who will be part of this year’s Festival lineup! 10 PM tonight (AEST), as well as later both online and on the PBS App!

Avant-Garde & Experimental with Ian Parsons

15/08/2024

This weekend, on The Sound Barrier on PBS, the wonderful Alex Raineri joins me on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne to preview this year’s stunning Brisbane Music Festival .. make sure you tune in at 10 PM Sunday night, or listen live or later online or via the PBS App! Details, as usual, here to check out … https://www.pbsfm.org.au/program/the-sound-barrier/2024-08-18/22-00-00

14/08/2024

In a country, and a world, in which there are so many brilliant and powerfully adventurous living composers, it seems a bit wrong to single out a best, or even a top dozen or so. But if I had to, I would probably choose Liza Lim who is, I think, one of the truly original and daring, and yet also generous, voices in music today. She engages with diverse histories, cultures, ecologies and brings them to new life in the breath of her music, always so fecund and abundant with timbre, narrative, and that profoundly, elusively mysterious thing we call a soul. She is stellar even in an atlas of stars.

12/08/2024

Another of those magical moments in music. Here an electronically transformed and spatialised ensemble of six soloists first springs to life alongside the acoustically stable ensemble of 24 musicians, setting off the glorious dialogue between “the one and the many”, in Pierre Boulez’s ‘Répons’. Don’t let me forget to broadcast it again for you on the radio sometime.

12/08/2024

As always, you can listen back to yesterday’s edition of The Sound Barrier from the programme’s website, where the audio will stay online for the next three months. There is my usual blurb about the music, and then individual play buttons for each piece (and the interview with Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) percussionists Peter Neville and Aditya Bhat) underneath that. A journey into spectral realties on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne!

Avant-Garde & Experimental with Ian Parsons

11/08/2024

Black star pulsar selfie …

11/08/2024

Spectral visions of shamanic realities told in this shimmering music of Kaija Saariaho, opening tonight’s edition of The Sound Barrier on PBS. Tune in or log on - 10 PM (AEST) on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne as well as online both live and for three months afterwards!

10/08/2024

Just another random page of the phenomenal score that is Gérard Grisey’s ‘Le Noir d’Étoile’. The Black of the Star. The temporal and polyphonic rhythmic spectra of a collapsed star coming from the far reaches of the cosmos, via six percussionists and audio-transmitted pulsars, through stereo broadcast on The Sound Barrier on PBS tomorrow night, and then through live performance surrounding the audience at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) at the end of the month!

08/08/2024

All the details for Sunday night’s edition of The Sound Barrier on PBS are now online for you to check out ahead of the show going live to air on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne at 10 PM (AEST) as well as online and via the PBS App both live and afterwards around the world. Moving into the spectral depths of a dead black star with music of Gérard Grisey, an interview with two of the percussionists performing it in Melbourne with Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) at the end of August, plus music by Kaija Saariaho and by Hugues Dufourt. Check it all out on the website: https://www.pbsfm.org.au/program/the-sound-barrier/2024-08-11/22-00-00

08/08/2024

Dimming the lights for the pulsars of Gérard Grisey’s percussive immersion into the temporal spectra of dark space, ready to reacquaint myself with this phenomenal work before bringing it, and two of the six percussionists who will be performing it in Melbourne later this month, to you on Sunday night on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne!

07/08/2024

I didn’t know that Antiphysis is actually a thing, but it seems that it is, and Hugues Dufourt seems to have seen its growing place in modern life when he wrote this astonishing piece way back in 1978. Listen in for it on this coming Sunday night’s edition of The Sound Barrier on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne!

05/08/2024

This is a big piece. The pulsations of space, no less. I’ll be bringing it to you on the airwaves next weekend, as well as chatting with two of the six percussionists from the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) who will be performing it in Melbourne at the end of August. Six percussionists and the recorded sounds of pulsars, all surrounding the audience with the rhythms of the cosmos. It’s Gérard Grisey’s ‘Le Noir de l’Étoile’, and here are its cover, first, middle, and last pages.

05/08/2024

As usual, here is the link to the audio, details, plus my usual blurb, of last night’s edition of The Sound Barrier, with Liza Lim’s vibrant embrace and musical invigoration of primal and endangered language, ‘Mother-Tongue’, and Pierre Boulez’s transmutation of Mallarmé’s poetry into transcendent sound unfolding from foggy night and returning back to it, ‘Pli selon pli’. If you missed it, want to hear it again, or listened but weren’t quite yet convinced, here it is to win you over anew, again, or at last!

Avant-Garde & Experimental with Ian Parsons

04/08/2024

Linguistic, musical selfie …

04/08/2024

CDs, running sheet, and scores for me to follow while musical magic floats, fold by fold, for you across the airwaves and cyberspace. Packing now for radio tonight on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne!

02/08/2024

Language ... not just set to music but transmuted into music. Two masterpieces: by Liza Lim and by Pierre Boulez, coming up this weekend on The Sound Barrier PBS 106.7FM Melbourne. Tune in Sunday night at 10.00 PM (AEST) or log on live or afterwards! As usual you can check out the details here on the show's website ... https://www.pbsfm.org.au/program/the-sound-barrier/2024-08-04/22-00-00

30/07/2024

‘la mort’ … the soprano’s final two words, the last barely whispered, of Boulez’s ‘Pli selon pli’. Then a brutal blow of a chord hammers, slices the music into silence, just as it had burst it into sound 70 minutes earlier. Here it is in the composer’s astonishingly neat, minute, handwriting in this, the penultimate version of the score, where different coloured notation indicated different degrees of freedom for the performers. He ultimately changed his mind about the freedoms, but the colour is still there, ablaze, in the music. Another teaser, then, for this weekend’s radio show.

30/07/2024

A soprano sings, in long pausing syllables, of a kind of floating nothingness (Of sleep? Of death? Of love?) while a handful of instruments - harp, vibraphone, piano, celeste, and quiet percussion - bubble tiny fractal kaleidoscopes here and there, as magical language doubles itself into music in the middle of the middle part of Pierre Boulez’s ‘Pli selon pli’. Coming up on the airwaves this weekend.

29/07/2024

After must discussion last week of its opening chord, I thought it worth shifting onwards a couple of bars to its opening line: ‘I bring you this child of an Idumaean night!’ is how it is translated in my newly-arrived collection of Mallarmé’s poetry. It is the first line of his ‘Don du poème’ (‘Gift of the poem’) and also of Pierre Boulez’s ‘Pli selon pli’ (‘Fold by fold’), sung here in a kind of warm, unadorned openness by a solo soprano against quiet harmonic strings, hushed meandering chords in woodwind and brass, and pin-pricks of notes quietly touching each syllable of this secret nocturnal gift of language and music.

29/07/2024

A well-timed arrival in the mail, after last night’s radio show presenting music inspired by Baudelaire and preparing for next week’s show, with Pierre Boulez’s masterpiece tribute to this guy:

28/07/2024

Baudelairean selfie …

28/07/2024

Don’t forget to tune in to PBS 106.7FM Melbourne tonight at 10.00 PM (AEST) (or log on from anywhere in the world to listen live or later online) as I take you into the poetry of Baudelaire via the music of Diamanda Galás, Alban Berg, and Henri Dutilleux (plus a little bit of Rimbaud via the recently departed Wolfgang Rihm, a late and sad addition to the show’s schedule).

27/07/2024

Remembering Wolfgang Rihm, who died yesterday, from six years ago, in Lucerne, amongst other friends, both gone and still with us. Always thankful for the music that is left behind.

26/07/2024

Two bits of Berg’s Baudelaire coming up this weekend on your radio or online on PBS 106.7FM Melbourne: 19th-century Paris, via 20th-century Vienna, flourishes in the 21st-century space that is global radio. An Olympian feat like no other!

26/07/2024

Speaking of amazing transmutation of language into music, as I was I earlier, here I am now listening to their transmutation into each other: from this brilliant trio of CDs of Liza Lim’s operas and vocal works, tonight I’m filling the house with her 2005 Song Cycle, ‘Mother Tongue’. Words by Patricia Sykes, drawing from ancient language lying on the brink of extinction, sung with staggering force by Piia Pauliina Komsi, with the always-gobsmacking virtuosity of ELISION Ensemble, and of course the music of Liza Lim that imbues everything it takes on with pulsating, invigorating, sentient life. Language becomes music; music becomes language. And the nearly-lost breathes anew.

26/07/2024

The truly staggering first and last pages of Pierre Boulez’s ‘Pli selon pli’. Poetry not just set, but transmuted, into music. And not this week, but soon, I’ll be bringing you these two pages, along with the 292 that lie between them, via the airwaves.

25/07/2024

As foreshadowed, music inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s bold poetry collection, Les Fleurs du mal, this weekend on The Sound Barrier: recaptured in the diverse sounds Diamanda Galás, Alban Berg, and Henri Dutilleux. Check out the link for all the details … https://www.pbsfm.org.au/program/the-sound-barrier/2024-07-28/22-00-00

25/07/2024

And one more Baudelairean musical link coming up this weekend on the airwaves that carry the sound barrier. Full details online tomorrow!

24/07/2024

Baudelaire’s fleurs du mal blossom in another two musical luminaries this coming weekend on the sound-barrier-breaking airwaves …