Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Saturday 17 December
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
It took 25 years for Richard Wagner to write Der Ring des Nibelungen (the Ring Cycle); presumably he was hoping people would like it. But did he anticipate that his masterpiece would be an enduring source of obsession for people in the 21st Century?
For this conversation, we’re bringing celebrated American radio producer, former film composer and Ring Cycle devotee Jad Abumrad together with one of the world’s foremost authorities on Wagner, Heath Lees. Taking the Ring Cycle as their starting point, the pair will discuss music, obsession and identity.
Why and how does music hold power over us? What does extraordinary music do to our brains? And what does identifying with a work like the Ring Cycle mean personally, socially and even politically?
Hosted by Casey Bennetto.
Presented in partnership with Opera Australia.
Featuring
Jad Abumrad
Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on 524 stations across the US and downloaded more than 9 million times a month as a podcast. Most days, Radiolab is the second most popular podcast, just behind This American Life.
Abumrad did most of his growing up in Tennessee, before studying creative writing and music composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. Following graduation, Abumrad wrote music for films, and reported and produced documentaries for a variety of local and national public radio programs.
In 2002, Abumrad began tinkering with an idea for a new kind of radio program, an open-ended radio 'laboratory'. Radiolab has since evolved into one of public radio’s most popular programs. Abumrad hosts the program with Robert Krulwich and also serves as its lead producer, composer and managing editor.
Alongside his radio work, Abumrad continues to work as a composer and remixer. His music is currently being performed across the country.
Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called 'a new aesthetic' in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews and sound effects into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism or the legal foundation for the war on terror.
In 2010, Radiolab was awarded the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award and in 2011 Abumrad was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). The MacArthur Foundation website says: 'Abumrad is inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story.' In 2015 the Radiolab episode ‘60 Words’ was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award.
Heath Lees
Heath Lees is an academic, musicologist, broadcaster and the founder of the Wagner Society of New Zealand.
Casey Bennetto
Casey Bennetto is an award-winning writer, musician and radio broadcaster. He wrote the musical KEATING!, hosts the program Superfluity on Melbourne’s 3RRR, and has appeared in places as diverse as ABCTV’s Spicks and Specks, the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House.
Born in 1969, Bennetto spent his formative years amongst the fragrant meadows and blossoming malls of Greensborough, Melbourne.
He made his way to university, procured a BA and worked variously as a proofreader, a copywriter, an IT specialist and as the lead singer in the band Skin, which garnered national commercial airplay for their 1994 EP, Waking Up With You.
As part of the ‘Drowsy Drivers’ project, in 2004 Casey wrote a musical theatre biography of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, KEATING!.
In late 2008, Casey premiered a new project as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival: A Largely Fanciful History Of The Spiegeltent, in which he also starred; he also wrote and performed in 2009's Evening and provided the songs for the ever-threatening Christmas pantomime The Terminativity in 2010–11. He served as dramaturge on Eddie’s Shane Warne: The Musical as well as making contributions to Company B’s The Adventures Of Snugglepot And Cuddlepie and Die Roten Punkte’s Super Musikant and Kunst Rock.
He scored both series of Amanda Brotchie and Adam Zwar's Lowdown and was nominated for an AACTA with Shellie Morris and Tim Cole for work on the 2014 musical documentary Prison Songs. He appeared with Alan Brough as underappreciated alternative rock icons The Narelles in 2015, and has hosted A Swingin' Bella Christmas for the past five years. He has hosted The Show Of The Year for the Wheeler Centre since the show's inception in 2013.
Most recently, he scored the ABC TV series Get Krack!n and is currently working on several things at once, obviously to the detriment of all of them.
Casey has also hosted a regular show on 3CR, worked extensively for PBS FM and made many appearances on 774 ABC Melbourne as host, co-host and guest.
His appearances on ABC TV’s Spicks And Specks resurface occasionally to shame him.