Peter Sculthorpe passed away at the age of 85 on Friday. As Australia’s best known composer of classical contemporary music, this gives us pause to reflect on the legacy of his music and also upon the…
Lana Del Rey is so boring. The most interesting thing about her is the gorgeous, Prell-girl hair that frames her expressionless face in videos and photographs. In interviews, she likes to complain about…
Walt Disney is, to many people, the most influential person who has been in film. And after all, he garnered the most accolades, receiving as many as 59 Oscar nominations. But there’s another film titan…
The Proms are upon us again. For the next two months world-class classical music will fill the Royal Albert Hall, where standing tickets cost only £5 on the day. Failing that, our radio waves and various…
Paul McCartney has released five of his classic post-Beatles albums as tablet apps. Band on the Run, RAM, McCartney, McCartney 2, and Wings Over America contain interviews, video footage, artwork and photos…
The BBC Proms, with justification, is flaunted as the world’s largest and most significant annual music festival. A bronze bust of the conductor Sir Henry Wood, is placed in front of the organ facing the…
Put Britney Spears into a YouTube search and the third auto-fill on the list is “Britney Spears without Autotune”. Auto-Tune has become the music industry equivalent of doping in the Tour de France circa…
Rap music is a transnational genre with many socially and culturally aware artists pursuing important collaborative projects – not least a current pairing in south-west Sydney. Indigenous rapper Izzy (Jacob…
Today, indie-rock, indie-folk, indie-dance, indie-hip-hop and even indie-classical are common terms used to describe the sonically discernible offshoots of an evolving genre once referred to as “indie…
For this weekend only, Balado in Perthshire is transformed into the fifth largest town in Scotland as it hosts the annual T In The Park music festival. The event this year sees a zero tolerance approach…
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Taylor Swift in which the singer-songwriter provocatively claims “…the music industry is not dying … it is just coming alive”. Her message of optimism…
Australian singer-songwriter Sia’s new album 1000 Forms of Fear has been released internationally today, accompanied by a deluge of media reporting her story: she’s one of a handful of the most successful…
Jonas Kaufmann, currently the world’s hottest tenor, is a freak. Kaufmann, who will sing at the Sydney Opera House during his first Australian visit next month, has broken the mould for what might be expected…
Matthew Wade, Australian National University and Maria Hynes, Australian National University
The Sydney-based Hillsong Church will today wrap up its annual conference, an enormous production of spectacle and a heady mix of the sacred and the secular. In Australia, where religious expression tends…
Let’s be clear: from Spotify to Pandora, streamed music is killing downloads, and that’s bad for artists and music lovers. The opposition between art and commerce has been a defining feature of the history…
Beyonce recently topped Forbes’s celebrity power list. “Who runs the world?” they ask. “In entertainment, it’s Beyonce.” This resonates particularly with me, since for the last few years I’ve been offering…
For many people, enjoying music results in noticeable physical reactions – sweaty palms or a shiver down the spine. Music can cause the release of dopamine in your body, which provides a feeling of immense…
By now you’ll be aware that the legendary soul singer Bobby Womack died on Friday, aged 70. As with the death of many cultural “greats”, social media and traditional media have been united in singing his…
You have probably felt the power of music to lift you out of yourself. Perhaps you were in a magnificent cathedral, listening to a choral mass. Maybe you were at a music festival where the music made you…
Why do people go to Glastonbury? No, it’s not a rhetorical question. Once you take away socialising, camping, sex, drugs, fast food, crystal healing, herbal remedies, face painting and sunburn/mudsliding…