RNZ: Saturday Morning

Andrew Withington is musical director and conductor of the New Zealand Secondary Students Choir - a 60-strong chorus of teenagers who work with top vocal and acting coaches and perform across the country and around the world. He has just completed his PhD which involved creating his own system on how to teach choirs to sing more reliably and consistently in tune. He joins Kim to explain how his method works, and to play some of his favourite music. NZSSC will once again sing at the official ANZAC Day service at Pukeahu Park this year, and give two cathedral concerts in Wellington next week.

Mass whale strandings are relatively common in New Zealand, but we don't yet know enough about what happens to the marine mammals when we intervene, says Dr Karen Stockin from Massey University's Marine Research Group.

Poet, novelist, performer, librettist, and one-time presidential candidate Eileen Myles moved to New York to be a poet in 1974. They found fame as part of the St Mark's Poetry Project, studying with the likes of Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. Their poetry has appeared in The New Yorker and Paris Review amongst others, while more than a dozen volumes of poetry and fiction have also been published. Myles will be appearing at this year's Auckland Writers Festival to talk about Afterglow, a memoir of their late dog Rosie.

Francis Wade is a UK foreign correspondent who is a Myanmar specialist. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Asia Times Online, Foreign Policy, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He previously worked as an editor and reporter for the Democratic Voice of Burma, an exiled Burmese news organisation based in Thailand. His latest book is Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim 'Other', which examines the origins of Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment in Myanmar - sentiment that has recently led more than half a million Rohingya people to flee the country for neighbouring Bangladesh. Wade will be appearing at this year's Auckland Writers Festival.

The United States is living through an inequality crisis which is distorting and weakening its society, says Jeffrey Sachs, world-renowned professor of economics, leader in sustainable development, and senior UN advisor.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

Tony Backhouse was a founding member of The Crocodiles, and after the band's demise in 1981, moved to Australia and continued playing, performing and arranging with a range of Trans-Tasman artists including Dave Dobbyn, Tim Finn, Renee Geyer and Joe Walsh. He moved into a cappella and gospel music in the mid-1980s, and has gone on to compose and arrange for a cappella choirs, as well as teaching and touring those interested to areas of the world in which gospel choirs are popular including the southern states of the US. He also performs and records with pianist/composer Peter Dasent under the Blessed Relief umbrella, with Fane Flaws in No Engine and with both Peter Dasent and Fane Flaws as The Bend.

Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974. During the 80s her family fled Iraq after Saddam's forces attacked the Kurds with chemical weapons. In 1993, Hardi was granted refugee status in England where she went on to study Psychology and Philosophy. She attended Oxford, London and Kent Universities, and was a Research Fellow at Oxford, before returning to her home city of Sulaimani in 2014 to teach English, and to found the region's groundbreaking Center for Gender and Development Studies. Her latest volume of poetry is called Considering the Women. Choman Hardi will be appearing the Auckland Writers Festival in May.

Zurich-born, Munich-based Otto Künzli is one of Europe's most renowned jewellers. His work is described as "minimalist, yet meticulously crafted work referencing cultural phenomena", including a recurring favourite theme making fun of the stereotypical symbol of the heart. Künzli also has an accomplished academic career spanning over twenty years. As director of the Jewellery department at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich from 1991 to 2014, he taught a number of prominent contemporary jewellers including Lisa Walker, Karl Fritsch and Helen Britton. Otto is coming to New Zealand to support the Dowse Art Muesuem's international contemporary jewellery show The Language of Things: Meaning and Value in Contemporary Jewellery.

Joel Solomon chairs Renewal Funds, Canada's largest mission venture capital firm, at $98m assets under management, almost all in the organic foods and distribution, green tech and independent media space. Early in his career Solomon served as National Youth Coordinator in Jimmy Carter's 1976 Presidential campaign, but entered the world of business when he inherited $50,000 in 1983 and invested it into an organic yogurt, eventually selling it to dairy giant Danone for an estimated $180 million. Joel Solomon is a member of numerous boards and taskforces and has recently written The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism. He's been in New Zealand to speak at the New Frontiers event in Upper Hutt, an event devised and run by cashed-up Silicon Valley millionaire brothers Matthew and Brian Monahan.

The effects of climate change on the lands of the Pacific are more complicated than tiny islands disappearing into the sea, says Auckland University professor Paul Kench. His team have discovered atolls like Tuvalu are actually growing in size.

Dave Goelz is an American puppeteer and voice actor who has been one of the lead Muppet performers for over 40 years, performing Gonzo, Zoot, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Beauregard and several other Muppet characters, as well as succeeding the role of Waldorf from Jim Henson. His non-Disney Henson credits include Fraggle Rock (as Boober Fraggle, Uncle Travelling Matt, Philo and others), The Animal Show and The Secret Life of Toys, and numerous other roles. Dave Goelz is in New Zealand for the Jim Henson Retrospectacle, and will give a talk on his many decades as a Muppeteer on Sunday April 15th (details here), as well as a number of other appearances, see here. https://www.thejimhensonretrospectacle.co.nz/events/becoming-real-a-muppet-performers-journey/

The Australian cricket controversy raged on this week as commentators compared the fury and tears over ball tampering with the relatively muted response to the abusive behaviour towards women of some high profile sportsmen. Zoe George is a RNZ journalist, producer and presenter, and she also hosts Fair Play, a monthly podcast produced for RNZ in partnership with global women's sports network WISP Sports. Fair Play covers all aspects of New Zealand women in sport, including the way the sporting world treats women as individuals, athletes and as sports fans. George is a former international cricket administrator.

Dr Andrew Williams is a urologist with sub-specialist training in robotics and complex cancer surgery. He has received numerous awards and research grants and published many articles in peer reviewed journals. Williams works as a consultant urologist at Auckland District Health Board and Counties Manukau District Health Board. He is a member of the Ministry of Health prostate cancer workforce and medical advisor for the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Testicular Cancer NZ. He has previously chaired the NZ Board of Urology and recently been appointed as an examiner for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.

Simon Wilson writes on politics, culture, urban design, the environment, food and other matters, and has held many positions including editor of Metro magazine, Auckland editor at the current affairs and culture website The Spinoff, editor of Cuisine and Consumer magazines, chief subeditor of NZ Listener and a commissioning editor at book publisher AH & AW Reed during a 30-year career. Currently a senior writer with the NZ Herald, Wilson discovered he had prostate cancer just prior to Christmas 2017, and has chronicled his experience with the disease in a column in the newspaper.