Episodes

EpisodeTitleFirst
Broadcast
RepeatedComments
20080224Actress Fiona Shaw introduces a selection of poetry and prose on the theme of animals.
2008050420081123 (R3)With Alison Steadman and Timothy West reading a selection of verse on the theme of food and drink.

Producers Notes

This edition of Words and Music is about Food. Mussels, Chocolates, Anchovies, Peaches, Whipped Cream, Oysters, Trout, Pies and Eggs are just some of the ingredients.

Alison Steadman reads Moules a la Mariniere by Elizabeth Garrett, Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath and Blackberry-picking by Seamus Heaney.

Timothy West's poems include Hillaire Belloc's On Food, Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish and Ben Jonson's Inviting a Friend to Supper.

Interwoven with the poetry is music such as Schubert's Trout Quintet, the chorus in Strauss' Die Fledermaus where the guests look forward to supper, and Biber's Mensa Sonora (music suitable to accompany aristocratic dining)

There's the 'Rice aria' from Rossini's Tancredi, which the food loving composer apparently composed whilst waiting for his risotto to cook and Nellie Melba, the soprano who gave her name to the Peach Melba, sings the Melba Waltz.

Plus popular food music by Fats Waller (Hold Tight I Want Some Seafood Mama), The Beatles (Savoy Truffle) and Bob Dylan (Country Pie).

Perhaps the most peculiar choice is a medieval song about eggs

Tim Prosser (producer)

Details of readings and music

JOHANN HERMANN SCHEIN

Allemande from Banchetto Musicale No 2 in D

Hesperion XX, Jordi Savall

Tr 10 CDC 7492242

JOHN UPDIKE

Alison Steadman (reader)

JOHANN STRAUSS II

A Supper-party's in store for us tonight

Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus

Herbert von Karajan

CD 2 tr 1 EMI 5670742

Timothy West (reader)

HEINRICH IGNAZ FRANZ VON BIBER

The Purcell Quartet

Tr 4 Chandos 0748

ANON

Peas

NABOKOV

A Literary Dinner

HOLD TIGHT (I WANT SOME SEAFOOD MAMA)

MATTHIAS GREITER

Von Eyren (On Eggs - goose eggs, ducks' eggs, crabs' eggs, pigeon's eggs.)

The Orlando Consort

Tr 20 HMU 907314

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Andantino from The Trout Quintet in A (Op.114)

Alfred Brendel and the Cleveland Quartet

Tr 4 Philips 420 907 2

ERIK SATIE

Last movement from 3 Pieces of Pear

Dominique Merlet and Jean-Pierre Armengaud (pianos)

Tr 17 MAN 4882

LOUIS SIMPSON

GEORGE HARRISON

Savoy Truffle (from the White Album)

CD 2 tr 10 CDS 746443 8

CAROL ANN DUFFY

Chocs

TCHAIKOVSKY

Chocolate (Spanish Dance)

The London Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons

CD 2 tr 3 CDS 7546002

WALLACE STEVENS

A Dish of Peaches in Russia

ARDITI

Se saran rose (The Melba Waltz)

Nellie Melba (soprano)

Tr 16 Naxos 8 110335

HILAIRE BELLOC

Anchovies (from the Quatre Hors-D'Oeuvre)

Lorenzo Bavaj (piano)

Tr 6 GB 50122

RUTH PITTER

Damson Boy

TELEMANN

Tafelmusic (Table Music)

Conclusion in D major

Musica Antiqua Koln, Reinhard Goebel

Di tanti palpiti (Rice Aria from Tancredi)

Vesselina Kasarova (soprano)

Munich Radio Orchestra, Roberto Abbado

Tr 6 RCA 09026 683492

CZESLAW MILOSZ

The Dining Room

SAINT-SAENS

The Wedding Cake Waltz

Jean-Philippe Collard (piano)

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Andre Previn

Tr 4 EMI CDC 797572

CHRISTOPHER SMART

Epistle to Mrs Tyler

Si quis amat (A medieval round on table manners)

Tr 7 HMU 907314

OSIP MANDELSTROM

Ice Cream

RICHARD STRAUSS

Dance of the Small Pralines from Schlagobers (Whipped Cream)

Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Jarvi

Tr 7 CHAN 9606

Alison Steadman and Timothy West read verse on a culinary theme. With music by Schubert.

20080921Producer's Note - Ode to Autumn

To celebrate the first day of autumn this week's Words and Music is devoted to what Keats called ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'. Autumn in the countryside is celebrated too in John Clare's ‘Autumn' and Percy Grainger's ‘Harvest Hymn'. For Ted Hughes it is a more mysterious time of year - the frost on an ‘October Dawn' leads to a premonition of an ice age where ‘mammoth and sabre-tooth celebrate reunion'. A harsher and more mystic season is also evoked in ‘The name of it is autumn' by a poet much admired by Hughes, Emily Dickinson. And, for another American poet, Robert Frost, the ripe apples unharvested and falling from the tree leads him to a plea for man to resist ‘managing' nature and to cherish the unknown and unexpected in life. Apples too In Patrick Kavanagh's beautiful poem ‘The Long Garden' in which the memory of a garden full of golden apples takes him back to his Irish childhood ‘where the sun was always setting on the play'. But, for Yeats, the sight of the wild swans at Coole as he walks through the woods with the trees in ‘their autumn beauty' reminds him of the passing of time as he reaches the end of his life

The music in ‘Ode to Autumn' takes us from the Italy of Vivaldi's ‘L'Autumno' to the tango of Piazzolla's Buenos Aires autumn in ‘Otono Porteno' and the Russian baccanale in Glazunov's ‘L'Automne'. The programme ends with Mahler's masterpiece ‘Der Einsame im Herbst', written after the death of his daughter, a lament for the passing of beauty and the loneliness of the individual in the face of death.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Readers: Rachel Atkins and Nicholas Farrell.

Details of Readings and Music

ADELAIDE CRAPSEY

November Night

Rachel Atkins (reader)

ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV

L'Automne - Petit Adagio

The Seasons

Oscar Shumsky - violin

The Scottish National Orchestra

Neeme Jarvi - conductor

CHANDOS CHAN8596

Nicholas Farrell (reader)

BBC Philharmonic

Richard Hickox - conductor

CHANDOS CHAN9493

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA

Maria de Buenos Aires

BELLA MUSICA BMCD317033

PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY

November - Troika

Detroit Symphony Orchestra

CHANDOS CHAN9514

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau - baritone

Alfred Brendel - piano

PHILIPS 4114212

Gathering Leaves

GERALD FINZI

Shortening Days

Who are these children and other songs

Mark Padmore - tenor

Roger Vignoles - piano

HYPERION CDA67459

JOHN KEATS

ANTONIO VIVALDI

The Four Seasons

Nigel Kennedy - violin

Berliner Philharmoniker

EMI 5576660

WALLACE STEVENS

Autumn Refrain

LUIS TINOCO

Autumn Wind - moderato

Music for Wind Quintet

Galliard Ensemble

MERIDIAN CDE84429

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Vagabond

Songs of Travel

Benjamin Luxon - baritone

David Willison - piano

CHANDOS CHAN8475

W.B. YEATS

October - Autumn Song

MARY OLIVER

Fall Song

FRANZ HAYDN

Der Herbst

Leipziger Kammerorchester

NAXOS 8557600001

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

ROGER QUILTER

Autumn Evening

Songs by Roger Quilter

John Mark Ainsley - tenor

Malcolm Martineau - piano

HYPERION CDA66878

SEAMUS HEANEY

Exposure

MAX RICHTER

Memory House

BBCLJ30022

PHILIP LARKIN

And now the leaves suddenly lose strength

GUSTAV MAHLER

Brigitte Fassbaender -mezzosoprano

Francisco Araiza - tenor

Wiener Philharmoniker

Carlo Maria Guilini - conductor

ORFEO C654052B

A sequence of music interspersed with readings of poetry and prose on the theme of autumn.

20090705Cheryl Campbell and Douglas Hodge explore the world of science in poetry, prose and music.
20090719As part of the BBC Poetry Season, a selection of poems recommended by BBC Radio 3 presenters. Including work by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, WH Auden, Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Maya Angelou, and music by Bach, Shostakovich, Nina Simone, Schubert, Martinu and Yasmin Levy.

The choices include Jez Nelson on Langston Hughes's The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Rob Cowan on I Could Not Stop by Emily Dickinson, Fiona Talkington on Sonnet XLVII by Edna St Vincent Millay and Stephen Johnson on September 1, 1939 by WH Auden. The readers are Tamsin Greig and Alex Jennings.

As part of the BBC Poetry Season, poems and music chosen by BBC Radio 3 presenters.

20100214Occidental as well as oriental - Turkey has often been disputed territory. It's the site of Homer's Troy; much of Xenophon's famous expedition takes place on its soil; and the country and its people have attracted admirers like the poets Yeats and John Ash as well as detractors like T.E.Lawrence. Byron as well as Lady Wortley Montagu have fallen under the spell of its customs and more recent visitors such as Rose Macaulay and Neal Ascherson have been both beguiled and bemused by their experience of the country.There's music to match from Mozart, Dave Brubeck, Arvo Part and Cantemir and the actors Ruth Wilson and Toby Jones are ready to set sail for Byzantium and beyond.

A portrait in music, poetry and prose of Turkey, seen through the eyes of the outsider.

150 Years Of The Royal Albert Hall2021040420211226 (R3)From Bach to The Beatles, beat poetry to a boxing match - The Royal Albert Hall marked its 150th anniversary this year and this Words and Music features readings performed by Royal Albert Hall regulars Josie Lawrence and Petroc Trelawny. We include moving and amusing moments from the Albert Hall archive, including Emmeline Pankhurst calling on her followers to meet once more at the Hall on the eve of her trial, and a former Head of Music at the BBC who was outraged by a young lady who exposed more than he felt was necessary to Prommers in 1977. You'll hear archive recordings of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading at the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965, and Sally Alexander tells the story of storming the stage at the 1970 Miss World Contest. The rich musical history of the hall is reflected in a soundtrack which includes music by Prince Albert himself, as well as Elgar conducting Yehudi Menuhin, Hugh Masekela (who appeared when Nelson Mandela was honoured there in 2013), Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, Mike Oldfield and Shirley Bassey who have all famously performed there.

Extract from The Royal Albert Hall Frieze

Extract from Queen Victoria's diary

Extract from In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Extract from The Daily Telegraph, June 30th 1914

On The Eve of Her Trial. A Message from Mrs Pankhurst

From Royal Albert Hall: A celebration in 150 unforgettable moments

The Convergence of the Twain by Thomas Hardy

From Royal Albert Hall Programme for The Chelsea Arts Club Annual Ball 1936

Some Bright Elegance read by Kayo Chingonyi

Extract from letter by Sir Henry Wood

Extract from I Am Waiting by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin

Extract from Who Be Kind To by Alan Ginsberg

Extract from letter by Robert Ponsonby

Extract from The Daily Mirror

Josie Lawrence and Petroc Trelawny with readings and music performed at the London venue.

15-04-200720080316Say, what shall we dance?: a sequence of music, poetry and prose on the theme of dance.
A Beat In Time20071021Actors Greta Scacchi and Greg Wise delve into poems on the subject of time: lives ticking away as the poets contemplate ageing and change, the rhythm of life and clocks themselves - objects that rule our lives.

With poems and prose by Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, Wendy Cope, Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare and music by Haydn, Ravel, John Cage, Bach and Philip Glass.

Poems on the subject of time, ageing, change, the rhythm of life and clocks, set to music.

A Beat In Time20100725Actors Greta Scacchi and Greg Wise delve into poems on the subject of Time: lives ticking away as the poets contemplate ageing and change, the rhythm of life, and clocks themselves - objects that rule our lives. With poems and prose by Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare and music by Haydn, Ravel, John Cage, Bach and Philip Glass.

A selection of music and poetry on a theme of Time.

A Celebration Of Sport2015062820200315 (R3)The joy, drama and human folly of the sporting calendar from rugby to the Olympics. The readers are Robert Powell and Pippa Bennett-Warner. As people recover from activities for this year's BBC Sports Relief, Words and Music takes us through the British summer sporting calendar from the optimism of April and the Grand National through the three-jerseyed days of the early cricket season into the warmth of Wimbledon, the heat of the British Open Golf, the elegance of Henley and culminating with competitors leaving for the Olympics in June.

Music from Warlock, Weber, Carl Davis and William Alwyn blends with the sometimes surprising words of Shakespeare, Milton and the many writers on sport from the heyday of Edwardian endeavour to the 20th-century frivolity of PG Wodehouse and John Betjeman and on to the enthusiasms of Alison Uttley and the beautiful reflections of the very best cricket writers like Neville Cardus and all-rounder Simon Barnes, with poetry from Roger McGough and John Arlott.

Producer: Tom Alban

Readings

Simon Barnes -The Times: 28th July 2014

John Milton -from Paradise Lost Book 2

Hugh McIlvanney - The Saga of Red Rum from McIlvanney on Horseracing

Alan Ross - from Stanley Matthews

Anon - from A Gravestone at Llanfair Church, South Wales

Alison Uttley - from Carts and Candlestick

Robin Daniels - Cardus Celebrant of Beauty, a Memoir

CLR James - from Beyond a Boundary

William Shakespeare - Henry V, Act I sc 2

E.M.Forster - from A Room With A View - Chapter 15

John Betjeman - from A Subaltern?s Love Song

Steve Fairbairn - The Oarsman?s Song

John Betjeman - Seaside Golf

Roger McGough - The Railings

John Arlott - On a Great Batsman

Alison Uttley - from Carts and Candlesticks

A E Houseman - To An Athlete Dying Young

The joy, drama and human folly of the sporting calendar, from rugby to the Olympics.

A Celebration Of The Life Of Bach20171224The words of Bach and those who knew him. With readers Roger Allam and David Annen.
A Celebration Of The Life Of Bach2017122420240331 (R3)The words of Bach and those who knew him. With readers Roger Allam and David Annen.

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A Change In The Weather20080330Mark Strong and Niamh Cusack read poetry on the theme of the weather.
A Chinese Anthology20080615Wendy Kweh and David Yip read from two millennia of Chinese poetry covering topics such as love, longing, loss, revolution and protest - with an early poem about a hangover. Plus music from Debussy, Mahler and Puccini as well as Chinese classical music and folk songs.

Part of Radio 3's Focus on China season.

Wendy Kweh and David Yip read works from two millennia of Chinese poetry.

A Christmas Menagerie20221225Robert Lindsay and Shiloh Coke perform prose and poetry alongside music depicting a range of animals and birds: from `a partridge in a pear tree` to Dylan Thomas's cats, UA Fanthorpe's donkey to Scrooge's turkey, Bach's Cantata Sheep May Safely Grace to Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep from the film White Christmas, Chuck Berry's Run Rudolph Run, to Haydn's symphony No. 83, 'The Hen'.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

Free Thinking broadcast a discussion about Bestiaries and animals which you can find on BBC Sounds and available to download as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Readings

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Christmas Every Day and Other Stories, by William Dean Howells

Help Wanted, by Timothy Tocher

The Christmas Angel, by Abbie Farwell Brown

The Three Low Masses, by Alphonse Daudet

Talking Turkeys, by Benjamin Zephaniah

Tess of the d'Ubervilles, by Thomas Hardy

A Child's Christmas in Wales, a story, by Dylan Thomas (read by the poet)

What the Donkey Saw, by U.A. Fanthorpe

Robert Lindsay and Shiloh Coke with a range of animals from sheep to turkeys and reindeer.

A Great Exhibition2011112720130713 (R3)This Words and Music is a celebration of The Great Exhibition 1851. The backbone of the programme is made up from descriptions of the rooms by Robert Hunt in his Companion to the Official Catalogue.

Scott Handy and Catherine Harvey read extracts from Robert Hunt together with poetry inspired by the exhibits on show. The display of locomotives in the Central Avenue, for example, leads here to William Carlos Williams' 'Overture to a Dance of Locomotives'. Similarly, China was represented by a model of a joss-house, which is depicted in the programme by Wang Wei's 'Toward the Temple of Heaped Fragrance' and Wordsworth's 'In My Mind's Eye a Temple, like a Cloud'.

The music includes Thomas Morley's 'Hard by a Crystal Fountain', Mosolov's 'Iron Foundry' and Bartok's 'Mikrokosmos'.

Scott Handy and Catherine Harvey read poetry and prose inspired by the Great Exhibition.

A Greek Odyssey20121202~Words And Music on the theme of Greece, from classical antiquity to modern day Greece, gripped by austerity.

Sian Phillips and Timothy West read the classical poetry of Euripides and Homer, defiant verses against the 1960s dictatorship by Nobel prize winner George Seferis, and contemporary poetry about Greece and the financial crisis.

Lord Byron champions Greek independence in The Isles of Greece, Gerald Durrell relives his childhood in Corfu in My Family and Other Animals, and Louis de Bernieres depicts life in Kefalonia during World War II in Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Modern day Greek poets have organised poetry demonstrations in Athens, and we hear Stamatis Polenakis' take on austerity in 'Poetry Does Not Suffice'.

Sian Phillips performs Medea's monologue from Euripides' tragedy and the great American-Greek soprano Maria Callas sings Medea in a famous live recording of Cherubini's opera from La Scala Milan in 1953, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Another world-renowned Greek soprano, Agnes Baltsa, sings traditional songs and we hear music played on the bouzouki and tambourin, native Greek instruments.

Mikis Theodorakis (born 1925) is one of the Greece's best-loved contemporary composers and his music for the film Zorba the Greek has achieved classic status. Iannis Xenakis is one of the most important post-war avant garde composers, who pioneered the use of mathematical models in music.

Music also includes Schubert's depiction of the Journey to Hades, Richard Strauss' opera Ariadne auf Naxos, Monteverdi's Orfeo, and Stravinsky's Greek ballet Apollo.

Producer: Timothy Prosser.

~Words And Music on the theme of Greece, with readings by Sian Phillips and Timothy West.

A Legend Of Good Women2012052020130407 (R3)Since ancient times poets, artists and composers have celebrated the ideal woman. Chaucer's famous poem, from which this programme takes its title, undermined and satirised this process: does abandonment, assault and suffering make for a 'good' woman and what place do the murderous Medea and Philomela have in the parade of virtuous femininity?

Oliver Dimsdale and Sian Thomas read poems by Tennyson, Carol Ann Duffy and Browning with music by Gluck, Sibelius, Handel and Stravinsky.

Producer: Natalie Steed

First broadcast in May 2012.

Texts and music on the theme of good women. Readers: Oliver Dimsdale and Sian Thomas.

A Silver Sea2015032220210627 (R3)I must down to the seas again' - the opening words of John Masefield's poem Sea Fever published in 1902. Today's Words and Music follows his suggestion, with readings by Julian Glover and Eleanor Tomlinson, which range from Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem Wreck of the Deutschland, a ship which foundered off the Kent coast in 1875 and Matthew Arnold's On Dover Beach, to Joseph Conrad's autobiographical book The Mirror of the Sea, to Kathleen Jamie's poem The Glass-hulled Boat. The music includes Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave, Flanders and Swann's Rockall, folk tunes by Julie Fowlis and Debussy's La Mer, which the composer wrote whilst staying at Eastbourne. The BBC Radio 3 Breakfast programme is currently asking listeners for suggestions of music inspired by the coastline of Britain to play each morning.

Producer: Tom Alban

Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave, Flanders and Swann's Rockall, Debussy's La Mer at Eastbourne.

A String Of Pearls2016121120171220 (R3)Pearls of Oyster, born of the new moon and harvested at great peril; pearls for tears and teeth, pearls flung round the neck of a lover; pearls of joy and pearls of sorrow; pearls of poetry and myth; Jude Akuwudike and Aysha Kala read the pearly words of Pliny and Keats, Shakespeare and Erasmus, Darwin and Steinbeck to the sound of Debussy and Bartok, Gershwin and Bruckner, Shankar and Britten.

Texts and music on the theme of pearls, with readings by Aysha Kala and Jude Akuwudike.

A Tribute To Hm Queen Elizabeth Ii20220911A special sequence of music and spoken words reflecting on the life and reign of HM Queen Elizabeth II, with readings by Juliet Stevenson and Damian Lewis alongside archive speeches by the Queen herself. Many of the writers and composers most closely associated with the Queen are represented, including all of her Poets Laureate and Masters of the Queen's Music, and the music includes some of the Queen's own favourite pieces.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Edmund Spenser - The Faerie Queene (excerpt)

John Masefield - Prayer for the Royal Marriage

Andrew Motion - Diamond Wedding

Carol Ann Duffy - The Crown

John Betjeman - Meditation on a Constable Picture

Vita Sackville-West - June 2nd 1953

Ted Hughes - A soul is a wheel

John Masefield - Lines on our Sovereign Lady's Return

Cecil Day-Lewis - Hornpipe

Ben Johnson - Every Man Out Of His Humour (excerpt)

William Shakespeare - Hamlet (excerpt)

Ted Hughes - Pibroch

Simon Armitage - The Bed

Douglas Dunn - Class Photograph

Andrew Motion - Hymn for the Golden Jubilee

Philip Larkin - In times when nothing stood

A sequence of music and readings reflecting on the life and reign of HM Queen Elizabeth II

A Woman's Lot20240303If we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality' In Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, the author summons up the image of Shakespeare's sister seizing her opportunities and today's Words and Music looks forward to International Women's Day on March 8th with a selection of fictional women challenging society's rules. Jessica Mitford's Hons and Rebels takes us to the Spanish Civil War, Sally Rooney and Aphra Behn imagine adulterous relationships, Warsan Shire writes in praise of Grace Jones and Athena steps into her chariot of fire in Emily Wilson's new translation of The Iliad. Music includes compositions by Emily Hall, Clara Schumann, Fatoumata Diawara, Cecilia McDowell and Hildegard of Bingen, and pieces arranged by or conducted by women including Alison Balsom, Rachel Podger, Barbara Hannigan and Emmanuelle Haim.

On March 8th Radio 3 has a special focus on women composing and performing music.

Producer: Hannah Sander

Greta Scacchi and Lydia Wilson with readings about women rebelling and questioning.

Ahead of International Women's Day, we explore expectations for women writers and composers trying to break the mould, including Virginia Woolf, Warsan Shire and Emily Hall.

Abundance2012021920121223 (R3)Music and poetry on the theme of abundance read by Nicholas Farrell and Hayley Carmichael.
After Life20131020A selection of poetry, prose and music by women and men who have lost loved ones.
After Shakespeare2014042720150101 (R3)Poetry, prose and music inspired by Shakespeare including words by T.S. Eliot, Michael Longley, Anna Akmatova, Sylvia Plath, James Joyce and Carol Ann Duffy and music by Sibelius, Frank Martin, Duke Ellington, Tchaikovsky, Michael Tippett and Loudon Wainwright III. The readers are Rory Kinnear and Adjoa Andoh.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Texts and music inspired by Shakespeare. Readers: Rory Kinnear and Adjoa Andoh.

Aftermath20140706From shellshock to women's suffrage, homecomings to war memorials, the League of Nations to Spanish flu, a sequence of poems, prose and music reflecting a world changed by war. James Wilby and Helen Baxendale read poems by Sassoon, Whitman and Gurney and excerpts from Pat Barker, Woodrow Wilson and contemporary documents, while the music includes works by Elgar, Ravel and Tippett.

Texts and music reflecting a world changed by war. Readers: James Wilby, Helen Baxendale.

All Aboard!2012060320180603 (R3)Robinson Crusoe is stranded without one, Yann Martel's Pi Patel is stranded with a tiger on one, and Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men are causing chaos mucking about on one. Boats feature frequently in literature and poetry as a means of exploring, escaping or just enjoying the water. Today's Words and Music features famous fictional boats along with important real life vessels such as Captain Cook's explorers, the Titanic, and those used during the Dunkirk landings. Extracts are read by Anne-Marie Duff and Jonathan Keeble and accompanied by nautical music from Wagner, Vaughan Williams, Debussy and Nick Drake.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

~Words And Music on the theme of boats. Readings by Anne-Marie Duff and Jonathan Keeble.

All Fingers And Thumbs20220904Fingers and thumbs define us - they can signify our identity and family heritage. One of the first things a baby does is suck its thumb, until Struwwelpeter's great tall tailor comes to cut it clean off.

Sylvia Plath contemplates her bleeding thumb stump, while Ted Hughes remembers her fingers leaping and somersaulting across the keyboard. There are magic fingers, hitchhiking thumbs, spin bowling experts and light-fingered thieves, with readings from Roald Dahl, Sarah Waters, Ian McEwan and Lorna Goodson - brought to life by Clare Perkins and Sean Barrett.

Musically, dextrous fingers predominate as players - from Martha Argerich to Anoushka Shankar - ply them with great skill. The piano, harp, drums and the thumb piano, the mbira are all on show with works from Rachmaninov, Sally Beamish and Thomas Ades.

Producer: Katy Hickman

READINGS:

Omar Khayyကm - ‘The Moving Finger Writes

Sinead Morrissey - Genetics

H. Frith and E.H. Allen - Chiromancy, Or the Science of Palmistry

Sylvia Plath - Cut

Ted Hughes - Fingers

Lorna Goodson - I Am Becoming My Mother

Darian Leader - Hands, What We Do With Them

Dr Heinrich Hoffmann - The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb

Roald Dahl - The Magic Finger

Ian McEwan - Lessons

Emily Dickinson - I Held A Jewel In My Fingers

Sir Thomas Wyatt - Of his love that pricked her Finger with a Needle

Thomas Hood - Song of the Shirt

Stephanie Norgate - Variations On A Plain Theme

E.T.A Hoffman, translated by Martyn Clarke - Musical Writings

F.N.S. Creek - Teach Yourself Cricket

Sarah Waters - Fingersmith

Hadara Bar-Nadav - Thumb

Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Trilling, sucking, spinning, plucking - fingers, and thumbs, do the talking.

All India Radio20090816A celebration of literature and music from the Asian subcontinent.
All India Radio20150920Texts and music celebrating literature and song from the Asian subcontinent.
All The World's A Stage2011050820111226 (R3)The lights, the greasepaint, the roar of applause: there's no business like show business and this week's Words and Music turns the spotlight on the theatre and showbiz. Actors have fascinated audiences from ancient Greece through to the groundlings of Shakespeare's Globe, on into modern movie houses; and the theatre has been both celebrated as a grand metaphor for life and denigrated as the the site of moral decay. Henry Goodman and Samantha Bond read from work by Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, John Dryden, T.S Eliot and Dorothy Parker, accompanied by the music of Puccini, Irving Berlin, Purcell, Sondheim and Thomas Ades.

Producer: Georgia Mann.

Texts and music related to theatre and showbusiness. With Henry Goodman and Samantha Bond.

Altitude20100724A sequence of poetry and music inspired by the world seen from a great height, the flight of birds and the romance of mountain tops.

Musical evocations of mountains by Sibelius, Strauss and Liszt sit with work by Shelley and John Evelyn. Anton Lesser and Lesley Sharp read works by Ted Hughes, Pablo Neruda and J.A. Baker which describe the world of birds in flight, and music by composers including Haydn, J.S. Bach and Richard Strauss evokes the same subject.

Texts and music inspired by the world seen from above, birds in flight, and mountain tops.

An American Landscape2009030120090927 (R3)On a cold, gusting morning of January 1961 the poet Robert Frost set out to read a specially composed poem at the inauguration of John F Kennedy, the man on whom all America ??s hopes were pinned. But the sun ??s glare and the newness of the poem robbed Frost of his ability, his confidence, to read. He fell back on a poem he ??d written in 1942. The Gift Outright explores in its few lines one of the deepest and darkest matters facing Americans: the nature of their brief relationship with the land, a land once occupied by others. The poem, read by Jeff Perry is followed by Virgil Thomson ??s film score The Plow That Broke the Plains, which was sponsored by the United States Resettlement Administration.

As the orchestrator of Gershwin ??s Rhapsody in Blue, Ferde Grofé couldn ??t have been closer to the heart of American music. In 1916, Grofé drove across the Arizona desert with a group of friends to watch the sun rise over the Grand Canyon. He was later inspired by the experience to compose his famous Grand Canyon Suite.

Some years before, in the late 1860 ??s John Wesley Powell, a soldier turned naturalist embarked on the first geological survey of the Grand Canyon. His journal, which starts as a dry analysis of rock samples and description of geological formations finally becomes a painting and a hymn of praise to this unique American landscape. I found writer and composer speaking in one language in their breathless excitement in the presence of the Grand Canyon. I think you ??ll agree that Grofé ??s music and Powell ??s journal exactly describe each other.

Etta Baker's Appalachian guitar music is followed by Copland ??s take on the same region: part of his ballet score Appalachian Spring. The White Mountains, part of the Appalachian mountains, the most rugged in New England, were visited in the 1830s by the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote an awe-inspiring account of his trip. His connection with the area was forever sealed by his death there on a subsequent visit many years later. Copland ??s classic orchestration of the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts ends this section and is itself topped off by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir ??s own version of the original hymn.

The composer Philip Glass has composed America with a photographer ??s eye, his unique, self-styled voice, mapping America and American life and shipping it across the world as the soundtrack of numerous films. His early score to The Photographer, unswerving in its forward drive is the adjunct to Robert Lowell ??s haunting poem, The Mouth of the Hudson, a description of a man standing on an outcrop above a railroad siding and watching the trains switching beneath him. It ??s a neutral description until the word  ??unforgivable ?? at the end.

The 20th century American composer Roy Harris was born in 1898 to poor parents, in a log cabin in Oklahoma, on Abraham Lincoln's birthday. He had the perfect opportunity to survey the American landscape as he worked for many years as a trucker, criss-crossing the continent. You can hear the lie of the land in his masterpiece Symphony No.3. I mixed the symphony with John Ashbery ??s poem Pyrography, an elliptical commentary of America, written to accompany a travelling exhibition of American landscape paintings.

We end with Charles Ives, possibly the composer who captured the spirit of America better than any other. Whilst Harris was a trucker, Ives ??s main job was in insurance. That was no bar to him writing his totally original and uncompromising musical reflection of the America he saw and heard. His Three Places in New England here prepares the way for Henry James ??s reflection on the New England landscape, which I have mixed with Ives ??s contemplative masterpiece The Unanswered Question. Appropriately, that piece ends the programme.

Paul Frankl

Producer

Actors Ian Barford and Jeff Perry read works on the theme of the American landscape.

An Autumn Walk2014092820181028 (R3)A selection of poetry and music to reflect autumn.
An Unquiet Mind20140713From the madwoman in her attic to the troubled king straining against the leashes of his medical attendants, the depiction of what has historically been called madness has been a common theme in art, music and literature. It has engaged both those who have sought to share their own experience of an unquiet mind and those who have used it to explore complexity, colour and difference in their subjects. Literary contributions in this programme include Cervantes' Don Quixote, Mr Rochester's sad, bad first wife, Anna Karenina and her self-destructive passion, and the Patrick Hamilton character who knows only that he must kill. There's a contemporary account of what it was like to be around George III as his grasp on reason slipped away, and readings about characters - such as Winston in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, driven mad by circumstances. We also look at collective madness, the greatest example of which must surely be war.

In music Berlioz describes obsessive love in his Symphonie Fantastique, Strauss depicts the absurdities of Don Quixote in his tone poem of the same name, and Peter Maxwell Davies has his own take on the madness of George III in his 8 Songs for a Mad King. There is also music by Britten, Gesualdo and Nick Drake.

Extracts are read by Katherine Parkinson and Greg Wise.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Texts and music on the theme of an unquiet mind. Readers: Katherine Parkinson, Greg Wise.

Ancient Greece2008122820101024 (R3)Poetry and music on the theme of Ancient Greece. Readings by Tim McMullan, Clare Higgins.
Animal Kingdom2020081620230212 (R3)Saint Saens, Tom Waits, Janacek and Laurence Crane provide some of the music as the actors Emily Bruni and Nicholas Farrell read from literature featuring animal characters by writers including George Orwell, Anna Sewell, Brian Jacques, Margaret Atwood and Roald Dahl.

You can find a recent Free Thinking discussion about donkeys available on BBC Sounds and as the Arts & Ideas podcast and other discussions available include programmes about cows and farming, Watership Down and rabbits, Dogs, and a conversation asking Should we Keep Pets?

Producer in Salford: Paul Frankl

Pieces read:

Animal Farm (extract) by George Orwell, read by Nicholas Farrell

Black Beauty (extract) by Anna Sewell, read by Emily Bruni

The Fantastic Mr Fox (extract) by Roald Dahl, read by Nicholas Farrell

Pig Song by Margaret Atwood, read by Emily Bruni

Watership Down by Richard Adams, read by Nicholas Farrell

The Lamb by William Blake, read by Emily Bruni

The Labrador Pact by Matt Haig, read by Nicholas Farrell

Redwall by Brian Jacques, read by Nicholas Farrell

An Old Cat's Dying Soliloquy by Anna Seward, read by Nicholas Farrell

Fire Bringer by David Clement Davis, read by Emily Bruni

The Donkey by GK Chesterton, read by Nicholas Farrell

The Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou, read by Nicholas Farrell

Dolphin Way by Mark Caney, read by Emily Bruni

Actors Emily Bruni and Nicholas Farrell read poems on lambs, cats, pigs and a donkey

Antarctica, From Shackleton To Happy Feet20240218Sir Ernest Shackleton - one of the most celebrated explorers of the Antarctic - was born in Co Kildare, Ireland on 15 February 1874. He moved to London as a boy, joining the Merchant Navy and became a Master Mariner. By the time he was in his 20s he had begun his career as a polar explorer. Shackleton is best known for the Endurance expedition in 1914 which was unsuccessful but the survival of his crew is now seen as a credit to his exceptional leadership and resilience. He was also a cultured man whose pioneering film, audio recording and photography planted ideas about the White Continent in our imaginations forever.

Antarctica contains the world's highest, driest, coldest and windiest places. It's inspired stories for centuries from Maori myth to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Doris Lessing. This unique landscape is the scene for memoir from Jenny Diski and Sara Wheeler as well as fiction from Beryl Bainbridge to Edgar Allan Poe and poetry from Derek Mahon to Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh. We will hear extracts from these writers alongside music from Vaughan Williams, Peter Maxwell Davies, Vangelis and Tanya Ekanyanka.

Produced in Salford by Olive Clancy

Readings and music inspired by the South Pole, in honour of Sir Ernest Shackleton

Jessica Cooper and John Lightbody are the readers for this celebration of Antarctica marking the 150 anniversary of Shackleton's birth

If you call to mind an image of Antarctica, it is likely you will come up with something informed by the heroic but ultimately unsuccessful Endurance Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. That's because the extraordinary photographs and film from that trip planted the so-called White Continent in our imaginations for ever. Shackleton, who was born in Ireland in February 1874 before moving to London as a boy, might be best known for that failed trip but the fact that his crew survived, when so many did not, is now seen as a credit to his exceptional leadership skills.

Today's Words and Music is a tribute to the frozen landscape that inspired the heroic age of exploration. It is not just remote - it contains the world's highest, driest, coldest and windiest places. And these days it's a hub of scientific discovery, international diplomacy and environmental change too. We'll hear fiction from Beryl Bainbridge to Edgar Allan Poe, poetry from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Derek Mahon, memoir from Jenny Diski and Sara Wheeler as well David Attenborough, Maori scientists and other Polar Explorers. Alongside you'll hear hugely varied music inspired by Antarctica from Vaughan Williams to Tanya Ekanayaka, from The Muppets to Nigel Westlake and Cab Calloway. Our readers are Jessica Turner and John Lightbody.

Readings and music inspired by Antarctica - the 'White Continent'.

Jessica Turner and John Lightbody are the readers for this celebration of Antarctica marking the 150 anniversary of Shackleton's birth.

Apollo And Dionysus20150125This programme is an offering to the gods Apollo and Dionysus, or Bacchus as the Romans called him. Apollo, with his golden curls and athletic beauty is the God of Light. He personifies Reason and Harmony. Dionysus, with vine leaves in his tangled hair, is the God of Wine and he represents Chaos and Ecstasy unchecked by Reason. Are you Apollonian or a Dionysian? If you're not sure, perhaps this edition of Words and Music will help you to make up your mind.

Producer: Philippa Ritchie.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music celebrating the gods Apollo and Dionysus.

Apples2011071020111229 (R3)Olivia Williams and Oliver Ford Davies read poems and prose inspired by apples with work by Keats, Kafka and Christina Rossetti and music by Schumann, Purcell and Janacek.

Apples are such a common place food and yet have been deployed in literature and myth to mean much more than the crisp bite and juicy, healthy froth on the tongue. They are a symbol of temptation, seduction and the fall of man as well as, in the savouring of the old names of disregarded varieties, a sort of nostalgic longing for an England of abundant orchards.

Texts and music inspired by apples, with readings by Olivia Williams and Oliver Ford.

April20220417Is it the cruellest month or the time when sweet showers fall? There's an ambiguity about April with its changeable weather and promise of rebirth that's reflected in this week's programme. Readers Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong and Emma Fielding guide us into April's more beguiling realms with poems by Anne Stevenson, Laurie Lee, Ann Sexton and Caleb Femi that are full of flowers, possibility and the warmth of sun on skin, but then TS Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Philip Larkin turn up to reveal that darker, melancholic side - the feeling of loss made starker by burgeoning new life. That same tension and contradiction comes through in the music which includes works by Stravinsky, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie, C退cile Chaminade, Prince (yes, sometimes it DOES snow in April), Manuel Maria Ponce, TesseracT and Astor Piazzolla.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Readings & *Music

*Gregor Joseph Werner - L'Aprile - I. Spring. Allegro

Robert Louis Stevenson - Flower god, god of the spring

Billy Collins - Today

*Ella Fitzgerald with Count Basie and his Orchestra - April in Paris

Laurie Lee - April Rise

*Manuel Maria Ponce - Chapultepec: I. Primavera

Robert Browning - Home Thoughts from Abroad

*Giovanni Croce - I diporti della villa in ogni stagione - La Primavera : Nella stagion novella

Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbevilles

*Henri Tomasi - Printemps pour sextuour a vents

Caleb Femi - Here Too Spring Comes to Us with Open Arms

*Prince - Sometimes It Snows in April

Philip Larkin - An April Sunday brings the snow

*Anthony Burgess - Mr Burgess's Almanack IV. Allegretto con grazia

Basil Bunting - Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise

Edna St. Vincent Millay - Spring

*Nico Muhly - Spring Figures

*TesseracT - April

George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four

*Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring/Le Sacre du Printemps

TS Eliot - The Waste Land - I. The Burial of the Dead

*Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - The Seasons Op. 37b - IV. April: Snowdrop

Robert Herrick - To Daffodils

Anne Stevenson - Swifts

*Astor Piazzolla - Las 4 estaciones portenas: I. Primavera Portena

*Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto No. 1 in E major `La Primavera` - II. Largo

Keith Douglas - Villanelle of Spring Bells

Anne Sexton - It Is a Spring Afternoon

*Max Beckschafer - Madrigali Veneziani: O primavera

Boris Pasternak (trans. Angela Livingstone) - Spring

*Niklas Sivelov - Symphony No. 3 Primavera - II. Adagio

*Cecile Chaminade - Pieces romantiques Op. 55 - No. 1 Primavera

Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales - The General Prologue

DH Lawrence - The Enkindled Spring

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 98

*Judy Garland - April Showers

The cruellest month, when sweet showers fall, or the time to be in England?

April Showers2017042320170430 (R3)
20180422 (R3)
Texts and music on the theme of precipitation.
Arcadia2017071620200419 (R3)Fiona Shaw and Jamie Glover with poetry, prose and music exploring the vision of Arcadia and harmony with nature across the centuries. Broadcast ahead of Earth Day 2020 on Wednesday April 22nd we move from the pastoral visions of the Ancient Greeks Virgil and Theocritus to the anxieties of the American environmentalist Rachel Carson in 'Silent Spring', via Stephen Spender's exploration of technology coming to an English landscape largely unchanged in centuries and Robinson Jeffers's 'Carmel Point' in which he imagines a time when nature and man can live in harmony. Arcadia includes work by Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, Virgil Thomson, Debussy, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Evelyn Waugh, Willa Cather and John Clare. You might also be interested in a Free Thinking discussion of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring broadcasting on April 22nd.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Readings:

Georgics I - Virgil & Cecil Day Lewis

Idyll 7 - Theocritus & Thelma Sargent

Georgics 3 - Virgil & Cecil Day Lewis

Our Forests and National Parks - John Muir

Summer Shower - Emily Dickinson

The Prelude - William Wordsworth

Farmer's Boy - John Clare

Walden - Henry David Thoreau

My Antonia - Willa Cather

Silent Spring - Rachel Carson

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

The Pylons - Stephen Spender

Carmel Point - Robinson Jeffers

The Amateur Poacher - Richard Jeffries

Texts and music about pastoral landscapes, with readers Fiona Shaw and Jamie Glover.

Architecture2012082620160904 (R3)Indira Varma and Robert Glenister read poetry and prose on the subject of architecture and the built environment, from the earliest known treatise by Vitruvius to J.G. Ballard's dystopian vision of the modern high-rise. Other texts include poems by Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin and Stephen Spender, critical writing by John Ruskin and Robert Venturi, and a passage from Milton's Paradise Lost. With music from Dufay, Stravinsky, Gabrieli, Varese, Debussy, Widor and Mussorgsky.

Texts and music on the theme of architecture. Readings: Indira Varma and Robert Glenister.

Arrivals And Departures2016091120191230 (R3)Includes music by Purcell, Eno and P䀀rt and poems by Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Louis MacNeice read by Niamh Cusack and Neil Pearson.

Readings:

William Blake: Infant Sorrow

Vernon Scannell: First Child

Dannie Abse: Return to Cardiff

Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley: Ithaka

Seamus Heaney (translator): Beowulf

Ted Hughes: The Thought Fox

Elizabeth Bishop: Arrival at Santos

Denis Glover: Leaving For Overseas

Emily Dickinson: There came a wind like bugle

Philip Larkin: Poetry of Departures

Louis MacNeice: The Suicide

John Donne: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Walter de la Mare: Good-Bye

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Includes music by Purcell, Eno and P\u00e4rt and poems read by Niamh Cusack and Neil Pearson.

Aspects Of The Divine20230820Have you ever felt lost for words at the beauty of a sunset? Or watched the sunrise and been struck with a sense of awe and wonder? That's what happens to Ratty and Mole in a magical passage in the children's classic, Wind in the Willows. As with all literature and music that touches the heart, it's the sense of something beyond the words or the notes that captures our imagination - something that points to the very mystery of our being - something numinous - what some people think of as God. In this programme, Aspects of the Divine, the actors Natalie Simpson and Ray Fearon explore texts which point to this feeling of something transcendent from different angles: for Wordsworth it was found in nature; for the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, it was the potential for the parched desert to suddenly blossom abundantly; for mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich it was glimpsed in a life of contemplation; in the contemporary novels by Marilynne Robinson and Caleb Azumah Nelson it is found in the rituals of organised religion. The ancient Greeks developed the idea of balance, order and harmony as a semi-mystical property that could shape our lives. And the first words we hear are a speech from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida about that. Many great composers, from Beethoven to Bruckner, caught this far-off melody in their music. And we start with Vaughan Williams' glorious evocation of music as the divine resolution of discord in harmony.

Producer: Clive Portbury

READINGS:

Shakespeare/Troilus and Cressida

Donne/Batter my heart, three-person'd God

Julian of Norwich/Revelations of Divine Love Chapter 5

Dickinson/Some keep the Sabbath going to Church

Old Testament/Isaiah chapter 35

Benjamin Myers/Extract from the novel Cuddy

Beethoven/Letter to Dr Franz Wegeler

Michael Symmons Roberts/Jairus

Kenneth Grahame/Wind in the Willows: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Carol Ann Duffy/Prayer

Marilynne Robinson/Extract from the novel Lila

Milton/Extract from Paradise from Paradise Lost

Caleb Azumah Nelson/Extract from the novel Small Worlds

Wordsworth/Extract from Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

Herbert/Church Monuments

Larkin/Church going

Readings from Shakespeare to Wordsworth and Larkin, and music from Beethoven to Bruckner.

Atonement20100110A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of atonement, with readings by Simon Russell Beale and Adjoa Andoh.

Featuring works by John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Anton Chekhov, CS Lewis, Antjie Krog and Kit Wright, accompanied by the music of Samuel Barber, Max Bruch, Benjamin Wallfisch, Dario Marianelli and Barry Adamson.

Poetry and music on the theme of atonement. Readings by Simon Russell Beale, Adjoa Andoh.

Audre Lorde's World2020122720230205 (R3)Performer Jade Anouka and Lorde's children Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins and Jonathan Rollins read from her inspirational poems, novels and her cancer diaries with music choices ranging from recordings by Chineke! and the Kanneh-Mason family of composers including Florence Price and George Walker, to the singers she listened to including Miriam Makeba, Sarah Vaughan and Donna Summer.

Lorde's writing was inspired by her wish to confront and address injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Brought up a Catholic in New York, she began writing poems as a teenager. In the 1960s she worked as a librarian in New York public schools and became a mother to her two children before divorcing from her husband, who was a white, gay man, in 1970. During her career she held a visiting Professorship at the Free University of Berlin and at various colleges and universities in America, co-founded the first U.S. publisher for women of colour, helped establish Sisterhood in Support of Sisters (SISA) in South Africa to benefit black women who were affected by apartheid and was New York State Poet Laureate. In an African naming ceremony before her death in 1992 at the age of 58 , she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means 'Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known'.

The journals Audre Lorde kept while undergoing a mastectomy originally published in 1980 are now available again and her1982 novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Essays and poem collections including The Black Unicorn have also been republished in recent years.

You might be interested in this conversation on Free Thinking which features her children, the poet Jackie Kay and performer Selina Thompson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004my0 and you can find other discussions relating to Queer History Month in the Free Thinking Prose and Poetry collection.

Readings include:

Sister Outsider extracts

Zami A New Spelling of My Name extracts

A Litany for Survival

Harriet

On the Night of the Full Moon

A Burst of Light

1984

Letter to Mary Daly

Now That I am Forever with Child

The Cancer Journals extracts

Dahomey

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Jade Anouka and Lorde's children read Lorde's work, from her poems to her cancer diaries.

Authority20071007The Truth about Love

Derek Jacobi and Juliet Stevenson read poetry and prose around the theme of love, including Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, Philip Larkin's Arundel Tomb and Auden's poems Lullaby and Oh Tell me the truth about love.

Music includes Britten's Auden settings, Elgar's Salut d'amour, madrigals by De Rore and Dufay, and Wagner's Prelude to Tristan und Isolde.

Poetry and prose around the theme of love, with music by Britten, Elgar, De Rore and Dufay

Ave Maria2013050520151222 (R3)Ave Maria: Music and texts inspired by the Blessed Virgin Mary with Jenny Agutter and Andrew Buchan.

Jenny Agutter can currently be seen starring as Sister Julienne in the hit BBC TV series 'Call the Midwife', and Andrew Buchan is currently playing the part of the father of a murdered boy in the ITV drama 'Broadchurch'.

The Virgin Mary has inspired perhaps more writing and music than any other historical or Biblical figure and this edition of Words and Music attempts to dip a small toe in the ocean of material available. Following the Biblical narrative from the Annunciation, the birth and life of her son Jesus Christ and his death on the cross, the story goes beyond the New Testament into Catholic traditions concerning the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, her crowning and, back on earth, the numerous visions and miracles that have been reported in her name over the centuries.

The programme includes poems, prose and texts by a wide variety of authors including Thomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, Dorothy Parker, W.B. Yeats, Marina Warner and Carol Ann Duffy, as well as extracts from the Gospels.

An eclectic selection of music includes works by Bach, Messiaen, Rautavaara, Robert Parsons, James MacMillan, Massenet and Jacqui Dankworth.

Producer

Helen Garrison.

Poems and music inspired by the Blessed Virgin Mary, with Jenny Agutter and Andrew Buchan.

Awake!2010062720101231 (R3)A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of awakenings.
Bah! Humbug!20191222Dominic West (The Affair/The Wire) and Ruth Bradley (Guilt/Humans) let out their inner Grinch's to explore the challenging aspects of Christmas: useless presents, tedious board games, relentless relatives, and excruciating office parties to name just a few. We'll hear from Bridget Jones, Dr Seuss, Reginald, Philip Larkin, George Bernard Shaw, and the most infamous Christmas grump of all, Ebenezer Scrooge: but will the Christmas Spirit win out in the end? Featuring music by Sufjan Stevens, Kate Rusby, James Horner, Richard Addinsell, and a host of festive favourites.

The Devils Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

How the Grinch Stole Christmas - Dr Seuss

Letter to Judy Eggerton - Philip Larkin

A Christmas Poem - Wendy Cope

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

Music in London - George Bernard Shaw

Bridget Jones Diary - Helen Fielding

Reginald on Christmas Presents - Saki

Christmas in Bournemouth - Jonathan Raban

Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind from As You Like It - Shakespeare

The 1981 Night Before Christmas - Frank Jacobs

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Dominic West and Ruth Bradley explore the challenging aspects of Christmas.

Ballad Of The Northern Lights2008080320090912 (R3)Poems and music on the theme of the North. Readings are by Stella Gonet and Douglas Hodge.
Baroque Spring20130303As part of Baroque Spring, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Zoe Waites read poems and prose about, and by, Baroque composers, including extracts from Francois Couperin's The Art of Playing the Harpsichord and Charles Avison's An Essay on Musical Expression, and poetry by Gerald Manley Hopkins and William Shentone. With music by Bach, Purcell, Rameau and other composers of the period.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music about and by Baroque composers.

Beautiful World, Where Are You?2018072920181231 (R3)The line 'Beautiful world, where are you?' derives from a 1788 poem 'The Gods of Greece' by the German poet Friedrich Schiller which Franz Schubert set in 1819. Between these dates Europe saw profound change, from the French Revolution to the fall of the Napoleonic Empire. The line from Schiller's poem was the theme for the 2018 Liverpool Biennial and it sets the tone for a Words and Music exploring change.

The readers are Nyla Levy and Steve Toussaint. A full list of the words and music can be found on the Words and Music website.

Caliban's the Isle is Full of Noises speech from the Tempest ends darkly, with an injunction to murder Prospero. No-one should listen to promises of Beautiful Worlds and not realise there will be a price to pay. Then there is reaching for the ultimate with John Coltrane and Favourite Things - ecstatic terrifying music. Then those who have tried to think their way to understanding, Pythagoras, Galileo, Ernest Rutherford and Roger Penrose. and those who, faced with reality, take refuge in dreaming like Elizabeth Barrett Browning or John Lennon, reaching into a past he suspects never existed. We lurch from the promise of the Statue of Liberty to the despair of refugees and victims of recent wars and those who refuse to give in to despair. So music and words from around the world and across time, from Hesiod and Nassir Shamma, John Agard and Gillian Clarke, Shelley and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Waterboys, Joanna Kavenna, Ambrose, Berthold Brecht and Penelope Lively, Galilei, Simeon ten Holt, Sally Beamish, Bruckner, Max Richter and Josquin des Prez

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

A reflection on upheaval inspired by Schiller, Schubert and the Liverpool Biennial.

Beauty20120429A thing of beauty is a joy forever.' John Keats' paean is a celebration of that which has inspired love, reverence and harmony. Beauty is an elevation of the senses or a perfect balance of nature. In this edition of Words and Music, Eve Best and Don Warrington put down their vanity mirrors and take the words of Baudelaire, Sara Teasdale and Alexander Pope to explore what became, for Narcissus, a watery obsession. With music from Bach, Delius and Byrd.

Texts and music on the theme of beauty, with readings by Eve Best and Don Warrington.

Bees20210606Poetry and prose that is abuzz with apiarian delights read by Sartaj Garewal and Verity Henry and accompanied by music both mellifluous and stinging. From Wolfgang Buttress's Be.One - a soundscape activated by live-streamed signals from a beehive in Nottingham - to Johann Nepomuk Hummel whose name is German for Bumblebee. Readings sample nectars from Amulya Malladi to Sylvia Plath via Winnie the Pooh and Karl Marx.

Produced by Barnaby Gordon

Poetry and prose abuzz with apiarian delights, read by Sartaj Garewal and Verity Henry.

Beginnings2013010620201231 (R3)Haydn's Creation, Britten's cradle song and a Purcell overture are amongst the musical choices as Words and Music marks the approach of a new year with a programme on the theme of Beginnings, with readers Geraldine James and Neil Pearson. Tennyson and Spenser poetically mark the new year as a moment for hope and celebration, while Dylan Thomas's In The Beginning retells the biblical story of creation. Birth and the beginning of life is the inspiration for poems by Thom Gunn and Anne Stevenson, while Philip Larkin and AE Housman reflect on the process of renewal, which sees life eternally beginning again and we end with an evocation of the seasons in Paul Simon's song Leaves That Are Green.

Producer: Georgia Mann Smith

Readings:

Alfred Lord Tennyson - Extract from In Memoriam

Edmund Spenser - Extract from The Faerie Queen

The King James Bible - Extract from Genesis

Dylan Thomas - In The Beginning

John Masefield - Dawn

AE Housman - Spring Morning

John Donne - The Sun Rising

Bram Stoker - Extract from Dracula

Charles Dickens - Extract from David Copperfield

Ian McEwan - Extract from The Child In Time

Thom Gunn - Baby Song

Anne Stevenson - Poem for a Daughter

TS Eliot - Extract from Four Quartets

Philip Larkin - Trees

Geraldine James and Neil Pearson with readings from the Bible to Philip Larkin.

Beginnings And Endings2018111820200101 (R3)One of the most fundamental questions we can ask is ‘where do I come from?' And poets, philosophers, religions and scientists down the ages and across cultures have fashioned theories and stories to try and answer that question. We can hear their work in Norse mythology, Cherokee creation beliefs and Darwin's theory of evolution. But what came before the beginning? One theory was chaos and Rebel offers us glimpses of that in musical form. There are also creative beginnings - a 14-year-old Aretha Franklin recorded in her father's church and Prince rehearsing a new song (Purple Rain) alone at night in his studio. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein stands as an warning of the risks of scientific experimentation while the orphan Pip, from Dickens' Great Expectations, is forced to create his own origin story from the tiniest of clues. Birth is the theme of Gerald Finzi's cantata, Dies Natalis, which sets to music the poetry of Thomas Traherne - about being unborn, emerging into the world and what it is to be human.

Endings come in the shape of Haydn's false endings, Caryl Churchill's apocalyptic visions and the final words from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable `I can't go on, I'll go on.` There are lost loves and lost countries - Amineh Abou Kerech - a 15-year-old Syrian migrant - writes a poetic lament for her homeland accompanied by 19-year-old Palestinian composer Nay Barghothi.

The readers are Julie Hesmondhalgh and Joan Iyiola

Readings:

Cherokee Myth retold by Terry L. Norton: The Three Worlds

Lao Tzu, translated by Lin Yutang: The Tao Te Ching

Snorri Sturluson, translated by Henry Adams Bellows: The Poetic Edda, Vol 1

John Milton: Paradise Lost

Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species

Margaret Cavendish: Of Many Worlds in This World

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

Doctor Who (Chris Chibnall): Episode 1

James Joyce: Ecce Puer

Walt Whitman: A child said, What is the grass?

Brendan Behan: A Jackeen Laments the Blaskets

James Berry: Beginning in a City, 1948

Amineh Abou Kerech: Lament for Syria

Sappho: He is More Than a Hero

George Gordon, Lord Byron: When We Two Parted

Jackie Kay: Extinction

Caryl Churchill: Escaped Alone

Samuel Beckett: The Unnamable

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Poems, prose and music with themes spanning origin myths to the apocalypse.

Below The Surface2014033020141012 (R3)Poems, prose and music exploring what lies below the surface - from the Underworld to the world of the coal miner and the depths of the sea. With poetry and prose by Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Mimi Khalvati and Louise Glück and music by Purcell, Gluck, Steve Reich and Takemitsu and Amy X. Neuburg. Readings by Juliet Stevenson and Alex Jennings.

First broadcast in March 2014.

Texts and music about what lies below the surface. With Juliet Stevenson and Alex Jennings

Berlin20080817Tonight's actors are Henry Goodman and Liz Sutherland and you should probably listen out too for the supporting cast which includes Hitler and John F Kennedy!

Hausmusik

Oktett, Op.20

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Mendelssohn: Octet. Quintet No 1

EMI CDC7499582

Track 8

Joseph Roth

Extract from Flight Without End

Reader: Henry Goodman

U2

Zoo Station

From Achtung Baby

ISLAND CIDU28

Track 1

Erich Kastner

Extract from Emil and the Detectives

Ute Lemper, John Mauceri

Moritat von Mackie Messer

Composer: Kurt Weill

From Ute Lemper sings Kurt Weill

DECCA425204-1

Track 3

Georg Heym

The Demons of the Cities

The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems

Ernst Busch

Der Graben

Composer: Hanns Eisler

Der politische Tucholsky

Deutsche Grammophon LPMS 44025

Bertolt Brecht

Of poor B.B

Wiener Philharmoniker

Wozzeck

Composer: Alban Berg

Deutsche Grammophon 423 587 -2

Track 10

Alfred Doblin

Extract from eighth book of Berlin Alexanderplatz

Reader: Liz Sutherland

Berliner Philharmoniker

Ein Heldenleben

Richard Strauss

Deutsche Grammophon 439 039 -2

Das Kastnerbuch

Buchberger Quartett

Ouverture zum `Fliegende Hollander` wie sie eine schlechte Kurkapelle morgens um 7 am Brunnen vom Blat spielt, fur Streichquartett

Composer: Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith: Kammermusik

WER 6197-2 286 197-2

Track 12

Anthony Beevor

Extract from - Berlin - The Downfall

Dennis Russell Davies and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra

Low Symphony

Philip Glass

Phillips 475 075-2

Peter Schneider

Extract from The Wall Jumper

Nazim Hikmet

Autobiography

The Symphony Orchestra of the Southwest German Radio

Vergangenes - number 2 of the Funf Orchesterstucke op. 16

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg - Funf Orchesterstucke op.16

WERGO WER6018550

Track 2

James Fenton

A German Requiem

Reader: James Fenton

Einsturzende Neubauten

Steh auf Berlin

Einsurzende Neubauten

Kollaps

ZICKZACK ZZ 65

Anna Funder

Extract from Stasiland

Ensemble Modern - Josef Bierbichler

Anmut sparet nicht noch Muhe

Heiner Goebbels/Hanns Eisler

Eislermaterial

CD Code: ECM 4616482

Gunter Grass

In the Egg

Rufus Wainwright

Going to a Town

From Release the Stars

GEFFEN1733587

Emine Sevgi Ozdamar

Extract from The Bridge of the Golden Horn

3Phase

Der Klang der Familie

Sven Rohrig and Matthias Roeingh

Best of Reactive Volume 2

REACT MUSIC REACTCD197

Track 7

Durs Grunbein

Trilce, Cesar

Ashes for Breakfast

To those born later

Philharmonia Choir and Orchestra

Ebarme Dich

J.S.Bach

Matthaus Passion

EMI 7243 5 675388 2 2

CD 2 track 16

Poems and music on the theme of Berlin, with readings by Henry Goodman and Liz Sutherland.

Berlin200911081989: Twentieth Anniversary

Berlin may not be as beautiful as Paris; it may not have the brash allure of Rome or even London's muscularity; but no one can think of the twentieth century without thinking of Germany's capital. It was on the front line between two of the most powerful ideologies of modern times - communism and capitalism. It was Hitler's stage when he seized power in 1933, and now it stands poised between a resurgent Russia in the East and a Europe forging a new identity in the West.

Actors Henry Goodman and Liz Sutherland read poems and prose to evoke the city's history, alongside a rich array of music. Including Strauss, Mendelssohn and Eisler, as well as Weill and U2. With readings by Alfred Doblin, Joseph Roth, Bertolt Brecht, Gunter Grass, Peter Schneider and Nazim Hikmet.

~Words And Music on the theme of Berlin, with readings by Henry Goodman and Liz Sutherland.

Beyond Good And Evil20120819~Words And Music on the theme of Evil. Readings by Ann Mitchell and Andrew Wincott. With texts from the Bible, Beowulf and Blake. With Music by Berg, Britten and Black Sabbath.

A whirlwind tour through the dark alleys of Evil: from the Garden of Eden in Genesis and Milton's Paradise Lost, to the vampires and dominatrices of Baudelaire and Swinburne, via the black magic of Aleister Crowley and Marlowe, to the apocalyptic visions of Blake and Dante, taking in the Evil lurking in the German forest to the cloven hoof on the carpet where Evil is located by Auden in the everyday world, 'unspectacular and always human'.

Producer Clive Portbury.

Poetry, prose and music on the theme of evil. Readings by Ann Mitchell and Andrew Wincott.

Birdsong20080210Claire Skinner and Hugh Bonneville are the readers in a celebration of nature's musicians.
Birdsong20081221Birdsong has fascinated poets and musicians for centuries. This poetry selection spans 700 years, from Dafydd ap Gwilym's 14th-century hymn to the thrush to RS Thomas's more recent celebration of the blackbird, while the music ranges almost as far, from the Renaissance lute-song The dark is my delight to a section from Einojuhani Rautavaara's atmospheric Cantus arcticus, memorably enriched by the recorded sound of migrating swans.

With a pair of 'catalogues' (opening with Izaak Walton's inventory of the 'nimble musicians of the air'), but for the greater part have chosen to concentrate on those songsters who have inspired the most frequent creative effort. Most popular among them by far is the nightingale, the thrilling musician of the woods who reduces the other birds to silence with her brilliance in Blake's Milton, sings her traditional song of lost love in Richard Barnfield's As it fell upon a day, and offers encouragement to human lovers in a ravishing air from Rameau's opera Hippolyte et Aricie. For Leslie Norris the voice of 'the poet's bird' is both pleasure and torment, a spur to the creative act and a reproach to human inadequacy.

Not far behind is the skylark, whose ebullient airborne music - for many people the sound of the British summer - is here celebrated in an anonymous 17th-century poem and in music connecting its song to the cares of lovers from the English folk tradition and by Hoagy Carmichael.

Less virtuosic but no less irresistible to artists have been the cuckoo - the two-note herald of spring humorously imitated by Saint-Saens and argued over in words by Wordsworth and Bunyan - and the owl, whose comforting and disturbing contributions to the soundscape of the winter night are evoked by Edward Thomas and in Dominick Argento's setting of lines from Love's Labour's Lost.

Other composers and poets have essayed more demanding birdsong imitations: Olivier Messiaen's intricately notated representations became a vital part of his own creative personality; Gerard Manley Hopkins ambitiously attempts a verbal characterisation of a woodlark.

Few of these skilful impressions would count for much without some wider resonance. We have seen that birdsong both marks out the seasons and reminds us of our humble place in the natural world. But above all, and as all the poets and composers represented in this programme have recognised, birdsong also touches something deep in our hearts, unstopping the streams of love, longing, memory, joy, laughter and melancholy that lie within us all.

Readers:

Claire Skinner (CS)

Hugh Bonneville (HB)

00.00

Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler (excerpt) (HB)

02.05

Saint-Saens: Voliere (Le Carnaval des animaux)

Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France

Marek Janowski (conductor)

TELDEC 4509 974452

03.20

John Lyly: Song (CS)

03.59

Britten: The Merry Cuckoo; Spring, the Sweet Spring (Spring Symphony)

Alison Hagley, Catherine Robbin, John Mark Ainsley

Philharmonia Orchestra

John Eliot Gardiner (conductor)

DG 453 433 2

07.36

William Wordsworth: To the Cuckoo (HB)

08.56

John Bunyan: Of the Cuckoo (CS)

10.16

Saint-Saens: Le coucou au fond des bois (Le Carnaval des animaux)

As above

12.31

Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Thrush (HB)

13.49

Trad. Irish: The Morning Thrush

Matt Molloy (flute) and band

VIRGIN CDVE930

16.26

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Blackbird (CS)

17.39

RS Thomas: A Blackbird Singing (HB)

18.25

Messiaen: Le merle noir (Petites Esquisses d'oiseaux)

Peter Hill (piano)

UNICORN DKPCD9144

20.44

Anonymous: The Lark (CS)

00:23.11

Trad. English: The Lark in the Morning: Alva (Vivien Ellis and Giles Lewin)

BEJOCD-45

23.59

Hoagy Carmichael: Skylark

Hoagy Carmichael (voice) and band

PACIFIC JAZZ CDP746862 2

31.01

Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Woodlark (CS)

33.25

Edward Thomas: The Unknown Bird (HB)

35.24

Paul Reade: Birdsong (Aspects of a Landscape)

Nicholas Daniel (oboe)

LEMAN CLASSICS LC42801

36.10

William Blake: Milton (excerpt) (CS)

37.26

Anonymous: The Dark is my Delight

Evelyn Tubb and Michael Fields

MUSICA OSCURA 070980

38.48

John Milton: Sonnet I (HB)

39.39

Rameau: Rossignols amoureux (Hippolyte et Aricie)

Patricia Petibon

Les Arts Florissants

William Christie (conductor)

ERATO 0630 155172

45.20

Richard Barnfield: As it fell upon a day (CS)

46.39

Ravel: Oiseaux tristes (Miroirs)

Tzimon Barto (piano)

ONDINE ODE 1095-2

51.42

Leslie Norris: Nightingales (HB)

54.42

Respighi: L'usignuolo (Gli'uccelli)

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

Edo de Waart (conductor)

PHILIPS 411 419 2

59.07

Edward Thomas: The Owl (HB)

01:00.04

Argento: Winter (Six Elizabethan Songs)

Howard Haskin and David Triestram

DXL 1098

01:02.06

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Dying Swan (CS)

01:04.12

Rautavaara: Swans Migrating (Cantus arcticus)

Lahti Symphony Orchestra

Osmo Vanska (conductor)

BIS CD-1038

01:10.27

Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush (HB).

Claire Skinner and Hugh Bonneville are the readers in a celebration of nature's musicians.

Birmingham20220724Actors Helen George and Kevin McNally read works by writers from Erasmus Darwin to Clare Morrall, Jonathan Coe to Roy Fisher and Benjamin Zephaniah which explore Birmingham's history as the industrial powerhouse and cultural centre in a programme which marks the city hosting the Commonwealth Games. Readings pick out the number 62 bus route, Soho Road and the river running alongside the Soho works powering mills into motion, the Dudley Road and 'the beat.. which makes this road complete', the 'chocolate girls' who work at Bournville, and the day Queen Victoria came to visit and was greeted by 500,000 people. The music includes recordings by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Ex Cathedra and Laura Mvula.

Readings -

Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain, by Richard Vinen

Astonishing Splashes of Colour, by Clare Morrall

Soho Road Then And Now, by Benjamin Zephaniah - read by the poet

Samuel Langford reviews Gustav Holst conducting five of his The Planets at Birmingham Town Hall, 1920

Moonlight and Gas, by Constance Naden

The Economy of Vegetation, by Erasmus Darwin

Chocolate Girls, by Annie Murray

Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes

Eve's Ransom, by George Gissing

Floozie, by Rachael Nicolas

Birmingham Roller, by Liz Berry - read by the poet

Birmingham River, by Roy Fisher

January, by Charlotte Wetton

Changing Places, by David Lodge

The Rotters' Club, by Jonathan Coe

Turning 30, by Mike Gayle

Producer: Barnaby Gordon

With the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, hear literature and music linked to the city.

Birth And Rebirth20080323Josette Simon and Julian Rhind-Tutt are the readers in this edition of the programme, which focuses on the theme of babies, flowers and birds, Creation and the Resurrection, and all things new and reborn.

With poems and texts by Sylvia Plath, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Dorothy Parker, and Margaret Drabble as well as music from Delius, Warlock, Bach and Cleo Laine.

With readings from Plath, Wordsworth and Browning alongside music by Delius and Bach.

Birth And Rebirth20080629Josette Simon and Julian Rhind-Tutt are the readers in this edition of the programme, which focuses on the theme of babies, flowers and birds, Creation and the Resurrection, and all things new and reborn.

With poems and texts by Sylvia Plath, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Dorothy Parker, and Margaret Drabble as well as music from Delius, Warlock, Bach and Cleo Laine.

With readings from Plath, Wordsworth and Browning alongside music by Delius and Bach.

Black Square20140914Lisa Dwan, who has been touring her one woman Beckett show to huge critical acclaim, and Peter Marinker, who's about to star in Waiting for Godot at the Cockpit Theatre, explore the work of Wallace Stevens, Rimbaud, T S Eliot and of course, Samuel Beckett; the musical counterpoint is provided by, amongst others, Kurt Schwitters, Beethoven, Morton Feldman, Berio, Satie, Parmegiani and Nancarrow.

Tying into a series of programmes as BBC Four Goes Abstract and to a Free Thinking Debate at Tate: Figuring out Abstract Art

Kazimir Malevich's Black Square is a totem of abstract art. He said the aim was to free art from the ballast of objectivity...a struggle which would probably seem rather odd to most composers. Music, after all, is effortlessly abstract by nature even when it seems to be insisting on its relationship with the world. Words are another matter altogether. Literary abstraction works sometimes like painting and sometimes like music.

My Black Square is then, necessarily, more of a meditation than a manifesto. It is tentative. It aspires to vivid colour, like Kandinsky, but it includes the minute monochrome shadings of Rothko. In the choices I've made I've left room too for argument . Where does abstraction begin? Is it a feature of the way we experience the world and the way we express ourselves about it? Is it dead and buried, as the erstwhile abstract painter Wyndham Lewis once rather grandly declared. As you might expect from an adventure into the abstract the programme works as a collage in the hope of creating something new.

Malevich is at Tate Modern until October 26th.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of abstraction, with readers Lisa Dwan and Peter Marinker.

Black Square20171112Lisa Dwan and Peter Marinker with a programme inspired by the art of Malevich exploring the idea of abstraction. The readings include Wallace Stevens, Rimbaud, T S Eliot and of course, Samuel Beckett; the musical counterpoint is provided by, amongst others, Kurt Schwitters, Beethoven, Morton Feldman, Berio, Satie, Parmegiani and Nancarrow.

Kazimir Malevich's Black Square is a totem of abstract art. He said the aim was to free art from the ballast of objectivity... a struggle which would probably seem rather odd to most composers. Music, after all, is effortlessly abstract by nature even when it seems to be insisting on its relationship with the world. Words are another matter altogether. Literary abstraction works sometimes like painting and sometimes like music.

My Black Square is then, necessarily, more of a meditation than a manifesto. It is tentative. It aspires to vivid colour, like Kandinksy, but it includes the minute monochrome shadings of Rothko. In the choices I've made I've left room too for argument. Where does abstraction begin? Is it a feature of the way we experience the world and the way we express ourselves about it? Is it dead and buried, as the erstwhile abstract painter Wyndham Lewis once rather grandly declared. As you might expect from an adventure into the abstract the programme works as a collage in the hope of creating something new.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Lisa Dwan and Peter Marinker present a programme exploring the idea of abstraction.

Blithe Spirit, The Skylark2015072620160619 (R3)As Radio 3 is inspired by birds today, this edition of Words and Music hails Shelley's 'blithe spirit' - the skylark. This rather nondescript little brown bird fills the skies with the most extraordinary torrent of sound, and has inspired poets and musicians throughout the centuries. Rising vertically from the ground he remains high in the air, fluttering and dropping his 'silver chains of sound', before plummeting back down to earth - a 'singing firework' as Edmund Blunden put it. How apt that the collective noun for larks is an 'exultation'.

Carolyn Pickles and Adrian Lukis are the readers - there is poetry from Shakespeare to Shelley, Herrick to Ted Hughes, with lark-inspired folk music, art song, chamber and orchestral music and of course some well-known Vaughan Williams...

Poetry and music inspired by the skylark, with readers Carolyn Pickles and Adrian Lukis.

Blood Wedding20071125A lifelong admirer of Federico Garcia Lorca, composer Simon Holt has set Lorca's words on many occasions. He selects music, poetry and prose conjuring images of blood, marriage and the moon.

As well as works by Bach, Berg, Bowie, Mozart, Manson and Lorca himself, Ian McDiarmid and Nuria Benet read extracts from TS Eliot's Four Quartets, poems by William Empson and Don Paterson, Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

A selection of music, poetry and prose conjuring images of blood, marriage and the moon.

Blood Wedding20080713English composer Simon Holt, a lifelong admirer of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, selects music, poetry and prose reflecting the mages of blood, marriage and the moon which suffuse his best-known play, Blood Wedding.

Including music by Bach, Berg, Bowie, Marilyn Mozart, Manson, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Scarlatti and Lorca and Holt themselves, plus actors Ian McDiarmid and Nuria Benet reading extracts from TS Eliot's Four Quartets, poems by William Empson and Don Paterson, Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

Simon Holt selects words and music reflecting the images from Lorca's Blood Wedding.

Bloomsday2019061620201224 (R3)Ulysses, James Joyce's groundbreaking novel of 1922 is the inspiration for this programme. A modernist retelling of The Odyssey, principally following the characters of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the city of Dublin across one day (16th June 1904), we track the novel's own winding journey through Ireland's capital, from the shoreline of Sandycove, to the Freemason's Journal, the National Library of Ireland, Davy Byrne's Pub, right through to Molly Bloom's bed in Eccles Street.

As we travel through the city, Stanley Townsend and Kathy Kiera Clarke read extracts from Ulysses itself as well as a host of other works - some referenced directly in Joyce's text such as the Iliad and Shakespeare's Hamlet, plus other writings inspired by Joyce's work. The programme also reflects Joyce's huge passion for music, with works by Wagner, Mozart, Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini and Friedrich von Flotow representing the author's love of opera. Elsewhere we hear two music-hall favourites alluded to throughout Ulysses - James Lynam Molloy's 'Love's Old Sweet Song' and 'Those Lovely Seaside Girls' by Harry B. Norris. Classic Irish folk songs also feature alongside songs by Radiohead and Dublin post-punk band Fontaines D.C., and listen out for a very special traditional number called 'Carolan's Farewell', played on the guitar once owned by none other than James Joyce himself.

You can find a discussion about James Joyce's book Finnegan's Wake on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking website - Matthew Sweet's guests include Eimear McBride and New Generation Thinker Eleanor Lybeck:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00061kl

Readings:

Ulysses - James Joyce

Lycidas - John Milton

My Grief on the Sea - Douglas Hyde

Iliad - Lotus Eaters episode - Homer, trans. Alexander Pope

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Excerpt from the introduction to the ‘Dictionary to Dublin', 1907 - E. MacDowel Cosgrave

James Joyce Interviews and Recollections' - E H Mikhail

All About People' - gossip column The Princess's Novelettes magazine, 16th June 1904

Finnegans Wake - James Joyce

Big Fish - Daniel Wallace

The Sixteenth of June - Maya Lang

Producer: Nick Taylor

Stanley Townsend and Kathy Keira Clarke read from James Joyce's Ulysses and other works.

Blow Winds, Blow20231008‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!' railed King Lear and we start and finish with the violence of winds, on land and sea. Joseph Conrad, Zora Neale Hurston and Seamus Heaney write about the unequal battle with an unseen enemy, and you can hear the smallness of humankind in the eye of a storm, in the works of Britten's Peter Grimes and Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica.

Gentler winds feed the senses and summon memories for Derek Walcott and William Wordsworth, while Emily Dickinson welcomes in the footless stranger. But there are unearthly winds that make people behave strangely, in Joan Didion's description of the Santa Anas, and Voltaire believed an east wind could bring utter despair.

Composers from Debussy to Toru Takemitsu and Nirmali Fenn have taken the movement of wind as inspiration in their work. And the Swedish Chamber Choir vocally recall the gusty mountain wind in Jan Sandstrom's Biegga louthe.

There's more bluster from the readers Adrian Scarborough and Amaka Okafor who bring to life those great windbags and blowhards, Shakespeare's Polonius and Pam Ayres's know-it-all husband.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Readings:

Shakespeare - King Lear

Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd

Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden

Emily Dickinson - The Wind tapped like a tired Man

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind

Derek Walcott - Osmeros

Lyall Watson - Heaven's Breath

William Wordsworth - The Prelude

Seamus Heaney - Cow in Calf

Shakespeare - Hamlet

Pam Ayres - They Should Have Asked My Husband

Joan Didion - ‘Santa Anas

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God

Seamus Heaney - Storm on the island

Joseph Conrad - Typhoon

Tempestuous to tremulous, winds blow through Shakespeare, Joan Didion and Joseph Conrad.

Blue2014012620140615 (R3)Angel Coulby and Raymond Coulthard read texts inspired by the colour blue, from seas and skies, to a lover's eyes, and blue's associations with sadness and hope. Texts include John Keats' Blue! Tis the Life of Heaven, Rudyard Kipling's Blue Roses, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's The Blue Bird, and excerpts from H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Blue-toned music ranges from Stanford's setting of Coleridge's poem to a jazz trio arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and tracks by Joni Mitchell, Brian Eno and Miles Davis.

First broadcast in January 2013.

Texts and music inspired by the colour blue. Readers: Angel Coulby and Raymond Coulthard.

Body Beautiful20190915Turn your gaze upon the beauty and art of the human form, with great works about nudity, narcissism, body positivity, the male gaze, physical desire, and physical fitness.

Composers regarding their own image in the mirror include Benjamin Britten, William Horsley, and William Onyeabor, while Sylvia Plath does the same in her post-plastic-surgery poem ‘Face Lift'. Elsewhere, Eavan Boland, Anne Carson, and Christina Rossetti all attempt to grapple with the idea of the female as muse and sitting model, and Claudia Rankine resists a world that would turn her invisible. Meanwhile, Mark Doty hits the gym in an effort to achieve the body beautiful.

The readers for this episode are the beautiful bodies (and voices) of Sophie Robinson and Giles Terera.

Readings:

Osip Mandelstam - Somebody gave me this body

Walt Whitman - I Sing the Body Electric

Robert Browning - Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of `The Judgement of Paris`

Eavan Boland - Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

Christina Rossetti - In an Artist's Studio

Anne Carson - Short Talk On The Mona Lisa

Anne Carson - Short Talk On Hedonism

Lord Byron - She Walks in Beauty

Jan Beatty - Sitting Nude

Maya Angelou - Phenomenal Woman

Claudia Rankine - Citizen - An American Lyric - VII

Rupert Brooke - Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body

Ella Wheeler Wilcox - I Love You

Federico Garcia Lorca - Casida Of The Reclining Woman

Mark Doty - At the Gym

Craig Raine - Marcel's Fancy Dress Party

Sylvia Plath - Face Lift

Thomas Hardy - I Look Into My Glass

Constantine P. Cavafy - Remember, Body -

Produced by Jack Howson.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Sophie Robinson and Giles Terera turn their poetic gaze upon the beauty of the human body.

Book Of Hours2008010620100731 (R3)A sequence of words and music which journey around the clock over the course of 24 hours.
Borders20100103A sequence of poetry, prose and music examining the idea of borders - those that are voluntary, those we use to define ourselves, those that baffle us and those we simply have to cross. With works ranging from Kafka's parable about the construction of the Great Wall of China to Marilynne Robinson's watery meditations on memory and loss; and from Chopin's dramatic exploration of the frontiers between major and minor keys to Ligeti's experiment to create the musical equivalent of a decomposing body.

With readings by Samuel West and Penelope Wilton.

~Words And Music on the theme of borders. Readings by Samuel West and Penelope Wilton.

Boredom, Restlessness, Killing Time2018070120200105 (R3)An exploration of the experience of boredom. Whether it's an idle moment or a life sentence, a spur to action or opportunity for contemplation, it's provided writers and musicians with a rich area to explore: Flaubert's Madame Bovary is driven to a disastrous affair, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim resorts to pulling grotesque faces, Jane Austen's Emma scorns a boring acquaintance, and Beckett's The Unnameable contrives a complex inner life of invention from doing absolutely nothing. In music, the Prince in Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges is dying of boredom, which provokes the courtiers to elaborate entertainments to revive him; for Cole Porter, 'practically everything leaves me totally cold'; and the Buzzcocks are 'waiting for the phone to ring'....

With readings by Pip Carter and Skye Hallam.

An exploration of boredom. A spur to action or an opportunity for contemplation?

An exploration of the experience of boredom. Whether it's an idle moment or a life sentence, a spur to action or opportunity for contemplation, it's provided writers and musicians with a rich area to explore: Flaubert's Madame Bovary is driven to a disastrous affair, Jane Austen's Emma scorns a boring acquaintance, and Saul Bellow asks, what would boredom be without terror? For Cole Porter, 'practically everything leaves me totally cold'; and the Buzzcocks are 'waiting for the phone to ring'....

An exploration of boredom, as spur to action or opportunity for contemplation.

Boyhood2015042620170611 (R3)Texts and music on the theme of boyhood, with readings by Roger Ringrose and James Stewart
Brave New Worlds20110515Ideas of the future have provided artists with the freedom of imagination to envisage new worlds, drive through change and reinvent traditional art forms. These imagined worlds might be oddly familiar, but ones where robots shoulder the burden of manual labour or fear stalks the streets of a rain washed, sky-scraper city. In religious texts, the philosophical musings of the Metaphysical poets or in sci-fi and other genre fiction this imagination has given rise to both utopian and dystopian visions.

Obsession with the future has also inspired composers to drive through change and reinvent their own art form, pushing the boundaries of composition.

With words from Margaret Atwood, Tennyson and Shelley and music from Tallis, Berlioz and Stockhausen.

Poetry, prose and musicon the theme of the future.

Breakfast2011100220130630 (R3)Dinner parties are mere formalities; but you invite a man to breakfast because you want to see him.' Thomas Babington Macauley

Of all the meals we eat Breakfast is the most loaded with possibility - to share a breakfast is to share intimacy, or to sit stubbornly in stony cold silence. It is a defining moment in the day, one of ritual and habit, full of joyous promise, or melancholic wonder. It is a meal to obsess over, to fuss over its constitution, or to ignore and sit in quiet contemplation.

Felicity Kendal and Gerard Murphy read poetry and prose around the theme of Breakfast ranging from the Victoriana of Mrs Isabella Beeton's missives to servants, to the narcotic fuelled orgies of Hunter S Thompson, the morning misery of Frank O'Hara, to the boiled egg obsessiveness of James Bond. Breakfast music is provided by G.F.Handel, Frank Zappa, Gustav Mahler, and Dusty Springfield amongst others.

First broadcast in October 2011.

Felicity Kendal and Gerard Murphy read poetry and prose around the theme of breakfast.

Breaking Free: The World Of Yesterday20170101Anton Lesser and Imogen Stubbs explore Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday.
Bridge Passage20081116~Words And Music - Bridge Passage

With Lindsay Duncan and Adam Godley

Earlier this year I read Nabokov's Bend Sinister, a novel whose protagonist Professor Adam Krug, an eminent philosopher, finds himself on a bridge. Bridges, be they literal or metaphorical take us from A to B, help us to continue our journey. But not for Professor Krug! His passage across the bridge is blocked, for at both ends guards won't let him pass. Suddenly he understands the meaning of nowhere and in a brilliant stroke (included in this Words & Music) Nabokov compares Krug to the sand in an hour glass, to an ant stranded on a piece of grass. My fascination with the bridge as a symbol had begun, and thus the idea for this programme.

In ancient times bridges didn't exist and the extract from Ovid that begins the programme, complemented by Stravinsky's Orpheus score, recalls the frustration and the aborted journeys in the era of the ferryman. Bridges don't appear in the Bible but The Psalms make an appearance in the programme in Handel's Israel In Egypt. The chorus ‘He rebuked the Red Sea, and it was dried up' describes the parting of the waters, a bridge without bricks or mortar.

In poems by Longfellow and Blunden, characters on a bridge peer down into the waters to consider the passage of time, experience moments of self discovery and revisit past hurts. For the German Romantic poet Friedrich H怀lderlin a bridge could offer panoramic views and, crucially, opportunities to get closer to nature - themes explored in his poem Heidelberg.

People jump off bridges, a fact well documented in Charles Dickens's newspaper sketch ‘Down with the Tide', which flows into the end of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with its grizzly death jumps.

One of the strangest uses of the bridge symbol in the programme comes in a Kafka short-story about a human who is literally a bridge, a virgin structure desperately seeking a traveller.

Bridges can define a town. The Bridge Over the Drina by the Bosnian Ivo Andri? flickers with unforgettable descriptions of life in Višegrad, where a bridge was revered by a diverse community.

The sequence ends with a paean to a bridge, a vision of the American Dream in the shape of Hart Crane's ecstatic poem To Brooklyn Bridge, and the similarly airborne reverberations of Sofia Gubaidulina's Offertorium.

Benedict Warren (producer)

Contributors:

Adam Godley (AG)

Lindsay Duncan (LD)

Including:

00:00:00

Metamorphoses (excerpt)

Trans. by John Dryden

Read by AG

00:00:48

Igor Stravinsky

Orpheus (excerpt)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Neeme J䀀rvi (conductor)

CHANDOS CHAN 9014 Tr 17

00:03:11

The Bridge Over the Drina (excerpt)

Trans. by Lovett F. Edwards

Read by LD

00:04:16

Benjamin Britten

Curlew River (excerpt)

John Shirley-Quirk (Baritone) English Opera Group

Benjamin Britten (conductor)

LONDON 421 858 2 Tr 2

00: 07:27

Israel In Egypt (‘He rebuked the Red Sea')

Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner (conductor)

PHILIPS 432 110 2 CD1 Tr 11

00:10:29

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

00:13:12

J.S. Bach (trs Walter Rummel)

Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen BWV12

Jonathan Plowright (piano)

HYPERION CDA67481/2 CD1 Track 9

00:17:39

00:18:59

Henri Dutilleux

Myst耀re de l'instant (excerpt)

BBC PO, Yan Pascal Tortelier (conductor)

CHANDOS 9853 CD3 Tr 11

00:21:08

Trans. Michael Hamburger

00:22:23

Robert Schumann

Symphony No.3 Op.97 ‘Rhenish' - Final Movt

London PO, Kurt Masur (conductor)

APEX 0927 498142 Track 9

00:27:50

Franz Kafka

Trans. by Edwin & Willa Muir

00:30:54

Markku Lepist怀

Silta (Bridge)

Markku Lepist怀 (accordion)

AITO RECORDS AICD003 Tr 10

00: 35:14

Edmund Blunden

00:37:00

Gerald Finzi

Prelude Op.25

City of London Sinfonia,

Richard Hickox (conductor)

CHANDOS CHAN 9888 Tr 7

00:41:56

L退o Ferr退

Le Pont Mirabeau

L退o Ferr退 (vocals)

RECORDING ARTS 2X802 CD2 Tr 8

00:44:53

Vladimir Nabokov

Bend Sinister (excerpt)

00:46:35

Iannis Xenakis

Pl退iades (excerpt)

Kroumata Percussion

BIS CD 482 Tr 3

00:46:52

Down with the Tide (Household Words)

00:50:02

Dmitri Shostakovich

Orchestra & Chorus of the Bastille Opera,

Myung-Whun Chung (conductor)

DG 437 5112 CD2 Tr 13

00:53:13

00:56:51

Zoltကn Kodကly

Hကry Jကnos Suite - Intermezzo

Chicago SO,

CHANDOS CHAN 8877 Tr 6

01: 01:52

01:04:26

Offertorium (excerpt)

Gidon Kremer (violin), Boston SO,

Charles Dutoit (conductor)

DG 427 3362 Tr 1

Lindsay Duncan and Adam Godley read poetry and prose inspired by bridges.

British Rivers2014032320141224 (R3)From the banks of the Thames, a live edition with poetry, prose and music on British rivers. With music by Delius, Sally Beamish and George Butterworth and words by Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Oswald. The readers are Stella Gonet and Robert Glenister.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Radio 3 is broadcasting live from a pop-up studio at London's Southbank Centre all day every day for the last two weeks of March. If you're in the area, visit the Radio 3 studio and performance space in the Royal Festival Hall Riverside Caf退 to listen to Radio 3, ask questions and enjoy the special events.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of British rivers.

Britten's Poets20131123Benjamin Britten's settings of poetry have earned him comparisons with Schubert. He spoke of his desire to 'restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom and vitality' and this he did through the poets he loved, from John Donne and Henry Vaughan to Rimbaud and W.H Auden. In this special edition of Words and Music Alex Jennings and Diana Quick read a selection of verse by the poets who captivated Britten, alongside recordings of some of his best-loved settings, including the Canticles, Les Illuminations and the War Requiem.

Both readers have an association with Britten: Alex Jennings played the composer in Alan Bennett's play The Habit of Art about a fictional meeting between Auden and Britten.

Diana Quick has a home on the Suffolk Coast and has been involved in Britten centenary celebrations.

Britten's favourite verse with settings by him. Readers: Alex Jennings and Diana Quick.

Building And Sound2021062020240102 (R3)According to Goethe, 'Architecture is frozen music ?. If that's the case, then today's programme will be putting some heat under that architecture and seeing what emerges. This exploration of buildings and sound features music written for specific places and music that incorporates the sounds of buildings - Hildegard of Bingen's plainsong exploits the natural reverb of churches and cathedrals, an Iain Chambers composition uses the sounds of Brutalist architecture in Paris, while Valerie Coleman's Clarinet Quintet evokes the shotgun house where she grew up in West Louisville, Kentucky. The readings by Marilyn Nnadebe and Henry Goodman take us to the soured utopia of a Peckham estate in the poetry of Caleb Femi; through a vast maze-like fantasy of a house in Susanna Clark's novel Piranesi; and to architect Marwa al-Sabouni's reflections on the Great Umayyad mosque in Damascus.

Readings:

Thomas Hardy - Architectural Masks

Emily Dickinson - The props assist the house

Susanna Clarke - Piranesi

William Golding - The Spire

Caleb Femi - Because of the Times

Mark Danielewski - House of Leaves

China Mieville - The Scar

Simon Armitage - Still For Sale

Elizabeth Bishop - Jeronimo's House

Andrew Marvell - Upon Appleton House

Marwa al-Sabouni - Building for Hope

Philip Larkin - Church Going

Peter Porter - Doll's House

John Gould Fletcher - Demolition of the Waldorf-Astoria

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

This episode is part of BBC Radio 3's programming reflecting the London Festival of Architecture which runs online and with events across June https://www.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/

Music Matters has looked at buildings and music; Essential Classics is featuring five great pieces of music inspired by buildings in its regular daily slot “Five Essentials ? at around 11.10 each weekday morning from 21st to 25th Jun; and Free Thinking is looking each weekday evening at 10pm this coming week at aspects of design and architecture ranging from the development of London, to mid century modern design and the re-opened Museum of the Home, to the visions of World Fairs and the writing of Owen Hatherley.

Prose and poems inspired by architecture and music recorded for and in particular places.

With writings by Caleb Femi, Marwa al-Sabouni, Susanna Clark, Thomas Hardy, Andrew Marvell and Elizabeth Bishop and a soundscape ranging from Hildegard of Bingen to Iain Chambers.

According to Goethe, 'Architecture is frozen music`. If that's the case, then today's programme will be putting some heat under that architecture and seeing what emerges. This exploration of buildings and sound features music written for specific places and music that incorporates the sounds of buildings - Hildegard of Bingen's plainsong exploits the natural reverb of churches and cathedrals, an Iain Chambers composition uses the sounds of Brutalist architecture in Paris, while Valerie Coleman's Clarinet Quintet evokes the shotgun house where she grew up in West Louisville, Kentucky. The readings by Marilyn Nnadebe and Henry Goodman take us to the soured utopia of a Peckham estate in the poetry of Caleb Femi; through a vast maze-like fantasy of a house in Susanna Clark's novel Piranesi; and to architect Marwa al-Sabouni's reflections on the Great Umayyad mosque in Damascus.

Music Matters has looked at buildings and music; Essential Classics is featuring five great pieces of music inspired by buildings in its regular daily slot `Five Essentials` at around 11.10 each weekday morning from 21st to 25th Jun; and Free Thinking is looking each weekday evening at 10pm this coming week at aspects of design and architecture ranging from the development of London, to mid century modern design and the re-opened Museum of the Home, to the visions of World Fairs and the writing of Owen Hatherley.

Butterflies And Moths20220828From the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice and Joby Talbot's ballet score, to John Fowles's collector of specimens and Poppy Adams exploration of the behaviour of moths, Shakespeare's King Lear laughing at 'gilded butterflies' and WG Sebald's tracking of silkworms to Dickens' Mr Skimpole 'free as a butterfly': today's programme weaves together examples of moths and butterflies in prose and poetry, set alongside music which ranges from operas by Bellini and Puccini to Harrison Birtwistle's Moth Requiem, Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road journeys, Dolly Parton's observation that 'love is like a butterfly', a Hopi butterfly dance and music from film, including Silence of the Lambs. Our readers are Erin Shanagher and Rupert Hill.

Producer: Chris Wines

Readings from Nabokov, Sebald, Tagore, Poppy Adams, David Henry Hwang and Emily Dickinson.

By The Sea20071118A selection of words and music on a sea theme, including Dickens, Mozart and Mendelssohn.
Canada: From Sea To Sea To Sea2017062520211223 (R3)William Hope and Jane Perry with readings that reflect how Canada has been shaped by the arrival of settlers from all parts of the world through the ages. The writers featured include Margaret Atwood, Wayne Keon, Alice Munro, ɀmile Nelligan and Rita Joe and the music includes the sound of ice, an old Toronto Klezmer suite, Buffy St Marie singing about Now That the Buffalo's Gone and the work of composers including Violet Archer, Marjan Mozetich, John Greer, Joni Mitchell and Talivaldis Kenins.

A Mari usque ad Mare - From Sea to Sea - is the official motto of Canada, but in recent years it has been suggested that this should be changed to From Sea to Sea to Sea to reflect the significance of its Arctic as well as Pacific and Atlantic regions. Just over a thousand years ago, the Inuit arrived in Canada's Arctic regions having moved eastwards from Siberia via Alaska. In Inuit mythology, Sedna is the goddess of the sea. We hear an excerpt from Derek Charke's Tundra Songs, while Tanya Tagaq tells the tale of Sedna's creation. Charke travelled to Iqaluit, capital of Nunavut, in 2007 and recorded sounds of the ice creaking and the region's wildlife which he then incorporated into the piece.

Shanawdithit was the last known living member of the Beothuk people of Newfoundland. Born in 1801, she died of tuberculosis in 1829 after spending some time living in the household of a Scottish emigrant - Joan Crate imagines the last months of Shanawdithit's life.

The majority of those seeking a new life in Canada will put their feet on Canadian soil for the first time at Toronto Pearson International Airport. The airport code is YYZ which is also the title of an instrumental piece by Canadian prog rock trio Rush. The opening motif repeats the airport's code in Morse: -.--/-.--/--.. While Joni Mitchell's song Chinese Caf退/Unchained Melody is a nostalgic look back at her teenage years in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Margaret Atwood Death of a Young Son by Drowning

Alootook Ipellie How Noisy They Seem

Joan Crate Shawnadithit (Last of the Beothuks)

Emile Nelligan (Marc di Saverio - translator) The Golden Ship

Alice Munro The View From Castle Rock

Michael Ondaatje Wells

Elizabeth Bishop The Moose

Billy Collins Canada

Thomas King Coyote Goes To Toronto

Wayne Keon I'm Not In Charge Of This Ritual

Rita Joe I Lost My Talk

Margaret Noori N'gii Zhibiiamaag Niijaanisag Chigamigong

William Hope and Jane Perry with music and words reflecting settlers travelling to Canada.

Carnival2009051720101230 (R3)Turn the world upside down, break all the rules and let the dead talk to the living and what have you got? Nothing less than the spirit of Carnival. This week Words and Music takes its cue from Rome's Saturnalia and the gris gris of New Orleans.

Carnival may be about laughter and licence but it also acknowledges darkness and unease. It's a kind of whistling in the dark and a kind of exorcism. It gives physical form to our fears and with its clowns, zombies and ritual helps us to reconcile ourselves to the obscene, the terrible and the outrageously wonderful in our lives. Most, if not all of us watch and all of us sometimes wear the mask and join the dance.

Musical intoxication is supplied by the likes of Saint Saens, Constant Lambert, Verdi and Berlioz and the verbal fireworks come courtesy of Edgar Allan Poe, Byron, Elizabeth Bishop, ee cummings, Malcolm Lowry and Goethe with the actors Saskia Reeves and Tom Hiddleston as the Lords of Misrule.

Poetry, prose and music evoking the spirit of carnival. With Saint-Saens, Verdi and Poe.

Catalogue Of Trees20180401Poems, prose and music about trees, with readers Emma Fielding and Julian Rhind-Tutt.
Cats20220515Alice's grinning Cheshire cat and Hauschka's music, cat masks on Zoom, the Owl and the Pussy-Cat, The Cure's Love Cats and Ravel's many pets, Blake's Tyger and Stevie Smith's cats galloping all feature in today's feline episode. Our actors are Anjana Vasan and Paul Copley.

Producer: Ewa Norman

You can find Free Thinking discussions asking Should we Keep Pets? and one all about another household pet - Dogs - in the Free Thinking archives.

Felines in works by Chaucer, Aaron Copland, Stevie Smith, SF Said, Ravel and Hauschka.

Celebrating Shakespeare20231105William Walton and Duke Ellington both composed music inspired by Henry V. Twelfth Night gave inspiraton to jazz musician John Dankworth. Amy Beach wrote choral settings from A Midsummer Night's Dream. The ghost of Hamlet inspired Shostakovich, and Debussy wrote a piano sketch called The Sleep of Lear.

In this episode of Words and Music, which is part of Radio 3's season of programmes marking the anniversary of the First Folio, music inspired by a whole series of Shakespeare plays and sonnets is set alongside key speeches from those dramas. The readings include archive performances and new recordings from Tracy-Ann Oberman, who is currently starring as Shylock in a touring Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Merchant of Venice set in 1936, and from Reuben Joseph - the most recent Macbeth for the RSC.

Producer in Salford: Les Pratt

You can find three different adaptations of Hamlet available on BBC Sounds as Drama on 3/ and there are more dramas to listen to in Radio 3's podcast The Shakespeare Sessions. Free Thinking, Radio 3's Arts & Ideas programme, has a playlist on the website exploring Shakespeare and will be broadcasting a special episode next Weds 8th November as part of Radio 3's Shakespeare Day which will play music inspired by Shakespeare from 7am to 7pm.

Tracy-Ann Oberman and Reuben Joseph read great Shakespeare speeches set with music.

Part of Radio 3's season of programmes marking the anniversary of the First Folio, the collection of Shakespeare plays first published in 1623.

Chains Of Desire20080525A sequence of poems, prose and letters read by actors Neil Pearson and Clare Higgins interspersed with music, all connected by the theme of erotic love. With words by Catullus, Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare, Keats as well as Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Proust (in translation). The music includes works by Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Wagner, Dvorak and Orff.

Poetry, prose and letters interspersed with music, all linked by the theme of erotic love.

Circles, Curves And Contours20160605Circles, Curves and Contours are explored as Words and Music strays from the straight and narrow. With literary selections from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Emily Dickinson and Tony Harrison and music from Miles Davis and The Beatles to Bach and Bax. The readers are Deborah Findlay and Hugh Fraser.

Producer: Harry Parker.

Texts and music exploring circles and contours. Readers: Deborah Findlay and Hugh Fraser.

Circles, Curves And Contours20170521Circles, Curves and Contours are explored as Words and Music strays from the straight and narrow. With literary selections from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Emily Dickinson and Tony Harrison and music from Miles Davis and The Beatles to Bach and Bax. The readers are Deborah Findlay and Hugh Fraser.

Producer: Harry Parker.

Texts and music about circles, curves and contours. Readers: Deborah Findlay, Hugh Fraser.

Clockwise2015051720170326 (R3)Clockwise: The award-winning actors Toby Jones and Romola Garai explore our obsession with clocks and timekeeping. The imperious shrilling of the alarm clock; the way ticking sometimes sounds like fate approaching; the moments elongated or abbreviated by emotion: the way the imagination tends to go blank before the notion of eternity: these are all part of a meditation on why and how we measure time - from Handel's pieces for musical clocks to St Augustine's Confessions ... and all in the time it takes your average chronometer to tick from five thirty in the evening to six forty-five.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of clocks and timekeeping. With Toby Jones and Romola Garai.

Clouds2017060420200102 (R3)Simon Russell Beale and Adjoa Andoh track clouds scudding across the sky, in poems from Yang Chi to Shakespeare and Rilke to Thoreau. With music by Westhoff, Ligeti and Debussy.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: The Cloud

EDWARD THOMAS: The clouds that are so light

EMILY DICKINSON: A Curious Cloud surprised the Sky

JONATHAN SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels

WILLIAM SHARP: Clouds

YANG CHI, translated by JONATHAN CHAVES: Nesting among Clouds

WORDSWORTH: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 33

CLOUD APPRECIATION SOCIETY: The Manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation Society

FROST: Lost in Heaven

RILKE, translated A. POULIN, JR.: These laborers of rain

ROBERT HERRICK: Her Bed

DEREK WALCOTT: A Long, white

SANDBURG: Fog

SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 34

ALEXANDER POSEY: Two Clouds

YEATS: These are the Clouds

ARISTOPHANES, translated by PETER MEINECK: Chorus of the Clouds, from The Clouds

RUPERT BROOKE: Clouds

ELLEN PALMER ALLERTON: Trailing Clouds

HENRY THOREAU: Journal, 25th December 1851

RILKE, translated by A. POULIN, JR.: Evening Clouds

BRECHT, translated by DEREK MAHON: A Cloud

Elizabeth Arno (producer).

Texts and music on the theme of clouds. With readers Simon Russell Beale and Adjoa Andoh.

Clowns2010070420150614 (R3)Alison Steadman and Andrew Sachs read poetry and prose exploring clowns as mysterious constructs that evoke an array of emotions: from laughter to tears, happiness to fear, and wonder to pity. Clowns are seen as solitary, innocent, terrifying, malevolent and sometimes even evil.

The programme captures the many guises of clowns and begins with a homage to Joseph Grimaldi, considered to be the most famous English Clown. On the first Sunday of every February, clowns gather in the National Clowns' Church (Holy Trinity Church, Dalston, East London) to celebrate the life of Grimaldi, so the beginning of the programme recreates the Grimaldi Service with stanzas from an ode by Thomas Hood read over Stravinsky's Circus Polka arranged for organ.

Then enter the clowns: Verlaine's Parisian circus clown, the foolish country clowns of John Clare and Henry Parrot, Simon Armitage's Clown Punk, Shel Silverstein's tearful, unfunny 'Cloony the Clown' and Heinrich Boll's naive clown in the confusion of post-war Germany. The familiar figures of the Commedia dell'Arte - Pierrot, Harlequin, Columbine and Pantalon - also begin to emerge from the beginning of the programme and are characterized in Schumann's Carnaval, Op.9, the Pierrot of Bantock and Reger, plus Telemann's Columbine from Ouverture Burlesque.

In the middle of the programme, the 'Clowns' Prayer' recreates the central part of the Grimaldi Service accompanied by Britten's Village Organist's Piece. The darker side of clowns is revealed through Stephen King's 'It' with Respighi's horrifying depiction of death in the Roman circus (Feste romane), Shakespeare's clown gravediggers from Hamlet over Charlie Chaplin's 'Clown's Last Crazy Act', and Betsy Sholl's ghostly 'saddest man in the world'.

Texts and music focusing on clowns, with readings from Alison Steadman and Andrew Sachs.

Cockneys20160410Texts and music on the theme of cockneys, with readers Jim Conway and Cheryl Fergison.
Coming Of Age2021041820220814 (R3)Josh O'Connor and Lydia Wilson with readings inspired by youthful experiences. Fresh from his role as Romeo for the National Theatre - a classic ‘coming of age' story - The Crown's Josh O'Connor reads Shakespeare, James Joyce and Harry Potter. Lydia Wilson, star of the thriller Requiem, offers contemporary fiction from Naoise Dolan and Emma Cline, along with Dickens' bildungsroman David Copperfield, and a poem by Libby Russell, a past winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award run by the Poetry Society. Ted Hughes recites his own translation of Ovid in archive audio and Tez Ilyas reads from his Secret Diary of a British Muslim Aged 13 ¾.

The music includes Stravinsky's adolescent girls dancing the Rite of Spring, a Marian hymn from Palestrina, and Ravel's mythical young lovers, Daphnis et Chlo退. Herbie Hancock, Rebecca Clarke and Felix Mendelssohn come of age as composers, while Patrick Doyle's film music shows Prince Hal turn into noble Henry V. The programme closes with Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier: the Marschallin bids farewell to her lost youth, and wishes her lover happiness with his new young bride.

Producer: Hannah Sander

Readings:

Charles Dickens - David Copperfield

Mishnah 5:21

Tez Ilyas - The Secret Diary of a British Muslim Aged 13 ¾

CS Lewis - Prince Caspian

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Libby Russell - ‘gaff

Fran瀀oise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse

Socrates (Plato) - ‘The children now love luxury

Margaret Mead - Coming of Age in Samoa

Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited

Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet

Ted Hughes - ‘Echo and Narcissus

Naoise Dolan - Exciting Times

Thomas Morris - ‘All the Boys

JK Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Emma Cline - The Girls

Claude McKay - ‘Adolescence

Josh O'Connor and Lydia Wilson with readings from Shakespeare to a bar mitzvah poem.

Commemorating The Liberation Of Auschwitz20200126In this special edition of Words and Music marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, readers Henry Goodman and Maria Friedman read poetry and prose about life and death at the most notorious Nazi concentration camp. We'll hear from survivors like Primo Levi and Victor Frankl, who paint startling pictures of existence at Auschwitz; and from Anita Lasker-Wallfisch who played the cello in the Auschwitz Women's Orchestra. She once played Schumann's Tr䀀umerei for Dr Josef Mengele, who came to be known as 'the angel of death'.

Despite the hellish conditions, music was made in concentration camps. We'll hear about the fate of Auschwitz's Roma Orchestra and the unexpected presence of Tango at Auschwitz. You'll hear an early recording of the first song to be written in a concentration camp, the ‘Peat Bog Soldiers', and songs by Ilse Weber, who wrote music for the children of the Theresienstadt camp and is said to have sung to her son and other children as she accompanied them into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Poetry by survivors Andrကs Mezei and Annette Bialik Harchik reminds us that liberation was the end of a nightmarish journey but that living with the aftermath of the Holocaust was a burden which would be carried long after the camps were destroyed.

Producer Georgia Mann

Extract from a letter by Salmen Gradowski,

The Survivor -Andrကs Mezei translated by Thomas Orszကg-Land

If This is a Man - Primo Levi

Man's Search For Meaning - Victor E. Frankl, translated by Lisle Lasch

Earrings - Annette Bialik Harchik translated by Rafael Bielobradek

Boots At a Concert of Lydia F - Krzystof Janusz Boczkowkski translated by Adam A. Zych and Andrzej Diniejko

The Librarian of Auschwitz - Antonio Iturbe, translated by trans Lilit Zekulin Thwaites

Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels

Violins of Hope - James A. Grymes

First Thoughts: On Liberation Day From a Concentration Camp - Annette Bialik Harchik

The Survival Syndrome - Adam Alfred Zych translated by June Friedman

With readers Henry Goodman and Maria Friedman

Commuters20190203The daily commute isn't always a grind. Readers Kate O'Flynn and Paul Copley explore the journey to and from work as a space where we consider our place in the world.

It can be a time to fantasise about the familiar strangers around us; where, as the world flashes by the window, we go into reveries, conjuring memories, imagined lives, and lyrics to songs. And while for many of us the journey to work is safe, habitual and easy, for others it's a time where both the majesty and perils of the world are felt most keenly.

Featuring poetry and prose by Chekhov, Kafka, Theroux and Hardy, and from the Tao Te Ching and the coal mines of Wales, as well as documentary archive from Ethiopia and Patagonia.

Music selections include Franz Schubert, Fanny Mendelssohn, Meredith Monk, Gavin Bryars and Charles Mingus.

Produced by Chris Elcombe.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

The journey to and from work, where we sit and consider our place in the world.

Constraint20110925A sequence of music, poems and prose on the theme of constraint. Artists have struggled against restriction, yearning for freedom and yet edges and boundaries can also be tremendous stimuli. Siobhan Redmond and John Rowe read poems and prose by Rosa Luxemburg, Andrew Marvell, Billy Collins and Emily Dickinson with music by Ethel Smyth, John Cage, Benjamin Britten and Francis Poulenc.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

Music and poems on the theme of constraint with Siobhan Redmond and John Rowe.

Conversations20150705Catherine Harvey and Jamie Parker muse on Conversations from the early Socratic dialogues to Larkin's 'Talking in Bed', and Debrett's to Theodore Zeldin. There are also conversation pieces between modern and original poems, as C. Day Lewis replies poetically to Christopher Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love'. Music includes Messiaen's Antienne de la conversation int退rieure and Telemann's chatty Divertimento in E flat major, TWV.50:21.

Elizabeth Arno (producer).

Texts and music centring on conversations, with readers Catherine Harvey and Jamie Parker.

Correspondence20090405Poetry, prose and music centring on correspondence. With works by Britten, Ovid and Mingus
Courtroom Drama20220710Readings about lawyers and courtrooms, from Harper Lee's crusading lawyer Atticus Finch, Dickens's Jarndyce v Jarndyce case from Bleak House that gets stuck in the Court of Chancery for decades, and part of Arthur Miller's witch-hunt drama The Crucible. Music includes Jocelyn Pook's score for The Merchant of Venice, Philip Glass's music for The Crucible, Woody Guthrie's tale of the Philadelphia Lawyer, and court scenes from Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes and Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury. And there's classic archive from an episode called Twelve Angry Men, which was part of Tony Hancock's TV series.

Our readers are Paterson Joseph and Emily Pithon.

Readings:

The Secret Barrister by The Secret Barrister

Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Owl by Emily Dickinson

Matthew Chapter XXVII from the King James Bible

Pilate's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

The Lawyer's Ways by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman

Warning by David Sullivan

Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare

The Case Won by William Cowper

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Winslow Boy by Terrence Rattigan

Producer: Nick Holmes

Readings from Kafka, Cyril Hare, Dorothy L Sayers, Carol Ann Duffy in this legal episode.

Creatures Of Habit20190106Can you quit, change your habits, follow those New Year Resolutions? Readers John Paul Connolly and Shiloh Coke explore habitual behaviour through poetry and prose. With music by Bach, Steve Reich and This Is The Kit.

The subtle stings of misfortune have James Whitcombe Riley reaching for his pipe, Alain de Botton observes the way our love of the familiar shapes our relationships, Beckett's Molloy takes habitual behaviour to a compulsive extreme, and Amy Lowell is troubled by a hauntingly persistent id退e fixe. But good or bad, logical or absurd, healthy or otherwise, - where would be without these repetitive quirks of behaviour that shape our identity and order our world? And so, when Allen Carr offers you a pain free path to quitting - will you take it? Perhaps the poet knows best the fear of the blank page and the power of routine to conquer it. And so we return to habit and to the setting down of words.

Producer: Laura Yogasundram

An exploration of habitual behaviour, good or bad, logical or absurd, healthy or otherwise

Crip Creativity2020110820231203 (R3)Music from Beethoven and Robert Wyatt to performance by percussionist Evelyn Glennie. With readings of Milton, Oliver Sacks, Alice Walker and Sue Townsend. For the 25th anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act, we feature music by composers and players set with readings by actors from writers who are disabled.

The readers are Jonathan Keeble and Nadia Albina.

Producer: Nick Holmes

Music from Beethoven to Evelyn Glennie. Readings of Milton, Alice Walker and Sue Townsend.

Beethoven and Smetana, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Amadou and Mariam, Robert Wyatt and Ian Drury provide some of the music in today's episode which marks the International Day of Disabled Persons (Dec 3rd) with a celebration of Crip Creativity. The readers Jonathan Keble and Nadia Albina give us extracts from Milton and Nuala Watts contemplating blindness; Beethoven and Raymond Antrobus looking at sound and echoes; Elizabeth Barrett Browning writing of her love; Jean Dominique Bauby, locked in and looking out at life and Joanne Limburg imagining The Autistic Alice.

READINGS:

Janet Frame Scented Gardens for the Blind

Jim Ferris Patience

John Milton Sonnet 19: On his blindness

Nuala Watt On Her Partial Blindness

Alice Walker A Child of One's Own

Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out

Lord Byron She Walks in Beauty

Sue Townsend The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4

Emily Dickinson Much Madness is Divinest Sense

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Beautiful and Damned

Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Kaite O'Reilly And then Suddenly I Disappear

Elizabeth Barrett Browning How Do I Love Thee?

Ludwig van Beethoven The Heiligenstadt Testament

Jillian Weise Future Biometrics

Raymond Antrobus Echo

Maya Angelou Gather Together in My Name

Fyodor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment

Jean-Dominique Bauby translated by Jeremy Leggatt The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Joanne Limburg The Alice Case (from The Autistic Alice)

Music from Beethoven to Evelyn Glennie. Readings of Milton, Alice Walker & Sue Townsend.

For the International Day of Disabled Persons on December 3rd, we feature music by composers & players set with readings by actors from writers who are disabled people.

Beethoven and Smetana, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Amadou and Mariam, Robert Wyatt and Ian Drury provide some of the music in today's episode which marks the International Day of Disabled Persons (Dec 3rd) with a celebration of 'Crip Creativity'. The readers Jonathan Keble and Nadia Albina give us extracts from Milton and Nuala Watts contemplating blindness; Beethoven and Raymond Antrobus looking at sound and echoes; Elizabeth Barrett Browning writing of her love; Jean Dominique Bauby, locked in and looking out at life and Joanne Limburg imagining The Autistic Alice.

Beethoven and Smetana, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Amadou and Mariam, Robert Wyatt and Ian Dury provide some of the music in today's episode which marks the International Day of Disabled Persons (Dec 3rd) with a celebration of 'Crip Creativity'. The readers Jonathan Keeble and Nadia Albina give us extracts from Milton and Nuala Watt contemplating blindness; Beethoven and Raymond Antrobus looking at sound and echoes; Elizabeth Barrett Browning writing of her love; Jean-Dominique Bauby, locked in and looking out at life and Joanne Limburg imagining The Autistic Alice.

For the International Day of Disabled Persons on 3 December, we feature music by composers and players set with readings by actors from writers who are disabled people.

Crossed Wires20200628Join readers Jonathan Keeble and Briony Rawle at the end of the line as they tell tales of phones and miscommunication. With music by Poulenc, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Little George Smith, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Berio and Menotti.

Our worlds are shaped by the technology we use to communicate - from phone conversations to text messages to letters of love and loss. Yet so often the tools we rely upon to convey our deepest feelings cause misunderstandings and revelations that we might never have imagined.

Raymond Chandler's lonely gumshoe Philip Marlowe may yearn for his telephone to plug him into the human race - but a simple ring can also herald the deepest of human emotions: fear, grief, even nostalgia. Sylvia Plath's half-heard syllables provoke dread, whilst Adrienne Rich and Phillip Gross consider how our ideas and identities are moulded and misshapen by the technology at our fingertips.

A thwarted conversation between Marcel Proust's Swann and his elderly mother leaves us pondering the hereafter - whilst Carol Ann Duffy muses on the futility of words blinking on an LCD screen. Arthur C. Clarke, meanwhile, suggests a telephonic sting in the tale of a dystopian kind.

Produced by Steven Rajam.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Readings

Raymond Chandler - The Little Sister

Robert Frost - The Telephone

Philip Gross - Mappa Mundi

Sylvia Plath - Words Heard, By Accident, Over The Phone

Tony Harrison - Changing At York

Marcel Proust - The Guermantes Way

Carol Ann Duffy - Text

Thomas Hardy - Tess Of The D'Urbervilles

Adrienne Rich - Cartographies Of Silence

Gail White - Ballade Of Indignation

Arthur C. Clarke - Dial F For Frankenstein

Devin Johnston - The Telephone

Tales of telephones and miscommunication, read by Jonathan Keeble and Briony Rawle.

Crowds2013060220161230 (R3)~Words And Music explores our relationship with Crowds - everyday collectives, the political and the personal.

We begin with the popular experience of mass gatherings, from sporting events, to the daily commute and the fair ground. William Carlos William's majestic poem 'At The Ball Game' celebrates the festive side of crowds and hints at the potential for terror. This foreboding is embodied in Stravinsky's manipulated puppet trapped in a fairground burlesque, and Petrushka points towards the political nature of crowds. In Dicken's famous revolutionary novel 'A Tale of Two Cities', playful games outside a wine shop end with the word BLOOD painted in red wine. Shakespeare's Coriolanus addresses the mob and Aldous Huxley analyses Hitler, the ultimate manipulator of crowds, in 'Brave New World Revisited'. Verdi's Nabucco completes this section; so synonymous is it with Italian history and politics Ricardo Muti recently found his audience rising as one to join in the 'Hebrew Slaves Chorus'.

Freddie Mercury's anthem 'Someone to Love' heralds the personal nature of crowds - the pursuit of the perfect match in amongst humanity - and the sense of loneliness experienced in a crowd. We visit Gatsby's vibrant parties, glittering with emptiness; Cinderella fleeing the ball and Maya Angelou's phenomenal woman where men swarm around her like bees. Finally we end with Philip Larkin's love poem written to Maeve whilst listening to a broadcast of the concert she was attending. There are a few other crowd pleasers along the way, including music by Handel, Grieg, Mozart, Beethoven, Elgar and Copland; with additional words from Walt Whitman, Wordsworth and Garrison Keillor.

Producer, Erika Wright.

An exploration of crowds, whether positive force or destructive mob.

Crushed20080810Readers Rafe Spall and Abigail Davies.

‘In the end it took me a dictionary to find out the meaning of unrequited'. So sings the Saturday Boy in Billy Bragg's evocation of the pain of unrequited love. The dictionary would only have told him that unrequited means unreturned. Looking into the world of music and poetry he would have found that unrequited love is much more complex and nuanced.

Schooldays are often the start, also for Gwyneth Lewis in her poem ‘To the boys I loved who never loved me' which brings back memories of adolescence and makes an important statement in this territory: I was never made less by loving you more. Unrequited Love can leave someone a sad, winsome and even quite pathetic figure. However, in reading poetry and listening to music that dealt with this idea it soon becomes clear that once the hope is gone, how the person deals with the love and longing that remains is fertile ground.

The physical decline of Miss Haversham's dress and rooms might be shocking, and the still upper lip fortitude found in the Houseman poetry quite painful, but the determination and self-knowledge demonstrated by both are things I found to be noble and empowering.

The idea of a carrying something inside that isn't just going to go away is also explored in Simon Rae's poem ‘Believed'. This isn't about unrequited love, but is nonetheless a longing for something that's never going to happen. There is perhaps in all of us a longing for the things we didn't do, the words unspoken, people unkissed, journeys not taken.

This is also touched on in Sophie Hannah's poem To the Memory of Love where Love was Not. Unrequited Love can be painful, and the love that remains after hope has gone can be the most painful of all. Sophie Hannah reminds us that however painful the feelings, at least those feelings are there, true and present, and in some way make us real.

There's a great deal of music that can be related to unrequited love. Brahms and Berlioz come to mind for their devotions to Clara Schumann and Harriet Smithson respectively. Billie Holiday had to be there not just for the song - she sings ‘Love me or Leave me' here - but for her own life and that voice that carries so much loss and pain so beautifully. The plangent dissonances of early string music are so reminiscent of the pains and stabs of love, and I've included music by Gibbons and Biber. To finish, I have included the quintet from Wagner's Die Meistersinger where Hans Sachs, one of the most humane and complex of all operatic characters sings of how ‘the heart's sweet burden had to be subdued' and renounces his love for Eva.

Fantasia No.3

Consorts For Viols

Laurence Dreyfus/ Phantasm

Avie AV0032

CAROL ANN DUFFY

Warming her Pearls

Read by Abigail Davies

NYMAN

Trysting Fields

Film Music 1980-2001

Michael Nyman Band

Virgin CDVED957

Read by Rafe Spall

Intermezzo in C Sharp Minor

Two Rhapsodies

Radu Lupu

Decca 4175992

A. E. HOUSMAN

XXXI (Because I liked you)

NOEL COWARD

Mad About the Boy

All Woman 3

Dinah Washington

Quality TV ALLWOCD03

BEETHOVEN

Variations On Bei M䀀nnern Welche Liebe Fühlen

Variations for Piano and Cello in E Flat Major

Jacqueline du Pr退/ Daniel Barenboim

EMI CMS 7630152

BEN JONSON

Song to Celia

Un Bal

Symphonie Fantastique

Berlin Philharmonic

DG 415325-2

DICKENS

From Great Expectations

TCHAIKOVSKY

Pezzo in forma di Sonatina

Symphony 4

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

Virgin VC 7907982

JOBIM/ DE MORAES/GIMBEL

The Girl From Ipanema

Nigel Kennedy Plays Jazz

Nigel Kennedy / Peter Pettinger

Chandos CHAN 6513

HEINRICH HEINE

Why is the Rose so Pale

MOZART

Adagio Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major K488

Piano Concertos

Daniel Barenboim/ English Chamber Orchestra

EMI 7691222

EMILY DICKENSON

The Heart asks Pleasure First

JANACEK

String Quartet No.2,'Intimate Letters

String Quartets

Vanbrugh String Quartet

Harper Collins 13812

F SCOTT FITZGERALD

Excerpt from the Great Gatsby

DONALDSON / KAHN

The Very Best of Billie Holiday

Verve 5474942

RUPERT BROOKE

Rosary Sonata No.1 'The Annunciation

Rosary Sonatas

Pavlo Beznosiuk/ David Roblou

Avie AV 0038

PETRACH

Canzoniere I

SHAKESPEARE

Sonnet 149

Brewing Up With Billy Bragg

Cooking Vinyl COOKCD 107

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Sonnets from the Portuguese, XIII

HANDEL

Ombra Mai Fù

La Lucrezia

A selection of literature and accompanying music.

Cymru Fach20090726In the run up to the 2009 National Eisteddfod of Wales, the annual festival of Welsh culture and language, Words and Music celebrates the land famous for its poetry and song - from the (Anglo-Welsh) lyrical verse of Dylan Thomas to the Welsh poetry of Gwyneth Lewis.

With the haunting sound of the male voice choir, Wales's leading classical musicians Bryn Terfel and Robert Te,r and some of Wales' most successful pop artists. Poems are read by Ruth Madoc and Owen Teale.

Ruth Madoc and Owen Teale with poetry and music inspired by Wales.

Dancing In The Wind20080727Sara Kestelman and Rory Kinnear read poetry and prose on the theme of childhood.

Including Prayer before Birth by Louis MacNeice; Morning Song by Sylvia Plath; Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney; and Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Music includes Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, Rufus Wainwright's The Art Teacher, John Tavener's To a child dancing in the wind, Schumann's Kinderszenen and Hans Kraas' Brundibar.

Sara Kestelman and Rory Kinnear read poetry and prose about childhood, set to music.

Dante2021091220221226 (R3)Father of the Italian language': the writing of Dante Alighieri c.?1265 - 1321 has given us Beatrice - symbol of divine love, the visions of heaven, purgatory and hell set down in his Divine Comedy, a use of vernacular language and Tuscan dialect when most poetry was written in Latin and a three line rhyme scheme or terza rima. Today's Words and Music features readings from his key works taken from a range of different translations (and some excerpts in Italian). These are set against music inspired by his words.

In 1849 Franz Liszt wrote 'Dante has become for my mind and spirit what the column of clouds was for the children of Israel when it guided them through the desert,' and he went on to compose a sonata and a symphony inspired by the Italian poet. In 1876 Tchaikovsky read the fifth canto of Dante's Hell and began his symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini, a noblewoman who falls in love with her husband's brother. Rachmaninov's operatic version of this story premiered in 1906. Soweto Kinch's The Legend of Mike Smith brings Dante's Inferno and the seven deadly sins into our modern world. The idea of 'people being ferried across the river of death' in an exhibition of Egyptian art inspired the track Pyramid Song by Radiohead, which takes images from Dante's journey through heaven and hell.

Readers: Christine Kavanagh and Leighton Pugh.

Producer: Tony Sellors

READINGS:

Giovanni Boccaccio Dream of Dante

Dante Alighieri (trans. Andrew Frisardi) Vita nuova

Dante Alighieri (trans. Allen Mandelbaum) Dante's Exile (Paradiso Canto 17)

Michelangelo Sonnet to Dante

Dante Alighieri (trans. Henry Francis Cary) Inferno Canto 1

Dante Alighieri (trans. Sandow Birk and Marcus Saunders) Inferno Canto 1

Dante Alighieri (trans. Henry Francis Cary) Inferno Canto 3 (The gates of Hell)

Dante Alighieri The Rivers of Hell (Inferno Canto 3, trans H.F.Cary)

Dante Alighieri Piero and Francesca (Inferno Canto 5, trans. Cary)

Dante Alighieri Canto 5 (Trans. Sandow Birk and Marcus Saunders)

Ned Denny B, Canto 5

Dante Alighieri (trans. Sandow Birk and Marcus Saunders Inferno Canto 8

Dante Alighieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum Purgatory, Cantos 1 and 2

Dante Alighieri Purgatorio Canto 2

Dante Alighieri (trans. A.S. Kline) Canzone Two

Dante Alighieri (trans Allen Mandelbaum) Paradiso Canto 30

Dante Alighieri (trans Barbara Reynolds) Paradiso Canto 33

You can find Free Thinking episode Dante's Visions in which Rana Mitter's guests look at art inspired by the Italian writer.

You can also find an exploration of Dante's language in the Divine Comedy hearing from scholars Prue Shaw and Nick Havely, poet Sean O'Brien and writer Kevin Jackson in the Free Thinking playlist called Landmarks of Culture.

Visions of heaven and hell from the writings of Dante, set alongside musical evocations.

Dante And Blake: The Seven Deadly Sins20160724In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri explores the cardinal vices of Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony and Lust. In his singular and influential model of the afterlife, he climbs the Mountain of Purgatory and encounters seven terraces, each home to penitents suffering torments according to their sin.

Another visionary poet, William Blake, was an equally individual artist and produced more than a hundred illustrations for Dante's masterwork. The themes of suffering and redemption, darkness and light, appealed to him as both painter and writer, and many of his poems match Dante for intensity and insight.

Extracts from Dante's Purgatory and Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience are read by Ray Fearon and Aoife Duffin while music includes Wagner, Janacek, Tchaikovsky and Miles Davis.

Poems by Dante and William Blake as well as music by Wagner, Janacek and Tchaikovsky.

Dead Meat2019090820220109 (R3)The vegetarian versus the carnivore reflected in literature and music. Actors Claire Benedict and Nicholas Farrell read words by Plutarch, Michel Faber and Ogden Nash, with music by Janacek, Vaughan Williams and Tom Waits.

Producer: Paul Frankl

Readings:

Rattlesnake Meat - Ogden Nash

On Meat Eating - Plutarch

Meat - August Kleinzahler

The Waves - Virginia Woolf

To Eat of Meat Joyously - Bertolt Brecht

Under the Skin - Michel Faber

The Time Machine - H G WELLS

Angel - Elizabeth Taylor

Grand Union - Zadie Smith

What did I love about killing the chickens? - Ellen Bass

The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft - George Gissing

Vegan Delight - Benjamin Zephaniah

Literature and music that explores the opposing worlds of meat eating and vegetarianism.

Deception2018100720211121 (R3)Can you trust your ears? Can you trust your eyes? How often do you tell lies? Watch out for fraudsters here, for cheats, charlatans and spies. Nothing is what it seems. William Wordsworth sees an island that he knows isn't there. Musical mirages are conjured by Shulamit Ran and Kaija Saariaho. Saariaho's mirage contains a Mexican shaman bursting free from the deception of ‘reality' to a greater truth beyond.

There are lovers too. Many lovers. Vernon Scannell's furtive adulterers. Tony and Maria from West Side Story sharing a delusion that there's a place for them (there's not). Meanwhile in the shadowy world of espionage, John Hollander's undercover operative has a crisis of confidence, Joseph Conrad's secret agent not only misleads his associates but betrays his wife in a terrible way and, as the Rhinemaidens sing in a performance of Wagner's Gotterdammerung at the Bayreuth festival in 1942, none of the Nazi officials watching suspects that one of them - contralto Margery Booth - is a British spy.

What of the tricksters? The west African spider god Anansi fools stronger, fiercer animals into parting with gold and even their lives, while the ‘sandy-whiskered gentleman' lulls Jemima Puddle-Duck into a false sense of security. Sometimes we can't help being deceived and there are examples here - in the opening poem by Walter Savage Landor and the closing sonnet by Shakespeare - where deception in love is positively welcomed.

But make no mistake: deceiving other people is rarely a good thing, so heed the words in Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Lies and extract the appropriate moral lesson from Pete Seeger singing Oh How He Lied.

The readers are Sheila Atim and Guy Masterson

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

READINGS:

Walter Savage Landor You Smiled, You Spoke and I Believed

Yevgeny Yevtushenko Lies

Vernon Scannell Taken in Adultery

Beatrix Potter The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck

Walt Whitman Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

William Wordsworth Lays and Legends of the English Lake Country

Virgil, translated by C. Day Lewis Aeneid

John Hollander Reflections on Espionage

Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent

Robert Browning Mr Sludge, The Medium

Kwame A. Insaidoo How Anansi Survived the Great Famine

William Shakespeare Sonnet 138

Derek Jarman's Garden2020052420220130 (R3)Tilda Swinton and Samuel Barnett are the readers in an episode inspired by the saving of the beachside home of film-maker, painter and writer Derek Jarman following a crowd-funding campaign. Jarman (1942-1994) purchased Prospect Cottage on the shingle shore at Dungeness in 1986 following his diagnosis as being HIV positive and it formed the backdrop for his 1990 film The Garden. This was one of 11 feature films he directed including Caravaggio, The Tempest, The Last of England and Blue - which Radio 3 collaborated on with Channel 4 when that premiered in 1993.

Today's Words and Music brings you music referenced in Jarman's writing and films, from Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring to pop songs by the Pet Shop Boys and Annie Lennox which Jarman directed the videos for. Tilda Swinton reads words from Jarman's books Modern Nature, Chroma, and At Your Own Risk, a moving history of homosexuality in the UK, and Samuel Barnett reads poetry including John Donne's The Sun Rising, which is inscribed on the wall of Prospect Cottage.

You can read a news story about the saving of Prospect Cottage and see images of it here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-52120409

Producer: Nick Taylor

Readings:

Modern Nature - Derek Jarman

At Your Own Risk - Derek Jarman

Chroma - Derek Jarman

Funny Weather: Derek Jarman's Paradise - Olivia Laing

The Sun Rising - John Donne

Metamorphoses - Ovid (trans. Henry Thomas Riley)

Sonnet 126 - William Shakespeare

Conversations with Angels - John Dee

The Garden of Love - William Blake

The Hollow Men (extract) - T.S. Eliot

Remarks on Colour - Ludwig Wittgenstein (trans. Linda L. McAlister)

Ancient Arabic poem - At-Taliq (trans. A. R. Nykl)

Tilda Swinton and Samuel Barnett with readings from and inspired by Derek Jarman's work.

Deserts And Springs20150802Sylvestra Le Touzel and Samuel Barnett read prose and poetry exploring deserts and springs, both in physical form - the bone-dry wilderness which water turns to fertile soil, and as metaphor - the wasteland of existential emptiness, transformed by the streams of spiritual nourishment. Readings from TS Eliot, Shelley, Hardy and Banjo Paterson, and music by Britten, Schubert, Messiaen and Duke Ellington.

Texts and music about deserts and springs. Readers: Sylvestra Le Touzel and Samuel Barnett

Dickens's World2020061420201225 (R3)Charles Dickens: tireless novelist, journalist, amateur theatricalist, traveller, socialiser, and liver of life. To mark the 150th anniversary in 2020 of the death of this literary titan, actor Sam West reads from the letters Dickens sent to correspondents including other greats of the time like Mrs Gaskell and Wilkie Collins; close friends such as actor William Macready and artist Daniel Maclise; and his wife and children at home as he travelled extensively giving public readings to his thousands of adoring fans.

Including observations of his first trip to America at the height of slavery in 1842, reflections on the incumbent British government and the prevailing class system, his traumatic account of the 1865 Staplehurst Rail Crash, guidance for his youngest son on departing for Australia, and the story of hunting a ghost with a shot gun, which turned out to be a sheep.

With music by Haydn, Beethoven, Kathryn Tickell, The Divine Comedy, and Michael Nyman.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

On the Free Thinking programme website you can find an episode with Matthew Sweet discussing the writing of Dickens with novelist Linda Grant, New Generation Thinker Laurence Scott and Lucy Whitehead from Cardiff University:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jt6c

Readings:

A Tale of Two Cities

Furnival's Inn, Wednesday Evening, 1835. To Miss Hogarth (future Mrs Charles Dickens)

Greta Bridge, February 1st, 1838. To Mrs Charles Dickens

Baltimore, March 22nd, 1842. To Mr W C Macready

Villa Di Bagnarello, Albaro, July 22nd, 1844. To Mr Daniel Maclise

Devonshire Terrace, January 31st, 1850. To Mrs Gaskell

Tavistock House, January 3rd, 1855. To Monsieur de Cerjat

Folkestone, Oct. 4th, 1855. To Mr W C Macready

Gad's Hill Place, Rochester, Kent, Oct. 15th, 1859. To Monsieur Regnier

Tavistock House, May 3rd, 1860. To Monsieur de Cerjat

Office of 'All the Year Round,' Oct. 24th, 1860. To Mr Wilkie Collins

Gad's Hill Place, Tuesday Night, Oct. 14th, 1862. To Mr Wilkie Collins

57 Gloucester Place, Hyde Park, Feb. 23rd, 1864. To Mr Marcus Stone

Gad's Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent, June 13th, 1865. To Mr Thomas Mitton

1868, to Mr. Edward Dickens (his youngest son) on his departure for Australia

Anon - Announcement of the Death of Mr Charles Dickens, Manchester Guardian, Friday 10th June 1870

Sam West reads the letters of Charles Dickens, marking the 150th anniversary of his death

Different Trains2012020520151004 (R3)In 1830, the first railway passenger service in the world was established between Manchester and Liverpool - ever since railways have exerted their special fascination, not least with writers and musicians. They can evoke adventure and romance, excitement, power and fear. Dickens, for example, had a strong dislike of trains, but couldn't ignore them in his fiction.

The path of a train can mirror a journey through life. The 19th century Parisian railway provided a powerful backdrop to Emile Zola's exploration of the darker side of human nature in La Bꀀte Humaine; while for the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the train was the means of carriage for a soul's symbolic journey towards spiritual fulfilment. Arthur Honegger famously used an orchestra to mimic the sound of a great continental steam train, while Rossini - who detested the railway - took a certain pleasure in creating a musical depiction of a hypothetical railway accident. Trains mean rendezvous, departure, loss and transportation. For some, the incessant drive of a great steam engine is potent expression of a mechanised industrialized world. For one poet, the clickety-clack of metal wheels on metal rails evokes something primeval.

Jonathan Pryce and Eleanor Bron read poems and texts celebrating our relationship with trains by Emile Zola, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi; alongside archive recordings from TS Eliot and John Laurie. Featured 'Train' music includes musical thoughts from Arthur Honegger, Percy Grainger, Gioachino Rossini, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Mikhail Glinka, Charles Ives, Benjamin Britten, Rued Langgaard, Simon Bainbridge, Meade 'Lux' Lewis and Elvis Presley.

Texts and music celebrating railways, with readings by Jonathan Pryce and Eleanor Bron.

Discovery20130224Texts and music about discovery. Readers: Katherine Parkinson and Stephen Campbell Moore.
Displacement20140629~Words And Music on the theme of Displacement, with readers Lesley Sharp and Philip Franks. Including a selection of poetry and prose telling the stories of people from across Europe who were amongst the millions forced to leave their home nations during the Great War, from the hundreds of thousands of Belgians taking refuge in the UK, to Serbians fleeing their homeland after defeat from Austrian forces. With extracts from Virginia Woolf's diaries, an essay by Henry James, the poetry of Herbert Read, and memoirs written by Queen Marie of Romania.

Part of Radio 3's WWI season, Music in the Great War.

Texts and music on the theme of displacement. Readers: Lesley Sharp and Philip Franks.

Do Keep In Touch2019042820210829 (R3)From a texting poem to a novel written in letters and intimate letters for strings composed by Janက?ek. This edition of Words and Music is about an increasingly frenzied international obsession: communication.

Of course, communicating is nothing new and as we approach World Letter Writing Day on September 1st, we begin with readings from good, old-fashioned letters such as those exchanged by F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s; Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the 50s; and fictional, archly manipulative letters between the Viscount de Malmont and Marchioness de Merteuil in Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Getting more up to date, the poet Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Text' highlights text messaging, today's most used, misused and disposable way to keep in touch. Jonathan Franzen's Purity highlights the tendency of texting to lead to unfortunate, emotional gameplay. We also have literature by JRR Martin, Keats, Hardy, Margaret Atwood and others. Music is by Gershwin, Janက?ek, Roy Harris, Laurie Anderson, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Tom Waits and Faur退.

The words are read by the actors Emily Bruni and Paterson Joseph,

Producer: Paul Frankl

Readings:

Ernest Hemingway: Letter to F Scott Fitzgerald

F Scott Fitzgerald: Letter to Ernest Hemingway September 7 1922

PG Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves!

Thomas Hardy: Moonlight

JRR Martin Song of Ice and Fire

LP Hartley The Go Between

John Keats: Letter

Ted Hughes: Letter to Sylvia Plath 5th October 1956

Sylvia Plath: Letter to Ted Hughes 6th October 1956

Carol Ann Duffy: Text

Jonathan Franzen: Purity

Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses Letters 33 and 34

Margaret Atwood: Postcards

Ernest Hemingway: Letter to Charles Scribener Jr.

Emily Bruni and Paterson Joseph read literature about communication, ancient and modern.

Do Not Go Gentle2009052420091230 (R3)Barbara Jefford and Neville Jason explore the adventure of entering our 'third age', and the challenges and consolations of old age. With readings from Shakespeare, Yeats, Browning, Dylan Thomas, Roger McGough and Dannie Abse, and music including Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Scarlatti, Villa-Lobos, John Taverner, Leiber & Stoller, Jerome Kern, and The Beatles.

Barbara Jefford and Neville Jason explore the adventure of entering old age.

Dreams And Nightmares2018040820191013 (R3)A programme inspired by the words of Martin Luther King as we mark Black History Month with this selection of readings and music which include Sojurner Truth, Aretha Franklin, Langston Hughes and Florence Price. The readers are Jade Anouka and Brid Brennan.

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious' said Sigmund Freud. And the unconscious is a storehouse for unacceptable ideas or desires, traumatic memories & emotions we repress. We all dream - and not just while we sleep. So what can our dreams tell us about ourselves and the society we live in?

Producer: Debbie Kilbride.

Readings:

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Land of Nod

Algernon Charles Swinburne: Love and Sleep

Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis

Audre Lorde: 1984

Willam Butler Yeats: The Second Coming

Sojourner Truth: Ain't I A Woman

JM Synge: Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara

Martin Carter: Looking at Your Hands

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea

Aodhagကn Ӏ Rathaille, translated by Seamus Heaney The Glamoured

Frances EW Harper: Bury Me in a Free Land

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Carol Ann Duffy: Dreams of a Lost Friend

Langston Hughes: A Dream Deferred

Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud: Dora's Dream

Crazy Horse: Upon Suffering Beyond Suffering.

Main image: Portrait of African-American orator and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth (1797 - 1883), 1860s. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Readings by Brid Brennan & Jade Anouka & music including Brahms, Debussy & Aretha Franklin

Drink And No Drink2019122920211231 (R3)Much drink will be taken over Christmas and New Year. People will enjoy and regret this. Some will look forward ruefully to dry January. Some people never drink. Back in the 1920s, the prospect for Americans was dry forever, because prohibition was introduced. In this Words and Music, Joe Bannister and Sinead MacInnes read works that celebrate booze and reflect too the damage it can do to people and their relationships.

Jack Falstaff praises the virtues of sack. Dorothy Parker delineates the slide from 'just the one' to 'never again'. For Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses (first published in 1922), the lingering flavour of burgundy triggers the memory of a tryst; for Laurie Lee imbibing cider leads to the erotic encounter itself. Mahler and Mozart encourage cheerful drinking and Sussex folk singers Bob and Ron Copper praise good ale. There are two stunning hangovers, in prose from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and song, in Loudon Wainwright III's April Fool's Day Morn, as poignant as its protagonist's behaviour is appalling.

Producer: Julian May

READINGS

Psalm 60

Just a Little One - Dorothy Parker

Beowulf - translated by Seamus Heaney

Drinking Alone Under the Moon by Li Bai (Li Po)

Jack Falstaff's paean to sack, Henry IV Part II - William Shakespeare

Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee

I touch a liquor never brewed - Emily Dickinson

The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler

Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

The Porter, Macbeth - William Shakespeare

Sloe Gin - Seamus Heaney

Ulysses - James Joyce

Good Morning Midnight - Jean Rhys

John Barleycorn - Jack London

Prohibition - Unknown

Tha an drungair anns an d쀀g (The drunk is in the ditch) - Iain Crichton Smith translated by Peter Mackay

Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Friend with a Mandolin - Jeremy Hooker

Taking inspiration from toasts, parties, hangovers and prohibition.

Drumming20151025A sequence of music, poetry and prose celebrating one of the oldest musical arts.
Dungeons And Dragons2021112820231210 (R3)The Lambton Worm - a folk song from north east England; part of the score composed by Tan Dun for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Mozart's serpent in the opera The Magic Flute and Wagner's conjuring of the dragon Fafner in Siegfried form part of the music for today's episode inspired by the title of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. The readings evoking dark dungeons and dastardly dragons range from the dragon Smaug in Tolkien's The Hobbit, to the song Puff the Magic Dragon and the poem by Ogden Nash, which inspired that song, to the Welsh dragon in The Mabinogion. For dungeons we turn to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and poems by Coleridge, Emily Bront뀀, and Andrew Marvell's depiction of the soul imprisoned in the dungeon of the body in A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body. We also hear part of Jon Peterson's new book about the game of Dungeons and Dragons. Our readers are Manjinder Virk and Colin Tierney.

Producer: Nick Holmes

From George and the Dragon to Puff the Magic Dragon to dungeons in The Pilgrim's Progress.

The Lambton Worm - a folk song from north east England; part of the score composed by Tan Dun for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Mozart's serpent in the opera The Magic Flute and Wagner's conjuring of the dragon Fafner in Siegfried form part of the music for today's episode inspired by the title of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. The readings evoking dark dungeons and dastardly dragons range from the dragon Smaug in Tolkien's The Hobbit, to the song Puff the Magic Dragon and the poem by Ogden Nash which inspired that song, to the Welsh dragon in The Mabinogion. For dungeons we turn to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and poems by Coleridge, Emily Brontë, and Andrew Marvell's depiction of the soul imprisoned in the dungeon of the body in A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body. We also hear part of Jon Peterson's new book about the game of Dungeons and Dragons.

The British Library is currently staging an exhibition exploring Fantasy (until 25 Feb 2024) and on the Free Thinking programme website and available on BBC Sounds are many discussions of fantasy literature by Ursula Le Guin, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, Beowulf, the Odyssey, CS Lewis.

READINGS:

J. R. R. Tolkien The Hobbit

U. A. Fanthorpe Not my Best Side

Siegfried Sassoon The Dragon and the Undying

William Wordsworth Even as a Dragon's Eye

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress

Jon Peterson Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons

Middle Welsh trans. Lady Charlotte Guest The Mabinogion: The Story of Lludd and Llevelys

Charles Dickens The Signal-Man

Emily Brontë The Prisoner

Chris Wormell George and the Dragon

Andrew Marvell A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body

Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Dungeon

Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk

Ogden Nash The Tale of Custard the Dragon

From George and the Dragon, the Welsh dragon and Puff the Magic Dragon to dungeons in The Pilgrim's Progress, Coleridge and Emily Brontë. With music by Mozart, Wagner and Tan Dun.

Dylan Thomas Out Loud20140504A special edition of Words and Music as part of Radio 3's Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations.

Often set against the background of his beloved South Wales, Thomas explored the big themes: childhood, religion, love and death. The programme includes many well-loved poems and stories, including: 'After the Funeral', 'Do Not Go Gentle', 'The ForceThat Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower', 'Under Milk Wood', 'A Visit to Grandpa's' and 'A Story'. Thomas himself features, in a powerful archive recording of 'Lament'.

An evocative folk song arrangement from the Cory Band, a hymn from the Tywi Male Choir, and a stirring rendition of Land of My Fathers from Bryn Terfel further emphasise Thomas's roots. But although his Welsh identity is so fundamental, Thomas's work has universal resonance. Thus Thomas also rubs shoulders with the likes of Schubert, Debussy, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Steve Reich and Johnny Cash.

The newly commissioned readings are given by two of Britain's most exciting young actors, Catrin Stewart and Trystan Gravelle - both, like Thomas himself, from South Wales. Together they bring to life the texts in idiomatic and vibrant performances, showing Thomas to be a poet in the true bardic tradition, the full impact of whose work is best appreciated read out loud.

David Papp (producer).

Poerty and prose by Dylan Thomas and music ranging from Schubert to Johnny Cash.

Dystopia20180121Samantha Bond and Tobias Menzies read poetry and prose on the theme of dystopia.
Easter2020041220230409 (R3)Music and readings on the theme of Eastertide, Spring and the Passover including prose by Tolstoy, Richard Yates and Jane Austen, poetry by TS Eliot and Christina Rossetti, and music by Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Judy Garland. The readers are Samantha Bond, Henry Goodman, Emily Bruni, Sam West, Molly Hanson and Robert Lindsay.

Producer: Nick Holmes

Readings include:

TS Eliot - East Coker

Marge Piercy - The Seder's Order

Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys

Denise Levertov - The Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus

Oscar Wilde - Easter Day

Leo Tolstoy - Resurrection

Charles Dickens - Pictures from Italy

Eleanor Farjeon - Upon Easter Morning

WB Yeats - Easter 1916

Thomas Hardy - I watched a Blackbird

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

Effie Waller Smith - Easter Lilies

Claude McKay - The Easter Flower Poem

Richard Yates - The Easter Parade

Helen Wallen - An Easter Poem for Crap Mummies

Music includes:

Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883): Parsifal - opera in three acts

Francis Poulenc (1899 - 1963): Stabat mater for soprano, chorus and orchestra

Nicolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844 - 1908): Russian Easter festival [Svetliy prazdnik] - overture Op.36

James MacMillan (1959): Stabat mater for chorus and orchestra

Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883): Good Friday music [from 'Parsifal'] - concert version [no voices]

Fanny Mendelssohn (1805 - 1847): Sonata in A major (Easter Sonata) for piano

Carlo Gesualdo (c1561 - 1613): Tenebrae responses for Good Friday for 6 voices

Charles Wood (1866 - 1926): This joyful Eastertide - trad. Dutch carol, arr. for chorus

Muriel Herbert (1897 - 1984): Loveliest of trees for voice and piano

George Butterworth (1885 - 1916): 6 Songs from 'A Shropshire lad' for voice and piano

Gregorio Allegri (1582 - 1652): Miserere mei Deus [Psalm 51] for 9 voices

Lennon/Mccartney: Blackbird

Edvard Grieg (1843 - 1907): 6 Norwegian mountain tunes for piano

E J Moeran (1894 - 1950): Songs of springtime for chorus

Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911): Symphony no. 2 in C minor (Resurrection) for soprano, alto, chorus and orchestra

Judith Bingham (1952): Missa brevis for chorus and organ

Easter Parade Judy Garland and Fred Astaire composed by Irving Berlin

From Easter flowers to Passover meals and midnight church services.

Ecstasy20071104A sequence of music and poetry evoking states of rapture. Religious ecstasy is explored through poems by John Donne and George Herbert, and music by Messiaen and Robert Carver. The Romantic obsession with the mind-altering power of the outdoor world is reflected in works by Wordsworth and Schubert.

Musical evocations of ecstatic feelings include pieces by Scriabin and Thomas Ades, while Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson provide a poetic depiction of the elation felt by lovers.

Read by Michael Elwyn and Eleanor Bron.

Music and poetry evoking states of rapture. With poems by Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.

Ecstasy20080720A sequence of music and poetry evoking states of rapture, with readings by actors Michael Elwyn and Eleanor Bron.

With works exploring religious ecstasy from John Donne and George Herbert as well as by Olivier Messiaen and Robert Carver. The Romantic obsession with the mind-altering power of the outdoor world is reflected in works by Wordsworth and Schubert. There are also musical evocations of ecstatic feelings in pieces by Scriabin and Thomas Ades, and poetic depictions of the elation felt by lovers in writings by Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.

Music and poetry evoking states of rapture, with works by Donne, Messiaen and Schubert.

Education20120318This week's Words and Music explores the theme of education. Richard Wilson and Celia Imrie read poetry and prose exploring educational experience, from primary school nature tables and terrifying school mistresses, to the 'cloistral hush' of Oxford University and the darker resonances of learning in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Musical accompaniment includes work by Barber, Schumann and Britten as well as Bartok, Leopold Mozart, Rufus Wainwright and Brahms.

Texts and music on the theme of education. Readings by Richard Wilson and Celia Imrie.

Electricity2022080720230108 (R3)From pylons 'tall with prophecy' to the literal darkness of power cuts and the life force of lightning - today's programme hears extracts from writers including Naomi Alderman, Michel Faber, DH Lawrence, Stephen Spender, Gregory Orr and Polly Atkin who have explored electricity as a life-force of energy and the metaphor for the spark of creativity. Music fizzes through the programme, from Bjork, Janacek, Philip Glass, Jeff Beck, Blanck Mass, along with Bob Dylan's electric masterpiece Maggie's Farm and the exquisite electricity of the tragic young American violinist Michael Rabin. Nikolas Tesla, who worked on electric power and induction coils used in radio technology, died on January 7th 1943. As we explore electricity - please make sure your radio is properly earthed. Sparks may fly.

With readers Rosie Cavaliero and Ray Fearon.

Producer: Paul Frankl

Frankenstein, lightning, the national grid, Bob Dylan, electronic orchestral instruments.

Eminently Victorian2012070120141222 (R3)Eminently Victorian is a kind of stumble or headlong trip into the kaleidoscopic world of the 19th century. It's a world which embraces Elgar, Mendelssohn and William Sterndale Bennett as easily as George Eliot, Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning. At once familiar and strange it still seems seems utterly contemporary. Anna Maxwell Martin and Rory Kinnear conjure up Gwendolen Harleth and Gunga Din amongst others and the music whirls from the vernacular of Gilbert and Sullivan to Samuel Coleridge Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of the Victorians. With Anna Maxwell Martin and Rory Kinnear.

Empire20111030The quest to Empire-build - from the sixteenth century Spanish conquistadors to the nineteenth century British Raj - has inspired some powerful and enduring words and music. Readers Sian Thomas and Timothy West read poetry and prose which conjures both the era of empire, Rudyard Kiplings' 'The White Man's Burden' and Forster's 'A Passage to India', and the discomfort and melancholy of the post Imperial world, with Derek Walcott's 'Poems on the Passing of an Empire' and Langston Hughes' 'Roar China'. War poetry offers a disturbing glimpse into the darkest impulses of Empire-building with Hardy's plaintive Drummer Hodge and Wilfred Owen's coruscating 'Dulce et Decorum Est' before the heart-rending opening notes of the 'Sanctus' from Benjamin Britten's 'War Requiem'. Empire-building and enslavement are tragically bound together; in the negro spiritual 'Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen' - sung by Barbara Hendricks - and James Weldon Johnson's poem 'Lift Every Voice And Sing' we hear both the sorrowful reality - and joyful rejection - of slavery.

Texts and music on theme of Empire, with readings by Sian Thomas and Timothy West.

Encoded2016121120161218 (R3)Today's Words and Music has more to it than meets the eye. Anna Maxwell Martin and Tim McInnerny read texts and poetry inspired by codes, and hidden messages. Codes are a staple in detective and spy novels, and we find characters sending and grappling with them in works by Conan Doyle, Graham Greene and John le Carr退. There are also real life examples of codes being used, and broken, from Francis Bacon's ingenious cypher, Mary Queen of Scots' fatal coded letters during her imprisonment by Elizabeth I, and the top-secret work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. The programme also includes clue-ridden text and poems, such as Agatha Christie's Manx Gold which contained cryptic clues to the whereabouts of hidden treasure prizes on the Isle of Man. There are acrostic poems with the names of loved ones hidden within them, and in a similar way, composers often embedded their own, or another's initials into their music - there are examples by Bach, Shostakovich and Berg.

Producer Ellie Mant.

Texts and music inspired by codes, with readers Anna Maxwell Martin and Tim McInnerny.

Encounters With Egypt2022110620231119 (R3)The pyramids, gods, and pharaohs of Ancient Egypt have inspired writers and composers for centuries – we hear from Philip Glass's Akhnaten, Mozart's The Magic Flute and, the pinnacle 19th Orientalism, Verdi's Aida, commissioned to inaugurate Cairo's opera house in 1871. Egypt's river Nile provided a sinister backdrop to one of Agatha Christie's greatest murder mysteries, and the setting of Ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra's legendary barge journey, the source of inspiration for countless works from Shakespeare to contemporary composer Fazil Say. November 4th 1922 was when Tutankhamun's tomb was uncovered by Howard Carter.

We also explore Egypt's more recent history and culture, including the British occupation and revolution of 1952. There are Egyptian readings in Arabic from Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Islam Issa, who has helped curate and translate, and you'll hear some of Egypt's greatest musical talent, including soprano Fatma Said and famous singers of the past Oum Koulthoum and Dalida. Our readers are Samuel West and Nadi Kemp-Sayfi. You can also hear Islam talking about his book Alexandria on an episode of Free Thinking.

Readings:

Bayram al-Tunisi: The Sun of Dusk

Max Rodenbeck: Cairo - The City Victorious

Ahdaf Soueif: The Map of Love

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile

abdel-Rahman al-Abnudi: Yunus

CP Cavafy: The God Abandons Antony

Shaksepeare: Antony and Cleopatra

Ahmad Shawqi: The Death of Cleopatra

Sabrina Mafhouz: A History of Water in the Middle East

EM Forster: Alexandria - A History and a Guide

Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo: Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls

Philip Gross: The Garden of Nebamun

Raphael Cormack: Midnight in Cairo

Naguib Mahfouz: Miramar

Christopher Hampton: White Chameleon

Penelope Lively: Moon Tiger

Mustafa Kamil: Loving Egypt and Reviving Her

Producer: Graham Rogers

From soprano Fatma Said to Verdi's Aida, Agatha Christie to Ahmad Shawki and Adhaf Soueif.

Pyramids, pharaohs, the Nile - inspiration for composers from Verdi to Philip Glass, and writers from Shakespeare to Sabrina Mafhouz, read by Nadi Kemp-Sayfi and Samuel West.

The pyramids, gods, and pharaohs of Ancient Egypt have inspired writers and composers for centuries - we hear from Philip Glass's Akhnaten, Mozart's The Magic Flute and, the pinnacle 19th Orientalism, Verdi's Aida, commissioned to inaugurate Cairo's opera house in 1871. Egypt's river Nile provided a sinister backdrop to one of Agatha Christie's greatest murder mysteries, and the setting of Ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra's legendary barge journey, the source of inspiration for countless works from Shakespeare to contemporary composer Fazil Say. November 4th 1922 was when Tutankhamun's tomb was uncovered by Howard Carter.

Enemies20100822One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good. So said Jonathan Swift, and this week's Words and Music takes a closer look at what we have to fear from those who wish us harm. Struan Rodger and Siobhan Redmond read work by William Blake, Dorothy Parker, Charles Baudelaire, Penelope Shuttle and Naomi Shihab Nye, with music from Mozart, Handel, Berlioz and Shirley Bassey.

Texts and music on the theme of enemies. Readings by Struan Rodger and Siobhan Redmond.

Entente Cordiale2012120920160221 (R3)In 1904 Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale - the formal agreement establishing a special relationship between the two countries. The agreement put in writing something that had existed informally for centuries: a deep cultural understanding, witnessed in the exchange of ideas, music and literature. And despite periods of great turbulence, such as the Napoleonic Wars, Britain and France remained close.

This week's edition of Words and Music sails the English Channel to give expression to this special relationship with music from Delius, Vaughan Williams and Francaix; and words by Swinburne, Proust, Elizabeth David and Julian Barnes. The readers are Rachel Atkins and Jamie Parker.

~Words And Music on the theme of Entente Cordiale with Rachel Atkins and Jamie Parker.

Entering The World Of Books2019120120201221 (R3)Stephen Mangan and Helen Monks explore attitudes to reading from Roald Dahl's Matilda to Flaubert's Madame Bovary to `The Reading of Young Ladies` (from the American Magazine of Useful Knowledge, December 1836) `Every-one must rejoice that the education of females is considered more important than formerly - But - .too much time is spent on novels, few of which are calculated to instruct or to improve`. Starting off a series this week of Words and Music focusing on writing by some key names in literature, today's programmes takes us into the world of books.

The birth of the novel in the early 18th century and their growing popularity with female readers lead to many a male moralist worrying about what these romantic literary adventures were doing to women's expectations. Some of Emma's struggles with marriage in Flaubert's Madame Bovary are traced back to the books she reads and Jane Austen satirised the prim James Fordyce, whose Sermons for Young Women we'll hear from. Fordyce warns about books that commit: 'rank treason against the royalty of Virtue'. There's also a passage from Jilly Cooper's Riders.

Musically we'll journey from Haydn at the fortepiano, a combination Jane Austen would likely have been familiar with, to Thomas Ad耀s's haunting take on Shakespeare's The Tempest and Dire Straits' tribute to a Lady Writer. There are also hymns to reading and writers by the 16th-century composer Robert Jones and The Beatles.

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books' said Dylan Thomas in his Notes on the Art of Poetry.

You can find a playlist of discussions about Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking programme website which includes a discussion of attitudes to women writers and readers https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh

Producer Georgia Mann

Readings:

Emily Dickinson - There is no Frigate like a Book

Roald Dahl - Matilda

Mimi Khalvati - Childhood Books

C.K Williams - Prose

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Land of Story-books

James Fordyce - Sermons to Young Women, extract From Sermon IV: On Female Virtue

Flaubert - Madame Bovary

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

George Eliot - Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists

Jilly Cooper - Riders

Shakespeare - The Tempest

Author Unknown - Extract from Devouring Books, from the American Annals of Education, January 1835

Robert William Service - Bookshelf

Andrea Levy - The Long Song

Katie Ward - Girl Reading

Dylan Thomas - Notes on the Art of Poetry

Stephen Mangan & Helen Monks explore attitudes to reading in prose & poetry set to music.

Epiphany2012010820120901 (R3)In the Christian tradition, The Epiphany marked one of the first manifestations of God to mankind - to the gentiles - when the Magi or Wise Men were presented to the new-born Christ. It was a moment of revelation, of insight and understanding, as Christ's divinity was revealed.

Richard Strauss's Die heiligen drei K怀nige opens this edition of Words and Music with its mournful and subdued strings. Introducing the religious theme, the piece describes the epic and starlit voyage of the three Magi as they sought the Christ child.

George Mackay Brown's Epiphany Poem, read by Joanna David, describes the horror of this journey: the Magi 'Suffered salt, snow, skulls'. But at the end, the revelation of God to man brings hope and salvation; the first word is made flesh. Strauss expresses the movement from suffering to salvation through the modulation from minor to major key.

The Epiphany has been interpreted by many composers including Jonathan Dove, Judith Bingham and Richard Trunk whose work we hear in this programme.

In contrast, TS Eliot's The Journey of the Magi, read by Bertie Carvel, is a dramatic monologue from the point of view of one wise man. The anguished narrator, rather than expounding the joy of the birth or the beauty of the Eastern star, explains that the coming of Christ brought about the end of his world, 'the old dispensation'. The birth was 'bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

In Queen Herod, Carol Ann Duffy subverts the Epiphany story. The poem tells the tale of three queens whose visitation brings a warning: the eastern star heralds the birth of 'a swaggering lad' who will break her daughter's heart. Stansilaw Baranczak's The Three Magi introduces a secular aspect to the theme of epiphany, transposing the story to Communist Poland and the arrest of a dissident: the gold of a watch and the frankincense of cigarette smoke serve as substitutions for the Magi's gifts: 'what is this myrrh, anyway / you'd have to finally look it up / someday.

Beethoven's Symphony No.3 expresses a secular epiphany in the finale, as its headlong rush is interrupted with a slow section, building to an overwhelming climax; Janacek's Taras Bulba describes a similar epiphanic movement.

Texts and music on the theme of epiphany, with readings by Joanna David and Bertie Carvel.

Everyday Heroism2020083020230702 (R3)As the NHS marks 75 years of service on July 5th, our programme today celebrates everyday heroes with readings by Paterson Joseph and Ruth Bradley. Recent poems by Raymond Antrobus and Jackie Kay consider the experiences of frontline medical staff dealing with COVID-19. Teachers feature in an extract from George Dennison's account of The First Street School in New York, and in Roald Dahl's Matilda. The quiet heroism of rural communities takes us to Sunset Song's Chris Guthrie toiling daily on the land of North East Scotland, and the shepherd Gabriel Oak battling a fire in Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. And the global impact of a single bold act of everyday heroism is evoked by Rita Dove's poem about civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who challenged where she had to sit on a bus. The music includes works by Arvo Part, Vince Guaraldi, Carole King, Beethoven, and Charles Ives.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Raymond Antrobus - On Touch

Jackie Kay - Home

George Dennison - The Lives of Children

Roald Dahl - Matilda

Sarah Moss - Night Waking

Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd

Lewis Grassic Gibbon - Sunset Song

Rita Dove - Rosa

Patrick Marber - Closer

Emma Donoghue - The Pull of the Stars

Walt Whitman - The Wound Dresser

Roger Robinson - On Nurses

Doctors, nurses, teachers, parents.

Everything Must Change2019022420220104 (R3)This edition of Words and Music circles around a song by Bernard Ighner, Everything Must Change, heard in this programme in Nina Simone's powerful 1978 interpretation. The ballad is a meditation on `the way of time` and the truth that life is itself constant transformation. We inhabit a world in flux, collapse and transition. But in this programme, we are invited to marvel at how all things are interconnected, to sit with the knowledge that, in Thomas Hardy's words, the elements that make up a `ruddy human life` become the green shoots of a young tree, that bones become coral and eyes, pearls, in the famous imagery of Ariel's song from The Tempest. The readers are Emily Taaffe and William Ash.

D.H. Lawrence and Marcus Aurelius suggest that to embrace change is to experience life more fully and more naturally. We hear Aretha Franklin and Philip Ayres desperately promise a constant love, immortal, beyond time. We sit by a river with the poet, Wis?awa Szymborska, and lie with lovers in the tall grass of high summer, savouring the present. The theme-and-variation form is heard in the hands of Rubbra and Schubert. We gaze at the clouds, through the music of John Luther Adams, and turn our awareness inwards to the flow of thoughts `that flash, kaleidoscope-like, now in, now out`, in the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. As Alice in Wonderland knew all too well, the cells of the body are itching and dancing with life and transformation if we care to notice.

Our readers are William Ash and Emily Taaffe.

Featuring the voice of Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso, recorded in New Mexico.

Produced by Phil Smith.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

A meditation on 'the way of time' and life as constant transformation.

Exile20100905Frances Barber and Greg Hicks read poetry and prose exploring the theme of exile. The texts look at differing reactions to being away from home and its effects, or thinking that home should be somewhere other than it is. Shakespeare, Du Maurier, Italo Calvino, WB Yeats, AE Housman, Browning, Shelley, John Clare, Edward Lear, and Emily Dickinson provide the words; music from Chabrier, Byrd, Bach and Bob Marley, among others.

Produced by David Papp.

Texts and music exploring the theme of exile. Readings by Frances Barber and Greg Hicks.

Exile20110619Frances Barber and Greg Hicks read poetry and prose exploring the theme of exile. The texts look at differing reactions to being away from home and its effects, or thinking that home should be somewhere other than it is. Shakespeare, Du Maurier, Italo Calvino, WB Yeats, AE Housman, Browning, Shelley, John Clare, Edward Lear, and Emily Dickinson provide the words; music from Chabrier, Byrd, Bach and Bob Marley, among others.

Produced by David Papp.

Texts and music on the theme of exile, with readings by Frances Barber and Greg Hicks.

Face20080928How does one analyse a face? The common cliche of a phenomenon being greater than the sum of its parts could not be more apt.

I've tried to create a journey, beginning with faces in a crowd - each unique - as observed by Whitman. The focus shifts onto the eyes, the windows of the soul. From Newton's laid back arrangement of the jazz classic Angel Eyes , through Poulenc's surreal La Dame Aveugle (the blind woman) to a knowing glance from the winking, blinking maid, it's all rather tiring so what better way to sink into a slumber than with a children's poem Wynken, Blynken and Nod which I still read to my own little ones at bedtime.

Barlow's ecstatic eulogy on the face of a loved one is tinged with sadness, for there is a large age gap between them. Not such a problem for young Narcissus, as he unwisely falls for his own reflection, a story echoed by the wicked queen in Little Snow White as she gazes into her mirror. The music here is Tcherepnin's Narcisse et Echo, rarely heard and yet so effective.

Age will always win in the end, of course, eating away at youth's bloom. Wilde's Dorian Gray thinks he has the answer - give away your soul and hide a portrait in the attic. Simple! But we all know it won't end there -

What about those who are born without beauty? Mary Webb's heroine in Precious Bane is cursed (as she sees it) with a hare lip. Another facially challenged hero is Rostand's Cyrano, unforgettably portrayed on screen by Depardieu in a film which used Burgess's virtuosic translation as subtitles.

The sad fact is that for those who are not blessed with beauty or are cursed with some facial flaw, finding a partner is very hard work. Eliza Cook's Song of the ugly maiden is one of the saddest poems I know, particularly poignant when you remember that in the 19th century when it was written, marrying was essential for any woman who wanted any kind of independence or financial security.

Like any fairy tale, we all need a happy ending, so as little Gerda kisses away Kay's tears in the Snow Queen we can see clearly that love is the ultimate salvation. A kiss communicates so much, from that first sensation of electricity - so wonderfully described in Purcell's erotic Sweeter than roses, to tenderness from an old friend. Beauty is only skin deep, and as Ella sings so wonderfully, when we eventually find our soul mate, we come to love that face which we see every morning over the breakfast table, no matter what it looks like.

Helen Garrison (producer)

Readers: Michael Maloney (MM) and Lesley Sharp (LS)

Hildegard of Bingen O pulchrae facies

Sequentia

DHM GD77020

Walt Whitman

Faces (extract)

David Newton Angel Eyes

Linn AKD 087

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Poulenc La Dame Aveugle (from Le Bal Masque)

W. Holzmair (baritone)

Saito Kinen Orchestra

S. Ozawa

Philips 456 504-2

Edward Lear

Limerick

Fred Emerson Brooks

The Girl That Winked Her Eye

H. Warren/J. Mercer arr Nelson Riddle Jeepers Creepers

F. Sinatra

Capitol 0 7777 48470 2 5

Eugene Field

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod

Gurney orch Finzi Sleep

C. Maltman (baritone)

BBC SSO

M. Brabbins

Hyperion CDA67065

George Barlow

To a Face

Harle Since first I saw your face

S. Leonard

John Harle Band

Argo 452 605-2

Christopher Marlowe

Was This the Face

Piazzolla arr. Llu퀀s Vidal Milonga del ကngel

P. Mainetti (bandon退on)

Orquestra de Cambra Teatre Lliure

Josep Pons

HMC 901595

Christina Rossetti

In an Artist's Studio

Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Brothers Grimm

Little Snow-White

Nikolai Tcherepnin Narcisse et Echo

Residentie Orchestra The Hague

G.Rozhdestvensky

CHAN 9670

Ovid Trans. Joseph Addison

The Story of Narcissus (Metamorphoses)

Ram n de Campoamor

Trans. Thomas Walsh

Two Mirrors

George Michael Cowboys and Angels

Epic 491705 2

Dowland Pavan Lachrimae Antiquae

Fretwork

Virgin VC 7 90795-2

Anon trans. William Cowper

Beware the Crystal Brook

Edmond Rostand trans. Anthony Burgess

Cyrano de Bergerac

Liza Lehman If no one ever marries me

Janice Watson and Steuart Bedford

Collins 15082

Tavener Tears of Angels

C. Gould

BT Scottish Ensemble

Linn CKD 085

Vaughan Williams Intermezzo `My Bonny Boy`: Andantino (from English Folk Song Suite)

RNCM Wind Orchestra

T. Reynish

CHAN 9697

Hans Christian Andersen

Debussy The Snow is Dancing

P. Rog退

Decca 443 021-2

Elizabeth Allen

Purcell Sweeter than roses

N. Argenta (sop)

N. North (archlute)

R. Boothby (gamba)

Virgin VC 7 59324 2

Lucien Stryk

Winter Storm

MM & LS

Gershwin arr Riddle Funny Face

E. Fitzgerald

N. Riddle and his Orchestra

Verve 825 024-2

Michael Maloney and Lesley Sharp read poems and texts exploring the face.

Face20100131Another chance to hear a revised repeat of Words and Music on the theme of the face.

The face of our mother is the first thing on which we focus when we are born. From then on, faces take on a huge significance throughout our lives. We communicate all our emotions through our faces, through our eyes and with words through our lips. Through our noses we can detect not just when it's time for dinner, but whether somebody is frightened, depressed or attracted to us. This programme explores this uniquely human phenomenon, surveying all aspects of the face - beauty, youth, ugliness, love, fear. Then there are the barriers put up when the face is not as it should be, when one cannot see, or one encounters a disfigured face, or eyes that tell a terrible story.

Highly acclaimed actors Michael Maloney and Lesley Sharp read poems and texts by Christina Rossetti, Christopher Marlowe, Ovid, George Barlow and, of course, extracts from Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. And there is music by Gershwin, Hildegard of Bingen, Tavener, Purcell, Ivor Gurney, Dowland and George Michael.

Michael Maloney and Lesley Sharp read poems and texts exploring the face.

Fairy Tale20131201Fairy tales shape our imagination. As children their fantasy strikes us as vivid and compelling and as adults their simple surface often seems a shimmering veil over a more profound if disturbing reality. They're distorting mirrors where for a moment at least a prince can look like a frog and a pea can leave a bruise on the soft flesh of a sleeping princess. The actors Hayley Atwell and Tim Pigott-Smith invite us for a stroll in this deep, dark wood - haunted by, Medtner, Syzmanowski, Dvorak and Humperdinck on one side of the twisting path and by Sylvia Townsend Warner, the Brothers Grimm and Margaret Atwood on the other.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of fairy tales. Readers: Hayley Atwell and Tim Pigott-Smith.

Fame2010101020190113 (R3)Poetry and music on the theme of fame and celebrity, read by Imogen Stubbs and Michael Maloney.

This week's programme looks at the value - or cost - of fame. Can recognition itself bring happiness? What happens when the soft caress of the camera is replaced by the harsh gaze of the paparazzi? Why do so many yearn for their 'fifteen minutes of fame'? And how differently do we view those who have earned their celebrity status through great achievements in life rather than in the film studio?

Writing by Rita Dove, Boris Pasternak, John Clare, Geoffrey Hill, Charles Simic and Emily Dickinson is accompanied by the music of Handel, John Tavener, Stephen Sondheim and Michael Jackson.

Texts and music about fame and celebrity. Readings by Imogen Stubbs and Michael Maloney.

Poetry and music on the theme of fame, read by Imogen Stubbs and Michael Maloney.

Family Portraits20091025Free Thinking 2009

Ian McMillan introduces a special edition, as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival. In an atmospheric evening of poetry and music inspired by family life, County Durham-born actress Gina McKee and Live Theatre's Donald McBride read poems by Philip Larkin, John Clare, Sylvia Plath and Newcastle's own Thomas Whittle. Plus a newly-commissioned dramatic dialogue for both actors by Karen Laws, Free Thinking Writer-in-Residence.

They are joined by members of the Northern Sinfonia playing works for string quartet by Purcell, Haydn and Dvorak, as well as music from Newcastle-based folk singer Emily Portman and concertina and Northumbrian pipes player Alistair Anderson.

Ian McMillan introduces a special edition recorded from the 2009 Free Thinking festival.

Fathers And Sons20121028Fathers and their sons -- or should that be sons and their fathers? Whichever way you look at it, it has to be one of the most powerful of human bonds....sometimes nurturing, sometimes destructive but always unavoidable. This evening's Words and Music features two of Britain's best known actors - Freddie Jones and as you might expect under the circumstances, his son Toby. Freddie has starred in everything from The Elephant Man to Emmerdale Farm and Toby is just as ubiquitous - think of Berberian Sound studio, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Dr Who. They stay pretty much in character for the programme - with the odd surprise - to explore this turbulent domestic terrain drawing on Shakespeare, Turgenev, Coleridge and Michael Hoffman as they go. Further illumination, wit and vitality is provided by JS Bach and his son CPE, the Strauss family, Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart and by Max Richter and Horace Silver - so something for everyone, as they say.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Freddie Jones and his son Toby are the readers in a sequence about fathers and sons.

Faust20070923Music and poetry reflecting the age-old obsession with the German legend of Faust.
Feast!2018122320231231 (R3)Does a feast always conjure images of rich food and eating too much? The actors Tony Gardner and Janie Dee read from a selection of literary feasts including F Scott Fiztgerald's account of an opulent garden party thrown by Jay Gatsby to the small scale 'This Is Just To Say' by William Carlos Williams (a cheeky note left on a fridge admitting to have eaten someone else's plums) and Chinua Achebe's Yam Feast from Things Fall Apart. Plus poems including Flowers in the Interval by Louis MacNeice and All Souls by Kit Wright. Music by Copland, Charpentier, Beyonc退, John Barry, Charles Aznavour and Schubert.

Producer: Paul Frankl

A smorgasbord of literary and musical feasts from Jonathan Swift to Nora Ephron.

Does a feast always conjure images of rich food and eating too much? The actors Tony Gardner and Janie Dee read from a selection of literary feasts including F Scott Fiztgerald's account of an opulent garden party thrown by Jay Gatsby to the small scale 'This Is Just To Say' by William Carlos Williams (a cheeky note left on a fridge admitting having eaten someone else's plums) and Chinua Achebe's Yam Feast from Things Fall Apart. Plus poems including Flowers in the Interval by Louis MacNeice and All Souls by Kit Wright. Music by Copland, Charpentier, Beyoncé, John Barry, Charles Aznavour and Schubert.

Actors Tony Gardner and Janie Dee read from a selection of literary feasts with music by Charpentier, Beyonce, Schubert and Charles Aznavour.

Feasting With Panthers2009100420100919 (R3)Texts and music on the theme of gay love. Readings by Douglas Hodge and Helen McCrory.
Featherbrained2014060120151228 (R3)An exploration of birds and the human imagination from Wallace Stevens to the crows in Disney's Dumbo with the actors Anna Maxwell Martin and Jonjo O'Neill.

Is there something atavistic about an earthbound creature's fascination with flying? Could this be why birds have such a grip on our imagination? Think of it - Shakespeare's starlings and jackdaws - Rossini's thieving magpie - Lewis Carroll and the dodo....The Owl and the Pussycat ...Messiaen's extraordinary musical aviary ... we're always adding to the list. Somehow, it seems, our minds are refreshed and perplexed by birds. Although profoundly different we seek out similarities with their behaviour; then, perversely, we decide to envy their singularity; we ponder their savagery, then wonder if we should follow their example; even as we hunt them, we marvel at their resilience - windblown scraps flying against a howling gale, or sandmartins snuggling together in deep domesticity. This evening's edition of Words and Music is an exploration of all things featherbrained - an all too human swoop from Wallace Stevens' blackbird to the singing crows in Disney's Dumbo; from the ambivalent sweetness of the dove you can hear in Du Fay or Penalosa to the slight and sensual figure of a wading girl that James Joyce transforms into a seabird. Whether a lark ascending makes your heart leap or whether you're stirred by the brassy lure of a buzzard, prepare to take wing.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

A sequence of texts and music on the theme of birds and the human imagination.

Femmes Fatales2009011820091229 (R3)A programme of poetry and music on the theme of the femme fatale, an idea exemplified in some of the most passionate artistic creations, including Medusa, Delilah, Carmen and Lady Macbeth.

Jeremy Northam and Harriet Walter read works by Keats, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wilde, Carol Anne Duffy and Angela Carter, alongside music by Handel, Massenet, Saint-Saens, Richard Strauss, Bizet and Gershwin.

Poetry and music on the theme of the femme fatale. Jeremy Northam and Harriet Walter read.

Fighting Spirit20120527With just two months to go before the start of the 2012 Olympics, and inspired by the idea of what motivates athletes to compete, an exploration of the theme of fighting spirit in its many guises.

From Aesop's famous morality tale of the hare and tortoise, through Lewis Carroll's selfish Queen domineering in a game of croquet, to Henry V's call to arms on St Crispin's Day - a range of driven characters reveal what it is that makes them tick.

Actors Alison Steadman and Peter Egan read poetry and prose alongside music including Raymond Scott, Schubert, Wagner, Irving Berlin and Queen.

~Words And Music on the theme of fighting spirit. Readers: Alison Steadman and Peter Egan.

Finishing The Hat2010041820101228 (R3)~Words And Music inspired by painting, with readings by Alex Jennings and Carolyn Pickles.
Fins, Scales And Hooks20150913Texts and music about fish and fishing, with readings by Emma Fielding and Michael Simkins
Flanerie, A View Of Paris2014051120190217 (R3)An imagined serendipitous journey through Paris's streets, past and present, told through its literature and music, with the actors Tamsin Greig and Neil Pearson

The Fl neur - 'that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps'.

It was Baudelaire, in his 'Fleurs du Mal' in the late 19th century, who created fl nerie as a literary ideal for evoking the patterns and emotions of modern urban life in Paris; but the concept of the detached observer - casual, directionless, voyeuristic - who finds refuge within the crowded streets of the capital, had been around for some time. Balzac, writing in the years before the advent of Haussman's modern cityscape, had described fl nerie as 'the gastronomy of the eye'. Later, the German writer and social-critic, Walter Benjamin, would use the experiences of the Parisian fl neur as illustrations for socio-political commentary.

In this edition of Words and Music, we - much in the spirit of the fl neur - take a casual musical and literary journey through Paris's imagined streets. Glimpses of buildings bring to mind the city's great history and its inhabitants; its poets, writers and composers. Imagine sauntering past Notre Dame and the neighbouring university: and the ribaldry of medieval Paris fills the mind's eye, evoking the words of Villon and Rabelais; of Victor Hugo describing the medieval skyline and the festive sound of the medieval bells.

Next on to the Louvre and the Marais, and echoes of the grandeur of Paris during the age of the Sun King; of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal de S退vingn退's famous letters; of the music of Lully and Charpentier. Turn another corner, and find the youthful Marin Marais, lost and bewildered by the banks of the Seine - his voice, post-pubescent - his services no longer required in the Royal Chapel.

A hundred years on, and in the wretched area of Sainte-Antoine, Charles Dickens watches the abject poor seemingly rehearse events for one the city's least glorious moments; their hands and clothes stained with red wine, like blood.

Balzac lists the varied 'physiognomy' of the Parisian back streets in the years just before Haussmann re-invented the city - we follow him into some of Paris's more forbidding and darker haunts; while later - into the Belle ɀpoque and beyond - coursing among the newer buildings, parks and thoroughfares - Baudelaire, Proust and Zola observe Parisian life with a multitude of senses and a painterly eye. As do Faur退, Verlaine and Debussy.

Among all cities, there is none more associated with the book than Paris', wrote Walter Benjamin. Ernest Hemingway finds refuge in one of the city's necessary cafes, watching and transcribing, while Beria and Bechet set the same thoughts to music.

Finally, our serendipitous journey presents an aspect of the modern Paris: not the beautiful; nor the bustling, fashionable and vibrant; but urban nonetheless. The city at its edge - people at the periphery. The world in the Banlieue: of graffiti and the blues.

An imagined, serendipitous journey through Paris with actors Tamsin Greig and Neil Pearson

Flights Of Fancy2020062120230813 (R3)Barbara Flynn and Hugo Speer read poetry and prose on the theme of flight, both literal and imaginative. The readings in this edition of Words and Music have been roughly grouped into three sections that flow seamlessly into each other. They are: flight in nature, human flight and flights of the imagination.

We encounter characters from Shakespeare: Ariel, Queen Mab and one of Titania's fairies, witness a new speed record for seagulls, peruse Dylan Thomas's sleeping fishing village, climb into the wild and majestic mountains with William Wordsworth and face the fantastical monsters of Lewis Carroll and H.P. Lovecraft.

We're on the wing with Einojuhani Rautavaara and a flock of migrating with swans. Kevin Volans takes us to South Africa with tribal rhythms that accompany Horatio Clare's observations of African Swallows. Paul Lawrence Dunbar's inability to see the sparrows at his window rings as true now as it would have been when the poem was written over 100 years ago. Kathleen Jamie's insight into the habits of peregrine falcons is as much an insight into her own life as that of the birds.

John Gillespie Magee wrote his sonnet High Flight after flying a Spitfire Mk1 and it has been paired here with Fatboy Slim's vision of the transonic jet fighter plane the Hawker Hunter, also known as the Bird of Prey. Both share the sense of freedom and exhilaration of fast flight.

Vaughan Williams is better known for his pastoral sound but his motet 'A vision of aeroplanes' is a veritable whirlwind. He takes a passage from the biblical Book of Ezekiel that seems to prophesy an aeroplane appearing through the clouds and sets it to tumultuous organ and vocal writing.

Flying for humans obviously involves rather more logistics than for birds but there are some airports around the world that add character and spark to what is mostly a necessary evil. We hear a little about the quirks of flying in Bolivia and Ecuador and Britain's only 3 runway airport, Barra, which is on a beach in north Scotland and lit by car headlights.

Readings:

Horatio Clare: A Single Swallow

Kathleen Jamie: Findings

John Gillespie Magee: High Flight

Sarah Arvio: Flying

Lonely Planet: Bolivia - Air travel

Undiscovered Scotland: Barra Airport

Lonely Planet: Ecuador - Air travel

Shakespeare: Where the Bee Sucks there suck I - Ariel, Act 5 Sc 1 The Tempest

Richard Bach: Jonathan Livingstone Seagull

Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 sc 4, Queen Mab speech (Mercutio)

Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream: Over Hill, Over Dale - Fairy, Act 2 sc 1,

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Sparrow

Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood (To Begin at the Beginning)

William Wordsworth: The Prelude, Book 13 (extract)

Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky

H.P. Lovecraft: The call of Cthulhu (Chapter III - The Madness from the Sea)

Produced by Barnaby Gordon

Barbara Flynn and Hugo Speer with readings and music on imaginative and physical flight.

Flowers Of Evil20080518The programme explores Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, an expression of personal torment and the conflict between Catholic morals and debauchery in 19th-century Paris. Antony Sher reads from the texts, with Imogen Stubbs reading complementary works by Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot.

With the voice of Jean-Louis Barrault and music influenced by Baudelaire from Debussy, Duparc, Serge Gainsbourg and Diamanda Galas, as well as Takemitsu and Messiaen.

Antony Sher reads from Baudelaire's poem Les fleurs du mal.

Fly Me To The Moon2019072120211227 (R3)On 20 July 1969, humans landed on the moon for the very first time. Or was it in fact the first time? Some say that adventurers and inventors have been making the trip to the moon for centuries. Just ask Edgar Allen Poe, who documented Hans Phall's journey by hot air balloon. Or listen to Leoš Janက?ek, with his opera celebrating Mr Brou?ek, who made it all the way on a drunken dream. Or read Italo Calvino, whose classic character Qfwfq climbs up there to harvest lunar milk.

The German astronomer Johannes Kepler was born on 27 December 1571. 450 years later Words and Music looks at space exploration.

In this edition of Words and Music you can experience the sensation of ascending to the moon and taking a moonwalk, beholding all the wonders lying in wait on the dark side. Your companions for the expedition are today's readers: Zawe Ashton and Peter Marinker.

Readings:

Orlando Furioso - Ludovico Ariosto

Stoned Moon Drawing - Robert Rauschenberg

Moon Palace - Paul Auster

Night - Etel Adnan

The Unparalleled Adventure Of One Hans Phall - Edgar Allen Poe

I am the moon, and you are the man on me - Claire Askew

A True Story - Lucian of Samosata

The Man In The Moone - Francis Godwin

Thirteen Haiku - Yosa Buson

Lady Chatterley's Lover - DH Lawrence

There's a moon inside my body - Kabir

Letter - CS Lewis

Voyage To The Moon - Archibald MacLeish

Various Portents - Alice Oswald

Aniara - Harry Martinson

Moonset - Carl Sandburg

Bad Moon - Claire Askew

Produced by Jack Howson.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

A trip to the moon featuring Zawe Ashton and Peter Marinker.

Food For Thought2009042620091225 (R3)A selection of poetry, prose and music on the subject of food, with readings by Samantha Bond and Robert Powell.

Including stories from the Bible, poetry by Robert Frost and Carol Anne Duffy as well as writings by Jane Grigson, Marcel Proust, Samuel Pepys and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Music includes Chabrier, Cage, Schubert, Stravinsky and Bach.

A selection of poetry, prose and music on the subject of food.

Footloose2017102920190103 (R3)From bare feet to dancing feet and booted feet, with everything in between, the programme features poetry and prose by writers including Cecil Day Lewis, DH Lawrence, Hans Christian Andersen, Pauline Prior-Pitt and Jung Chang, and music by Prokofiev, Victoria, Fats Waller and Kirsty MacColl. The readers are Hermione Norris and Robert Bathurst, stars of the TV drama series 'Cold Feet'.

The notion of a programme about feet might at first seem comical, but once you begin to look at how the image of the foot is used in literature, a wide range of symbolism reveals itself. Phrases such as 'best foot forward', 'the world at your feet', 'falling at your feet' all evoke power and achievement. 'Treading on eggshells', 'a foot in the door', 'pussy-footing around', 'getting cold feet', all point towards hesitation and a lack of confidence. The symbolism of Jesus Christ washing his disciples' feet, re-enacted every Maundy Thursday, is one of the most powerful symbolic acts in the Christian liturgical calendar. Just as powerful is the image of an army marching to war. Children's literature and fairy tales are peppered with footprints, from Cinderella trying on the glass slipper to The Little Mermaid, who has to endure the sensation of dancing on sharp knives in order to become human.

Producer Helen Garrison.

Dancing, marching, washing, binding: with readings by Hermione Norris and Robert Bathurst.

For Love Of Bagpuss20240211Bagpuss - that much-loved, furry cat - first appeared on TV screens on 12 Feb 1974. There only ever were 13 episodes but it was such a hit with 1970s children that it was re-run many times, entrancing generation after generation. Part of the secret of the Bagpuss attraction were the characters at the heart of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's series: the yawning, baggy cloth cat of course, but also the wise child Emily, the chattering woodpecker Professor Yaffl (said to be a send-up of the philosopher Bertrand Russell), Gabriel the banjo-playing toad, Madeleine the rag doll and those magic mice. This Words and Music looks to these characters for inspiration.

Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner provided the music for the series and you'll hear some of that alongside compositions by Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Hindemith, Florence Price, Ailbhe McDonagh and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Readings include novels by George Eliot and Roald Dahl, Eleanor Farjeon's poem Cats and Robert Louis Stephenson's To Any Reader, read by the former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis and the CBeebies actor and presenter Ben Faulks - also known as Mr Bloom.

Producer in Salford: Olive Clancy

You can find a Free Thinking discussion about Bagpuss and the other worlds conjured by Oliver Postgate including The Clangers, and Pogles' Wood. With guests including Sandra Kerr and Daniel Postgate. Available on BBC Sounds

Readings and music inspired by the anniversary of the children's TV programme Bagpuss

Former Blue Peter star Janet Ellis and CBeebie's Mr Bloom, Ben Faulks, are the readers for this nostalgic evocation of the world of Bagpuss

Forty Years Of Poetry On Radio 320071028It's 40 years since Radio 3 made its entrance on the world's stage. Poetry has been the station's lifeblood from its earliest days, so there's no better way to toast the past and welcome the future than a deep draught of the 'blushful Hippocrene'.

Featuring some of the most arresting performances poets have given on Radio 3 in the past 40 years, from John Ashbery to Derek Walcott, with music to match.

Arresting poetry performances, from John Ashbery to Derek Walcott, and music to match.

Four Medieval Mystic Masters Across Religions20130428Four medieval mystic masters across religions through verses read by Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack.

~Words And Music travels back to the 12th and 13th centuries through the spiritual poetry of four remarkable mystics; one Christian, one Jewish, one Muslim, and one Buddhist. German Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Iberian-born Hebrew poet Rabbi Judah Halevi, Persian Sufi master Rumi, and Tibetan monk Jetsun Milarepa provide this varied tapestry of reflections reaching to the core of spiritual belief, a tapestry surprisingly fresh and still relevant in today's world. The music featured, taken from the complex soundscapes nurtured over the centuries by these four religions, offers a quite unique spiritual journey, full of contrasting colours and feelings.

Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist medieval poetry with Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack

Foxes And Wolves2017120320181021 (R3)We go into the Forest with Red Riding Hood as Alison Steadman and Tim Dutton read from Aesop to Sarah Hall, Rudyard Kipling to Roald Dahl in a programme exploring wolves as both wild and nurturing, foxes as both cunning and prey.

Tying into BBC Radio 3's Into the Forest season, the landscape changes from woodlands to hunting fields to the plains of America in the film Dancing with Wolves and recent attempts at re-wilding which have seen wolves re-introduced to national parks in the USA and the UK. The musical palette moves from Mozart, Prokofiev and Sondheim to Los Lobos and Jimi Hendrix.

But these seemingly similar creatures are portrayed with very different characteristics. Blues singer Chester Burnett was apparently given the name Howlin' Wolf by his grandfather who would scare the boy with tales of wolves in the Mississippi woods but the Wolf of Jungle Book is the creature who cares for Mowgli. And the cunning fox from Roald Dahl's Mr Fox gives way to the sexy fox of Sarah Hall's short story, which won her the BBC short story prize in 2013, becoming fox fur worn in David Malouf's poem and in the fate of the heroine of Janက?ek's opera after she dies at the hands of a poacher.

Producer: Harry Parker.

Image: Sloth, detail from the Seven Deadly Sins, 1485, by Hieronymus Bosch (ca 1450-1516), oil on canvas, 120x150 cm. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images); Madrid, Museo Del Prado.

Free Thinking, Words And Music20081102Experience the journey of a lifetime in an hour-and-a-half with young Liverpudlian actors Annabelle Dowler and Kevin Harvey, and music performed by folk-singer Belinda Sykes, jazz/rock-percussionist Bill Bruford, pianist Ashley Wass and the Elias String Quartet!

This edition of Words and Music is an interpretation of Shakespeare's declaration about life, the ‘Seven Ages of Man' from As You Like It, through the words of Blake and the Mersey Sound; Marlowe and Raleigh, Sassoon and Pinter; Pam Ayres and Kipling. Plus, Don't Fence Me In, a newly-commissioned take on Shakespeare's ‘Second Childishness' by Free Thinking Writer in Residence, Angela Clarke.

Bill Bruford plays percussion improvisations that represent the passing of time, while Belinda Sykes punctuates the programme with folk ballades that convey the raw experience of life. Ashley Wass and the Elias String Quartet play music that ties in with youth, from Mendelssohn's String Quartet Op.44 No.2 to Grieg's Arietta, and from Debussy's String Quartet to Kurtag's Jatekok nursery rhythms. They come together for the ‘Lover' in the Adagio from Elgar's Quintet and, as old age approaches, play from Haydn's String Quartet Op.76 No.1 and Bax's In a Vodka Shop to represent Shakespeare's ‘Slippered Pantaloon' and ‘Second Childishness'. Ashley Wass brings the programme to a close with more Grieg, his ‘Recollection', which is followed by Kipling's ‘The Way through the Woods' and Bill Bruford's percussion beat fading as life comes to a close.

Producer: Elizabeth Arno

Recorded live on 1st November in the Small Concert Room of St George's Hall Liverpool as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival 2008

Annabelle Dowler (reader)

Kevin Harvey (reader)

Bill Bruford (percussion)

Belinda Sykes (singer)

Ashley Wass (piano)

Introduced by Ian McMillan

PART 1: YOUTH

Shakespeare: Seven Ages of Man (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII)

Mendelssohn: String Quartet op.44 no.2 (Andante)

Blake: Cradle Song

Grieg: Arietta (Lyric Pieces, Book 1, Op.12)

Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (extract)

Traditional: Hush my babe

Debussy: String Quartet (2nd movement)

Roger McGough: First Day at School

Bill Bruford: Improvisation

Brian Patten: Gust becos I cud not spel

Kurtag: Jatekok: Tumblebunnies

PART 2: ADULTHOOD

Traditional: The trees they do grow high

Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Raleigh: Her Reply

Elgar: Quintet (Adagio)

Traditional: Courting is a Pleasure (Lovely Molly)

Sassoon: In me, past, present future meet

Britten: Divertimento No.1 (March)

Dickens: Little Dorrit (extract)

Bach: Contrapunctus 2 (Art of Fugue, BWV.1080)

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn: Come, Captain Age

Bach: Contrapunctus 9 a 4 ‘alla duodecima' (Art of Fugue, BWV.1080)

Shostakovich: March: Allegretto (3 Fantastic Dances, Op.5)

Harold Pinter: A Slight Ache

Shostakovich: Waltz (3 Fantastic Dances, Op.5)

PART 3: OLD AGE

Traditional: The Ages of Man

Pam Ayres: Oh I wish I'd looked after my teeth

Bax: In a Vodka Shop

Haydn: String Quartet Op.76 No.1 (Adagio sostenuto)

Longfellow: My Lost Youth

Traditional: Hush, my babe

Cole Porter: Don't Fence me In

Sung by Ella Fitzgerald, VERVE 8219902 Tr16

Angela Clarke: Don't Fence me In (new commission)

Grieg: Recollection (Lyric Pieces, Book 10, Op.71)

Kipling: The Way through the Woods

Seven Ages of Man': a special edition recorded live at Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival.

Free Thinking: The One And The Many20180311A special edition of Words and Music, recorded earlier today in the Glass Box at Sage Gateshead as part of the Free Thinking Festival. Carolyn Pickles and Jonathan Keeble read poetry and prose on the festival's theme of 'The One and the Many'. The programme will explore literary and real people who have thought or acted differently from the crowd - and the crowd's attitude to them. Including texts by George Orwell, Albert Camus and Elizabeth Jennings, and music by Benjamin Britten, Bohuslav Martinu and Igor Stravinsky.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

The One and the Many with readers Carolyn Pickles and Jonathan Keeble.

Free Thinking: The Speed Of Life20170319Music and readings on the theme of 'the speed of life'. With Kim Gerard and Samuel West.
Free Thinking: Who's In Control?20131027In this special edition of Words and Music, recorded in front of an audience at St Marys Heritage Centre, Gateshead as part of this year's Free Thinking Festival, readers Kevin Whately (Inspector Morse, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet) and Madelaine Newton (When the Boat Comes In), read a selection of poetry and prose on the theme of this year's festival: 'Who's In Control?'.

They appear alongside their daughter Kitty Whately, the mezzo-soprano and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, the acclaimed Leonore Piano Trio and Kathryn Tickell, the Northumbrian piper and composer whose work is deeply rooted in the folk traditions of the North East.

Words come courtesy of Shakespeare, Dickens and Wordsworth, and musically we'll move from Beethoven to Sondheim, Arne to Mahler.

BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival takes place at Sage Gateshead 25-27 October and is broadcast for three weeks on Radio 3 from Friday 25 October.

A special live edition from Radio 3's 2013 Free Thinking festival of ideas.

From London To Paris20071202With the opening of London's new international terminal to Paris, Sophie Okonedo and Kenneth Cranham read a selection of poetry and prose around the theme of these two great cities.

Readings include words by Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Verlaine, George Orwell and Fleur Adcock, and a range of music from Gibbons, Noel Coward, Elgar, Boulez and Yves Montand.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music around the theme of these two great cities.

Fruit And Vegetables2020050320210124 (R3)
20230827 (R3)
As farmers hope for a good harvest and a plentiful crop of autumn fruits, Paterson Joseph and Jane Whittenshaw read poetry and prose on the theme of the humble fruit and vegetable. From Beatrix Potter's lettuce-loving Peter Rabbit to the Campion's tempting Cherry-Ripe; these dietary stalwarts have long been associated with indulgence and, sometimes, misbehaviour. Sometimes they are just pure pleasure, as in William Carlos Williams's poem about 'cold' and 'delicious' plums in an icebox. For Nigel Slater, just 'the rough feel of a runner bean between the fingers' can bring a special sort of comfort. The nutritious soundtrack includes Joplin's Pineapple Rag, Nina Simone's Forbidden Fruit and Handel's Ruddier than the Cherry.

Producer: Georgia Mann

From Nigel Slater to Nina Simone's Forbidden Fruit and Handel's Ruddier than the Cherry.

Fugue20150823Texts and music on the theme of fugues, with readings by Adjoa Andoh and Peter Marinker.
Full Of Noises2009082320101223 (R3)A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the distinction between listening and hearing, with readings by John Paul Connolly and Rebecca Hall.

Including writings by EM Forster, PG Wodehouse, Ian McEwan, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Walt Whitman, as well as music from Shostakovich, Tallis, Ravel, Sciarrino, Bach and Part.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of hearing and listening.

Genesis2019070720220410 (R3)Anton Lesser and Stella Gonet with readings from Genesis and poems that cast a sideways glance at these well-known myths.

The first book of the Bible is a wellspring of potent stories that contain deep truths and powerful archetypes. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden shows how we learn to label things as Good or Evil in our search for knowledge; and how this comes at a terrible price. The fratricidal brothers, Cain and Abel, demonstrate the malevolent force of resentment and revenge.

Stella Gonet reads from the classic King James Version of the Bible, a translation whose cadences run through Shakespeare, Milton and all of English literature.

As well as the tales of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, Anton Lesser explores the untold stories of the women in Genesis: Eve thrown out of paradise and yearning to lie naked in the grass of Eden once more; a middle-aged and plump Mrs Noah looking back at her passionate youth when she was locked up in an ark full of frisky animals; and Potiphar's wife, the prototype of a whole line of femmes fatales looking for a `rough and ready man.`

As well as containing great wisdom, these deep-rooted myths can tap into more dangerous aspects of the human psyche, if taken too literally. One of the best-known parts of Genesis is the story of Noah's flood. The notion of a universal flood sent by God to purify a world that has supposedly fallen into sin is a common theme in many religions. It has allowed the idea that any major flood or catastrophe expresses God's displeasure. In 2014 it was claimed by some that the UK floods were divine retribution for the British government's introduction of gay marriage. It prompted a Facebook campaign to get the song `It's raining men` to UK number one. This iconic 80s gay anthem was written for the duo Two Tons o Fun, later known as The Weather Girls.

Also includes music by Messiaen, Dowland, Cole Porter, Berg, Stravinsky, Rossini, Bach, Martin Georgiev, Ligeti, Mozart, Richard Strauss and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Readings:

Extracts from Genesis in the King James Bible translation of 1611

Paradise Lost Book 4 - Milton

Eve - Ella Higginson

Cain and Abel - Kipling

Noah - Siegfried Sassoon

Mrs Noah: Taken After the Flood - Jo Shapcott

Babel - Sir Osbert Sitwell

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young - Wilfred Owen

Joseph's Dreams and Reuben's Brethren - Henry Lawson

Potiphar's Wife - Sir Edwin Arnold

Producer: Clive Portbury

Anton Lesser and Stella Gonet with readings and music inspired by book one of the Bible.

George Eliot's World2019112420201223 (R3)From meeting Clara Schumann to the piano playing doctor's wife in Middlemarch - Fiona Shaw, Ellie Kendrick and Philip Bretherton read from the novels, letters and journals of George Eliot, as well as responses to her and her work from the likes of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. The music is what she might have chosen to listen to including pieces by Clara Schumann, Bach, Liszt, Haydn, Handel and Purcell.

George Eliot played the piano all her life, was passionate about music and alludes to it many times in her novels and diaries. In her journal she talked of ‘music that stirs all one's devout emotions blends everything into harmony - makes one feel part of one whole, which one loves all alike, losing the sense of a separate self'.

She knew and was friends many composers including Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt and Anton Rubenstein. In 1854 Eliot was travelling across Europe and met a famous pianist and composer in Weimar. It was Clara Schumann, described by Eliot as ‘an interesting, melancholic creature'. In Eliot's novel, Daniel Deronda, she quotes from Rossini's Otello, where he set to music Dante's words:

Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella misseria

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in the midst of misery.

On the Free Thinking website Fiona Shaw shares her insights into George Eliot's Mill on the Floss with a panel chaired by Shahidha Bari https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bf70

Producer: Fiona McLean

Readings:

Woman in France

Silas Marner

Simone de Beauvoir - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

The Mill on the Floss

Letter to Maria Congreve

Mr Gilfil's Love Story

Henry James - Letter to his father

Lady Ritchie - on George Eliot

W.L. Courtney - on George Eliot

George Eliot - from her Journal

George Eliot - from Self and Life

Edmund Gosse - on seeing George Eliot

George Eliot- on Finishing Middlemarch

Virginia Woolf George Eliot

Novels, letters and journals read by Fiona Shaw, Ellie Kendrick and Philip Bretherton.

Get Thee To A Nunnery20121007Music, poetry and prose on the theme of Nuns. Read by Sheila Hancock and Ellie Kendrick.

The figure of the nun has long exerted a powerful influence on the imagination.

From the chaste and pious figure of St Teresa of Avila to the tragic and imprisoned nuns of Puccini's Suor Angelica and Diderot's The Nun. From the courageous martyrs of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites to the sexually transgressive and possessed nuns of the convent at Loudun.

There's the sad nun, disappointed in love, as portrayed by Alexander Pope in Eloisa to Abelard. The Courtesan who finds redemption in Massenet's Thais. The ghostly terrifying figure of the nun in Matthew Lewis' The Monk. And of course nuns have been the source of much comedy, such as Chaucer's social climbing Prioress, or the men dressed as nuns in Rossini's Comte Ory.

For centuries entering a convent was one of the few ways women could gain independence and express themselves in music and poetry. Saint Hildegard of Bingen, who founded two monasteries in the 12th Century, is one of the most significant early composers of Western music, and the 17th Century Italian nun Caterina Assandra also achieved recognition and fame for her work. Her beautiful motet Duo Seraphim has been one of my favourite discoveries in making this programme.

Producer: Timothy Prosser.

Texts and music on the theme of nuns, with readings by Sheila Hancock and Ellie Kendrick.

Getting Together2020092020220605 (R3)Poets and novelists reflect on time spent in groups. With readings by Souad Faress and Raj Ghatak.

Gathering together, to share space and time with loved-ones and friends, in groups and as audiences, at ceremonies and casual meet-ups, in crowds, inside... such experiences have been at the core of what it has meant to be human, a normality challenged by the recent months of lockdown and social distancing. How have writers and poets sought to express the feelings and the dynamics at play when we get together?

Amidst food, conversation and candlelight, the guests around Mrs Ramsay's dinner table become `conscious of making a party together` in a scene from To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Leonard Cohen is reminiscing, urging us to join a late-night scene of song and revelry at Dusko's Taverna in 1967; and in the desert a family have gathered in the hooghan for a healing ceremony, described by Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso. And soundtracking the socialising we hear chamber music from Haydn, a Verdi drinking song, intimate folk singing and a wedding procession.

Readings:

January Gill O'Neil - In the Company of Women

Eric Miyeni - The Harbour Caf退

Leonard Cohen - Dusko's Taverna 1967

Charles Baudelaire - Crowds (tr Arthur Symons)

Virginia Woolf - To The Lighthouse

Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

Thomas Hardy - During Wind and Rain

Mrinal Pande - Two Women Knitting (tr Arlene Zide/Mrinal Pande)

E.M. Forster - Howards End

William Blake - Song: I love the jocund dance

Jane Hirshfield - A Blessing for Wedding

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

Luci Tapahonso - Starlore

Robert Frost - A Time To Talk

Walt Whitman - I Sing The Body Electric, 4.

Produced by Phil Smith

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Poets and novelists reflect on time spent in groups. Read by Souad Faress and Raj Ghatak.

Gifts20101226Sheila Hancock and Scott Handy read poems and prose on the festive theme of giving and receiving gifts. Through the words of writers from Robert Herrick to O. Henry, and from Edward Lear to Walt Whitman, Sheila Hancock and Scott Handy unwrap simple gifts of friendship and lavish gifts of love. They explore the desire of gifts and the rejection of friendships. Music includes Siegfried Idyll by Wagner, which was composed as a birthday present for his wife Cosima, and Colleen's musical boxes.

Producer: Elizabeth Arno.

Sheila Hancock and Scott Handy read poems and prose about giving and receiving gifts.

Gifts20151225Sheila Hancock and Scott Handy read poems and prose on the festive theme of giving and receiving gifts. Through the words of writers from Robert Herrick to O. Henry, and from Edward Lear to Walt Whitman, Sheila Hancock and Scott Handy unwrap simple gifts of friendship and lavish gifts of love. They explore the desire of gifts and the rejection of friendships. Music includes Siegfried Idyll by Wagner, which was composed as a birthday present for his wife Cosima, and Colleen's musical boxes.

Producer: Elizabeth Arno.

Sheila Hancock and Scott Handy read poems and prose about giving and receiving gifts.

Goddesses And Monsters2020030820220731 (R3)From Medusa to the Madonna, this episode explores the iconography and inner lives of Greek goddesses, mermaids and sirens, oracles, witches, and Mary, mother of Jesus. The composers include Joan Tower, Amy Beach, Mica Levi and Elena Kats-Chernin among others and readings by Keziah Joseph and Jenet Le Lacheur range from poems by Nikita Gill to HD, Sojourner Truth to Mary-Kim Arnold. You can also find, on BBC Sounds, a Free Thinking discussion about goddesses from around the world linked into the current exhibition at the British Museum.

Producer: Caitlin Benedict

READINGS:

Madeleine Miller - Circe

Bettany Hughes - Venus and Aphrodite

Nikita Gill - Athena to Medusa

Edith Wharton- Pomegranate Seed

HD - Demeter

Mary-Kim Arnold - Self Portrait as Semiramis

Audre Lorde - The Winds of Orisha

Sojourner Truth - Aint I a Woman ?

Vandana Khanna - Blue Madonna

Susan Stryker - My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

Anne Sexton - Her Kind

Sylvia Plath - Witch Burning

Dr. Veronica Wigberht-Blackwater - The Mermaid, from The Compendium of Magical Beasts

Margaret Atwood - Siren Song

Adrienne Rich - Diving into the Wreck

Feminine power: the divine to the demonic runs at the British Museum until September 25th 2022 and then tours to museums and galleries in Australia and Spain.

An exploration of women, sacred and profane, from Medusa and Circe to the Madonna.

Good Intentions2014052520160103 (R3)Intent is a great driver for drama. The better the intent the more agonising the tragedy when it all goes wrong and, in equal part, the more hilarious the comedy as chaos unfolds in front of a knowing audience. And there are several different varieties of good intention; the ambitious, the optimistic, the clear sighted, the nervous and the horribly mistaken.

Today's Words and Music seeks, with the best of intentions, to illustrate just a few of them and to discover where they might lead, beginning with a well-intentioned trip to the underworld where Orpheus attempts to win back his wife.

Eve's intentions appear laudable enough as Milton has her contemplate sampling 'the fruit of that forbidden tree', and it's hard to blame Shakespeare's Juliet and Friar Lawrence for hatching a plot that they believe will ensure a happy ending all round.

There's a look back to the now agonising intentions of the Music Hall Recruitment songs with the results reflected with understated eloquence by Sarojini Naidu's 'Gift of India.

And there are less direct approaches. Was Midas a greedy tyrant or just another, very modern, figure to fall under the sway of the apparent virtue of economic need? Carol Ann Duffy has Mrs Midas watch and judge the results. And Robert Burns, doing what any farmer should be doing at harvest time, finds his innocent intentions are pretty grim news for the mouse whose home he unwittingly exposes.

And then there's the sheer joy resulting from the operatic activities of a cleaning lady in Wexford, shared by the late Bernard Levin, and the Flanders and Swann hymn to eternal self-generating good works in 'The Gasman Cometh'.

The readers are John Sessions and Indira Varma.

Producer: Tom Alban.

John Sessions and Indira Varma set out on linguistic roads paved with good intentions.

Goodbye To All That20130317Goodbye to All That: words and music saying farewell to all things old: the collapse of old orders; the end of a relationship; or a farewell to one's old life. With words from Hermann Hesse, Cicely Fox Smith, Graham Greene and Shakespeare and music from Bach, Strauss and Benjamin Britten.

Robert Graves wrote that his autobiography 'Goodbye to All That' was 'a bitter leave-taking' of England. It was published after the First World War and described the collapse of society as he saw it. Taking Graves's title, this edition of Words and Music threads together different coloured goodbyes, which are very much on my mind at the moment as I bid my own farewell to Radio 3.

Although for Graves it was bitter, the end of something can offer hope, as Hermann Hesse explains in 'Stages', the opening poem of the programme. With an end comes a new beginning and the poet urges us to 'Be ready bravely and without remorse'. Hope runs through this programme like thread through a needle, finding its expression in the music of Haydn's The Creation, Parry's Songs of Farewell, and even Durufle's hymn Sanctus from his Requiem.

But of course farewells can be woven with sadness especially when marking the end of a relationship, as Alun Lewis, Graham Greene and Cole Porter evince. Strauss takes us by the hand, through sorrow and joy, to say one final goodbye to the day in 'Im Abendrot' ('At Sunset') which brings the programme to a close.

Producer: Gavin Heard.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music saying farewell to all things old.

Gratitude2020051020211114 (R3)Rory Kinnear and Pandora Colin read diary extracts from 1945, recalling visits to see the royal family waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace and the pubs extending their licensing hours for a programme exploring gratitude on Remembrance Sunday. We hear from Hadley Freeman's book House of Glass, recalling the trains sent from France to America laden with gifts after the US had sent France food trains in the Second World War. Gratitude to medical staff is much on our minds at the moment so we picture Florence Nightingale, depicted in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Santa Filomena ‘A lady with a lamp shall stand / In the great history of the land'. Plus poems about our feline friends and the benefits of childhood piano lessons - as well as a thank you letter from Audrey Hepburn to the composer Henry Mancini. And in a reading by Clive James, a poem in which he gives thanks that 'the book of my enemy has been remaindered'.

The soundtrack includes Beethoven, writing in thanks for the restoration of his health after illness, a very grateful Pharaoh created by Verdi and The Kinks, who are just thankful for The Days.

Producer: Georgia Mann

Readings

Welcome Morning - Anne Sexton

Extract from I Hear You Say So - Elizabeth Bowen

Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley-Hopkins

Extract from Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey

St Filomena - Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow

Gratitude To The Unknown Instructors - Yeats

The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered - Clive James

Extract from The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

Extract from Twelfth Night - Shakespeare

Audrey Hepburn's Thank You note to Henry Mancini

Extract from We Shall Never Surrender: British Voices 1939-1945 - Penelope Middelboe and Christopher Grace

Extract from House of Glass - Hadley Freeman

Extract from Wild Gratitude - Edward Hirsch

Extract From My Own Life - Oliver Sacks

Extract from Hope Is The Last To Die - Helen Birenbaum

Thanks In Old Age - Walt Whitman

Florence Nightingale to VE day, Clive James on critics to Audrey Hepburn's note of thanks.

Green2012090920150531 (R3)Has any colour attracted a wider range of associations than green? This Words and Music programme explores its resonance - from emeralds to vegetables and frogs to leprechauns, the greenhorn and the green-ey'd monster, Irish republicanism and international environmentalism - in poetry and prose from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Wilfred Owen, Dylan Thomas and PG Wodehouse; and music from Schubert to Maxwell Davies.

Readings: Niamh McGrady and Sean Barrett.

First broadcast 09/09/2012.

Texts and music exploring the colour green. Readings by Niamh McGrady and Sean Barrett.

Greeneland2016040320161228 (R3)A celebration of Graham Greene on the 25th anniversary of his death with the actors Samuel West and Romola Garai. Pack your bags, check your passport and prepare to renew your acquaintance with Scobie, Aunt Augusta, Sarah Miles, Minty and of course Harry Lime. As they buttonhole you expect to hear music that complements or even contradicts what they have to say - Honegger's Pacific 231, The Walk to the Paradise Garden by Delius, a medieval motet, the odd snatch of gypsy zither and maybe even a spot of dodecaphony - music as angular, varied and surprising as the features of Greeneland itself.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Samuel West and Romola Garai celebrate Graham Greene on the 25th anniversary of his death.

Gsoh: Good Sense Of Humour20110123This edition of Word & Music draws together a universal theme - what makes you laugh? Or as the personal ads put it: 'GSOH', a Good Sense of Humour. Over the ages, poets and writers have drawn inspiration from the things that make us laugh and musicians have tickled our funny bones with their musical notes.

Sophie Thompson and Sanjeev Bhaskar read a selection works from Ogden Nash, Hilaire Belloc, Shakespeare and Wendy Cope and music to accompany these include the laughing aria from Die Fledermaus, some Erik Satie and a smidgen of Sondheim.

Producer: Belinda Naylor.

Texts and music on the theme of humour. Readings by Sophie Thompson and Sanjeev Bhaskar.

Hallelujah!2010111420111223 (R3)Jane Horrocks and Rory Kinnear are the readers in this sequence of music, poetry and prose celebrating the many facets of joy; with words from Thomas Hardy, Rabindranath Tagore, Friedrich Schiller among others, and music ranging from Handel to Leonard Cohen, and from Mozart to Randall Thompson to Judy Garland.

Celebrating the many facets of joy, with readings by Jane Horrocks and Rory Kinnear.

Hallucinations20151129~Words And Music takes a journey into the unknown to explore the world of hallucinations in poetry, prose and music.

Samantha Bond and Stephen Campbell Moore read texts by Lewis Carroll, Alex Garland, Baudelaire, Allen Ginsberg and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Music includes Berlioz, Ligeti, Jeff Buckley, Hildegard of Bingen and Steve Reich.

Texts and music exploring hallucinations. Readers: Samantha Bond, Stephen Campbell Moore.

Handel Week, Handel's Divas2009041220091221 (R3)Geraldine James and Michael Maloney read extracts from journals, newspapers, letters and poetry of Handel's time about the highs and lows of opera and oratorio performances in London. These are interspersed with music by the composer himself.

In his London operas, Handel provided vehicles for the most famous singers, mostly brought over from Italy. The infamous rivalries between singers such as Senesino, Cuzzoni and Faustina were played out in public.

Music and poems with extracts from journals and newspapers about Handel's opera singers.

Hands2016020720161226 (R3)Imogen Stubbs and Simon Shepherd read a selection of poetry and prose exploring the way our hands, as much anything, distinguish us from all animals; even other primates cannot match us for dexterity or the handling of tools and instruments. There are few activities either in the practicality of everyday life or the creative process where hands are not involved - from making and mending to painting, writing or playing an instrument. They are also a vital means of communication, but equally they can be violent and destructive.

This edition of Words and Music explores the various roles our hands play as expressed in music from Handel, Steve Reich, Sir Michael Tippett, Puccini, Janacek and Bill Withers, with poetry from Shakespeare, John Donne, Seamus Heaney, Wendy Cope, Mary Cornish, Ruth Padel and Michael Rosen and prose from Dickens and Helen MacDonald.

Producer: Harry Parker

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and the Producer's Notes.

With music by Tippett, Puccini and Chopin and readings by Imogen Stubbs and Simon Shepherd

Happiness20080203Actor Simon Russell Beale curates a sequence of words and music on the theme of happiness. Emma Fielding and John Rogan read poems and texts by Wordsworth, Adcock, Shakespeare, AA Milne and Sassoon.

Music eovking the happiness of the texts includes Byrd's Haec dies, Blossom Dearie singing I'm in Love, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, Adams's China Gates and Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.

Happiness2021071120230101 (R3)Helena Bonham Carter and Tim McInnerny are the readers for a programme exploring ideas and meanings of happiness, joy and ecstasy. The Wellcome Collection opens an exhibition and a series of events exploring this theme later this week, and reflecting this, today's episode offers an anthology of thoughts on the subject conveying us from Plato to Easton Ellis by way of George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Margery Kempe. Ray Bradbury, Anthony Trollope, William Blake, Edmund Spencer, Chinua Achebe, Aldous Huxley and others; with music by Beethoven, Handel, Schumann, Heinrich Schutz, Hildegard of Bingen, Eubie Blake, REM, Charles Penrose, Thomas Ades ... and Ken Dodd.

Note from the producer:

The theme is `the pursuit of happiness'.

You'll hear extracts from Plato's ‘Euthydemus' - his Socratic dialogue in which he sets out some of his philosophical thoughts on the subject. Is good fortune the secret to happiness? Is it knowledge? Or is it about the best use of the goods that you are given? The programme features examples from across time which reflect and comment on these thoughts. For example, Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' offers the suggestion that society is happier without the complexities of knowledge; Elizabeth von Arnim and Sylvia Plath enjoy the positive romantic pleasures of `being at one with nature`; Anthony Trollope focuses on the practicalities of finding happiness through love; while Brett Easton Ellis considers some of the extreme implications of materialism and happiness. And talking of extremes, both the medieval mystic, Margery Kempe and Aldous Huxley touch on differing notions and interpretations of ecstasy.

The music includes Bernstein's take on Voltaire; Beethoven in the country; Schumann on the joys of married life; Thomas Ades at a rave; Mozart; Rogers and Hammerstein, Charles Penrose, and the inimitable Ken Dodd. And there's also music from the early 1990s by REM - a song said to be inspired by some propaganda posters, promoting happiness, from around the time of the Tiananmen Square protests.

The programme ends its journey with piano music by Poulenc, transporting us the island of pleasure and happiness, Cythera.

Producer: Chris Wines

Helena Bonham Carter and Tim McInnerny with readings on the pursuit of happiness.

Hard Times2013111020150102 (R3)Texts and music about money and its lack. Readings by Sarah Smart and Nathaniel Parker.
Harold Pinter20090222A programme devoted to the playwright and actor who died in December 2008, featuring archive recordings of Pinter himself reading poems by Thomas Hardy, Nazim Hikmet and his own work.

Plus new readings by Michael Gambon, including the passage from No Man's Land which the actor read at Pinter's request at the playwright's funeral. He also reads a passage from Proust's Time Regained, a poem by WS Graham and an unpublished poem heard for the first time, To My Wife, dedicated to Antonia Fraser.

Penelope Wilton's readings include a passage from Old Times and, with Michael Gambon, she reads the passage from TS Eliot's Little Gidding chosen by Pinter for her to read at his funeral.

Some of the late playwright's favourite music is also featured, including Miles Davis, Bach, Thelonius Monk, Schubert (played by his friend Mitsuko Uchida) and Beethoven, alongside music from one of the films Pinter worked on - The French Lieutenant's Woman.

A programme devoted to Harold Pinter, with recordings of the playwright himself.

Head To Toe2019032420220102 (R3)Join readers Harriet Walter and Tim McInnerny in a journey over and through the length of the human body in the company of writers spanning 25 centuries, with music from Beethoven to Chas 'n' Dave.

To begin, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh marvels at the grey jelly that is the source of human consciousness. Walter de la Mare strains his ears in a spooky old house and Milton's blindness helps him imagine Samson's blinded eyes. Cyrano de Bergerac's comically huge nose is followed by two 400-year-old self-help books about the tongue, and Fryderyk Chopin's advice on piano fingering includes the hand's relationship with the wrist, forearm and arm.

At the centre of the journey is the heart. It thumps with John Clare's first love and glows with consummated love in Tennyson's 'Now sleeps the crimson petal'. 'Never give all the heart', warns WB Yeats - too late for broken-hearted Sappho, Emily Dickinson and John Donne.

The ‘huge stuffed cloak-bag of guts' is the belly of Shakespeare's Falstaff, a cue for Giulia Enders to remind us that the gut is an integral part of human feeling and being.

At the gut's end, a 14th-century fart in Chaucer's ‘The Miller's Tale' still has the power of a thunderclap and, round the other side, Montaigne bemoans the 'indocile libertie' of the male member which rises to the occasion only at its choosing.

Nearly at journey's end, here are legs and feet. In Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' the aristocratic Natasha delights everyone with her innate ability to dance like a true Russian peasant, something Edward Lear's Pobble would have found difficult.

With Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb' and the end of life, the human body is represented in stone effigy. Now, 'Only an attitude remains' - and a final, hedged Larkinesque flourish 'to prove/Our almost-instinct almost true:/What will survive of us is love.

David Papp (producer)

Harriet Walter and Tim McInnerny journey downwards with writers from Sappho to Larkin.

Healing2010031420101224 (R3)Two of Britain's most well loved actors - Celia Imrie and Bill Paterson - read poems and texts on the subject of Healing. Ranging from Jesus' healing miracles in the Gospels of the New Testatment to Florence Nightingale's advice on nursing, the texts and poems cover all aspects of healing. Doctors and nurses feature in works by H G WELLS, Louisa M Alcott and Richard Gordon. Then there are spiritual, emotional and political healing as described by authors as diverse as Dorothy Parker, Robert Burns, Carol Ann Duffy and Nelson Mandela, interwoven with music by Wagner, John Adams, Durufle and Sting.

Texts and music on the subject of healing, with readings by Celia Imrie and Bill Paterson.

Heroines2018061020190303 (R3)Readings by Tuppence Middleton and Patsy Ferran and a selection of music, from Ethel Smyth to Janelle Monကe , Rokia Traor退 to Fanny Mendelssohn, Respighi to Robert Wyatt in praise of heroines: some fictional, like Sally Bowles and Scheherazade, some historical, like Grace Darling and Joan of Arc, some inspirational, like Malala Yousafzai and Rosa Parks, and some simply anonymous and everyday - like poet Gillian Clarke's mother rescuing a drowning child or WB Yeats' Song of an Old Mother.

As we approach this year's International Women's Day next Friday - Words and Music this weekend explores the idea of what a heroine is and the range of qualities which have been praised from patience to protest, from caring to cunning.

We begin with a Concerto for Violin Horn and Piano by Ethel Smyth, the composer who had written The March of the Women in 1910, which became the official anthem of the Women's Social and Political Union. This is followed by folk musician Eliza Carthy's solo version of the Pankhurst Anthem, a new piece commissioned by BBC Radio 3 from composer Lucy Pankhurst which uses the words of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. But if we begin with campaigning energy should we end in a celebratory mood?

Producer: Harry Parker.

Readers Tuppence Middleton and Patsy Ferran, plus figures Malala Yousafzai and Rosa Parks.

Hey, Little Hen2018070820201228 (R3)Sophie Thompson and Alex Waldmann are the readers as we peck and scrape our way around the curious world of man's old friend the chicken. Lockdown has seen a rise in people taking up chicken keeping but our readings begin much further back in time with Geoffrey Chaucer and Robert Herrick. We'll hear about the hen who escapes being cooked for Sunday lunch, by laying an egg in Clarice Lispector's short story and the chickens coming home to roost in Kay Ryan's poem - whilst in Love Among the Chickens, P.G. Wodehouse writes of the difficulties of a relationship set against an ill-feted get-rich-quick-scheme on a Dorset farm. Musical settings range from Rameau, Mussorgsky, Saint-Saens and Lassus to performances by the folk performer Peter Seeger, blues performer Willie Dixon; and Louis Jordan, the American singer and sax player known as 'The King of the Jukebox' in the 40s and early 50s.

Producer: Lindsey Kemp

Readings:

Gary Whitehead - A Glossary of Chickens

John Clare - Hen's Nest

Edward Lear - Oh Brother Chicken! Sister Chick!

Christina Rossetti - A White Hen Sitting

Clarice Lispector - The Hen

PG Wodehouse - Love Among the Chickens

Ted Hughes - The Hen

Herman Melville - Cock-a-doodle doo! or the Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano

John Gay - Before the Barn-Door Crowing

Chaucer translated by Neville Coghill - The Nun's Priest's Tale

Katharine Tynan Hinkson - Chanticleer

Elizabeth Bishop - Roosters

Jack Mapanje - The Last of the Sweet Bananas

Edwin Brock - Song of the Battery Hen

Robert Herrick - Cock-crow

Henry Vaughan - Cock-crowing

Kay Ryan - Home to Roost

Mark Roper - The Hen Ark

Heinrich Heine, translated by Charles Godfrey Leland - The Homecoming

Sophie Thompson and Alex Waldmann enter the curious world of man's old friend the chicken.

Hidden20130210A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of concealment and the invisible.

Alex Jennings and Maxine Peake read poems and prose by Lewis Carroll, Edward Thomas and John Clare about secrets, lost things and encrypted meaning. There's music by Elgar, Bartok, Britten and Poulenc.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

Texts and music on the theme of concealment and the invisible.

Hinterland2016102320210103 (R3)We travel to an area beyond what is visible or known, and to remote areas of a country away from the coast or the banks of major rivers in this evocation of hinterland.

Olivia Williams and Michael Pennington read poetry and prose from the travel writing of Bruce Chatwin about the lost mythical city of riches hidden in the Andes to the sinister underworld of Virgil's Aeneid, via contemporary urban byways examined in the Edgelands project of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, childhood dreams remembered by Australian poet Les Murray and the remote island which the sailor Enoch Arden ends up on in the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson - a poem which has given name to the principle in law that after being missing a certain number of years (typically seven), a person could be declared dead for purposes of remarriage and inheritance. The music includes John Luther Adams' environmentally inspired piece Under the Ice and Walking Song from Meredith Monk, Mussorgsky's Great Gate at Kiev from his Pictures at an Exhibition and Felix Mendelssohn's Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Producer: Felix Carey

Readings:

William Wordsmith - Tintern Abbey

Bruce Chatwin - In Patagonia

Virgil, translated by John Dryden - Aeneid, Book VI

Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett - Republic, Book VII

Christina Rossetti - Somewhere or Other

Les Murray - The Sleepout

Thomas Hardy - The Dead Drummer

Slavomir Rawicz - The Long Walk

Robert Byron - The Road to Oxiana

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts - Edgelands

Rudyard Kipling - A Song for Travel

Judith Schalansky - Atlas of Remote Islands

Alfred Tennyson - From Enoch Arden

Robert Frost - Once by the Pacific

Olivia Williams and Michael Pennington with readings from beyond what is visible or known.

Home2014120720151011 (R3)Poetry and music on the theme of home by Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Dvorak and Butterworth.
Hope And Despair20091213Romola Garai and Tim McMullan read poetry and prose on the theme of hope and despair.
Horse2013011320130908 (R3)Texts and music on the theme of horses, with readings by Emily Taaffe and Sam Troughton.
I Am A Camera20130203Scenes of the people and landscape of Germany. Through the bawdy songs of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana to the romantic poetry of Bertolt Brecht, this week's edition of Words and Music describes a collection of images: sublime mountains, temperate forests, or the Lorelei on the eastern bank of the Rhine. And we meet some of the inhabitants: the bishop at Freiburg Station; the author struck down with sunstroke; and the pedant who keeps his 'nice piece of joinery', a gramophone, locked away during the day.

With music from Bach, Brahms and Mendelssohn and words by Brecht, Sylvia Plath and Christopher Isherwood. The readers are Lisa Dillon and Patrick Kennedy.

Sequence of poetry and prose and music evoking the people and landscape of Germany.

I Contain Multitudes20190210Ancient and contemporary reflections on the fluidity of gender and sexuality, including personal accounts of the transgender and non-binary experience. Stereotypes are challenged, identity is redefined, and the deities are feminised.

Travis Alabanza and Rebecca Root read poetry, prose and drama from the pens of Aaron Apps, Jo Clifford, James Joyce, Michael Field, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Featured composers include Bach, Beethoven, Berio, and Burial.

Produced by Jack Howson.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

On the fluidity of gender and sexuality.

I Love No Leafless Land2013051220170108 (R3)'I love no leafless land'

Readers: Lucy Briers and Gerard Murphy.

Taking its title from words by A E Housman, this edition of Words and Music is inspired by trees.

There are individual real trees such as Sassoon's 'Blunden's Oak', or a spectacularly 'dissolving' storm-battered beech, and trees that are symbolic - C. Day Lewis's Christmas Tree, and the trees that mark the passing of the year.

With poetry on the relationships between people and trees, the pleasure and pain of being solitary (Walt Whitman), and the struggle for survival (D H Lawrence), insistence on the need for trees (Gerard Manley Hopkins 'Binsey Poplars, felled') and meditations on long life and ageing (W H Davies).

There are also celebrations of the sheer beauty and abundance of trees. Trees have spirits, so the Green Man makes his appearance, as do the dryads and hamadryads of mythology. (Shakespeare, James Thomson, C S Lewis)

The words are interleaved seamlessly with music, including Respighi's Pines, song settings by Butterworth and Madeleine Dring, an atmospheric evocation of acacias by Toru Takemitsu and some music generated by the wood of the trees themselves, using electronics and a modified turntable.

~Words And Music about trees with readers Lucy Briers and Gerard Murphy.

I Need A Holiday2014082420160703 (R3)~Words And Music goes on holiday with readers Scott Handy and Jemima Rooper, taking in the Italian sights, the South of France, the great outdoors and the breezy British seaside. They struggle with the journey, the swarms of tourists, the rucksacks, the weather forecast and the age-old problems of expectation exceeding reality but are determined to have a good time. There is also archive recording of John Betjeman and Philip Larkin reading their own work. The soundtrack to the getaway is provided by Liszt and Gershwin, Vaughan Williams and Whitlock, and Suggs and Solomon Burke, to name a few.

Texts and music on the theme of holidays, with readings by Scott Handy and Jemima Rooper.

I, Robot2017100820200112 (R3)Readers Kenneth Colley and Yolanda Kettle. From Descartes' thought experiments on the way clockwork illuminates animal nature, via Hoffmann's humorous but slightly anxious fantasia about the chaos caused when an automaton is introduced into polite society, to modern science fiction's explorations of how humans and robots might ultimately meet in an apocalyptic conflict. With music from Bach, Haydn and Handel, to Ligeti, Stockhausen and Reich, and Aphex Twin.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Image: 26th April 1955: A youth makes his homemade robot walk. (Credit: Keystone / Getty Images)

Kenneth Colley and Yolanda Kettle in an exploration of robots and automata.

Iberia20090822A sequence of poetry and music inspired by the sights and sounds of the Iberian Peninsula.

Music by Granados, Falla and Miles Davis is combined with examples of the flamenco and fado traditions, while Andrew Wincott and Yolanda Vazquez read work by Portuguese and Spanish writers such as Lorca and Fernando Pessoa.

This is complemented by atmospheric writing by outsiders such as Byron, Washington Irving and Ted Hughes.

Poetry and music inspired by the peninsula, with flamenco, fado and atmospheric readings.

Ideas Of Wilderness2009062120101221 (R3)Jenny Agutter and Anton Lesser explore ideas of wilderness from all corners of the globe, reading works by WH Auden, eco-writer Jeffers Robinson, the Australian Elizabeth Brown, Shackleton and the Taoist wilderness literature of Ancient China. Music includes excerpts from Messiaen's Des Canyons aux Etoiles, Redolfi's Mare Teno, Purcell's Solitude and Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet.

Jenny Agutter and Anton Lesser read works about wilderness from all corners of the globe.

Idleness2011041020120916 (R3)The weekly sequence of music, poetry and prose celebrates the art of doing nothing much at all. Claudie Blakley and Tony Haygarth rise from their couches to explore the idle thoughts of Keats, Jerome K. Jerome, Tennyson, Kenneth Grahame and Michel de Montaigne among others, and there is music from the likes of Debussy, Hoagy Carmichael, Vivaldi, Delius and The Kinks. Tune in if you can be bothered...

First broadcast in April 2011.

Claudie Blakley and Tony Haygarth celebrate the art of doing nothing much at all.

Illumination2009053120091101 (R3)~Words And Music on the theme of illumination. Readings are by Sian Thomas and Jamie Glover
Illusions Of Power2009101120111221 (R3)~Words And Music on the theme of power, with readings by Sheila Hancock and Tom Hollander.
In Disguise2014100520150906 (R3)Men, women, gods and a toad all don disguise in this edition of Words and Music, in pursuit of sex, riches, revenge and freedom.

Susan Jameson and Tom Durham read poems and prose from Homer, the Bible and Shakespeare; and WB Yeats, Michael Donaghy and Kenneth Grahame.

Emotions are hidden, but find expression in music by Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Saint Sa뀀ns, Charlie Parker, Martin Carthy and Elvis Presley.

Producer: Julian May.

Texts and music on the theme of disguise, with readings by Susan Jameson and Tom Durham.

In Flux2018093020191208 (R3)Owen Teale and Thalissa Teixeira with readings and music exploring ideas about change, chaos and becoming.

When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self'. So says Dogen, the medieval Japanese philosopher whose words are positioned to respond to Emily Berry's poem The Old Fuel depicting the pain of carrying on with one's emotional routines when external circumstances have changed. The tension between rigidity and flux is a recurring theme. Some of the works featured seem surprised to observe that flux is the condition of all things. If Berry struggles to accept it, Virginia Woolf presents change as being contrary to our every-day expectations, and Carson McCullers' teenager Frankie finds it as baffling as the transition from Winter to Spring. The note of anxiety is picked up by Philip Glass and Haydn. Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Marx brag that they see change as the natural condition of things, but the tone of enthusiasm in their accounts is suspicious. The inevitability of it is better captured by Seamus Heaney's Bog Queen - even in what appears to be stasis, flux rules whether we're excited about it or not. We hear flux and stasis in Steve Reich's Piano Phases, music from SUNN 0))) and Aphex Twin. Marianne Moore, Marcel Proust, and Chuang Tzu, seem more moved by the beauty of transience.

READINGS:

Heraclitus fragments translated by Philip Wheelwright

Edmund Spenser Ruines of Rome

Friederich Nietzsche The Will to Power translated by Walter Kaufmann

Hannah Sullivan Repeat Until Time: The Heraclitus poem

Karl Marx and Friederich Engels The Communist Manifesto

Marianne Moore A Jellyfish

Chuang Tzu from the Book of Chuang Tzu

Carson McCullers The Member of the Wedding

Emily Berry The Old Fuel

Dogan Genjo Koan

Gerard Manley Hopkins Pied Beauty

Ovid Metamorphosis Book VIII translated by Samuel Garth

Ted Hughes Tales from Ovid

Seamus Heaney Bog Queen

Virginia Woolf Orlando

Marcel Proust Swann's Way translated by CK Scott Moncrieff

Edmund Spenser Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Owen Teale and Thalissa Teixeira with a programme exploring the idea of change.

In Hirsuite Of The Truth2013021720161229 (R3)In hirsute of the truth: hair can be a weapon with which to strangle your lover or a net in which to catch your crumbs. During the Victorian period, hair was a highly charged symbol of virility and an object of commerce. Changing hairstyles depict the changing power relationship between women and patriarchy. It has been fetishised, idolised and can be very useful if you're a cellist.

From the stories of Samson and Delilah and Rapunzel we see how hair - for centuries even - was considered a metaphor for virtue or righteousness: an idea especially evinced in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Deryn Rees-Jones's haunting poem 'My Father's Hair' describes how her father's identity developed during his life and how, at his life's end, the 'long white wings' come to rest on the pillow of his sick bed.

Evil and violence pursue the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. First told in a Penny Dreadful of the 1840s, the story of Sweeney Todd inspired Stephen Sondheim's Opera of the same name. It follows a long history of compositions which conjure images of death and destruction: from Robert Browning's sinister 'Porphyria's Lover' to Carol Ann Duffy's 'Medusa'.

Producer: Gavin Heard.

Poetry, prose and music on a theme of the object of commerce and symbol of virility - hair

In Pursuit2020011920220103 (R3)An otter, a dangerous enemy, the search for the Holy Grail: Is the chase sometimes better than the catch? Perhaps it depends on what you're pursuing. In this edition of Words and Music, Heather Craney and Clive Hayward bring us readings in which the net closes in on fugitives from justice; a ghost is chased and so are rainbows. There's a suffragette composer, jailed for her pursuit of equality. A priest scans the sea, in search of religious revelation, while in the Kalahari, a bushman sings a hunting song. The music includes Puccini, Weather Report, J.S. Bach, George Crumb and Judy Garland, amongst others.

Readings:

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) - Pursuit

Alexander Pushkin (trans. D.M. Thomas) - The Bronze Horseman

John Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Sign of Four

Richard Matheson - Duel

Henry Williamson - Tarka the Otter

Anon (trans, Burton Raffel) - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Lewis Carroll - The Hunting of the Snark

Thomas Hardy - The Glimpse

Sylvia Plath - Pursuit

Alfred Lord Tennyson - Idylls of the King

Pascale Petit - Snow Leopard Woman, Mama Amazonica

R.S. Thomas - Sea-watching

Edward Thomas - The Unknown Bird

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Is the chase sometimes better than the catch? Readings by Heather Craney and Clive Hayward

In Search Of England20071223A selection of words and music on the theme of England, including Orwell and Delius.
In Search Of The Sublime2010092620101229 (R3)The human soul's desire for transcendence. Readings by Stephen Mangan and Adjoa Andoh.
In The Dark20170416Emily Bruni and Robert Bathurst read texts and poetry on today's theme, 'In the Dark' - the experience of not seeing things as they really are. For some it is physical blindness which prevents seeing, while for others it is metaphorical; they can't see because they are being deceived, or are deceiving themselves. And for some, being physically blind actually helps to see the world as it really is. Texts and poetry by Austen, Ishiguro, Milton, Sophocles and Jennings are accompanied with music by Stravinsky, Saariaho, Dowland and Faur退.

Texts and music about 'being in the dark'. Readers: Emily Bruni and Robert Bathurst.

In The House Of God20090125Hugo Thurston and Pookie Quesnel with readings and music about places of worship.
In The Park2009091320091220 (R3)A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of parks, with readings from Greta Scacchi and Henry Goodman.

Including writing by Thackeray, DH Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Gwen Harwood and Sara Teasdale, as well as music from Handel, Debussy, Phyllis Tate, Stephen Sondheim and Charles Ives.

Poetry, prose and music on the theme of parks. Readings by Greta Scacchi and Henry Goodman

In The South20150719In the South: Anne-Marie Duff and Malcolm Sinclair head off across the Channel to explore the words, music and sounds of southern Europe, in the company of Alphonse Daudet, Hilaire Belloc, Paul Val退ry and Marcel Pagnol. With music by Berlioz, Canteloube, Rodrigo, Ennio Morricone, Michel Fugain and Italian folk band Sonidumbra.

Producer: Simon Elmes.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music evoking summer in France, Italy and Spain.

In Therapy20200216Over the last decade, we have turned in increasing numbers to talking therapies in order to try and make sense of ourselves, our mental health and our world. Featuring the words of some of the psychotherapeutic profession's most significant figures (Freud and Jung) as well as poetic reflections on the healing process from a host of young British poets, this edition of Words and Music explores how writers from a variety of ages have examined stories of self and suffering. Music by Charles Mingus and Anton von Webern is treated to psychoanalytic reading, while John Dowland's call, `lend your ears to my sorrow`, suggests that the desire to be heard and understood is not so new a feeling. Participating in our radio therapy sessions are readers Buffy Davis and Simon Tcherniak.

Readings:

Caroline Bird - A Surreal Joke

Joe Dunthorne - I Decided To Stop Therapy

Anna Freud - Problems of Technique in Adult Analysis

Robert Pinsky - Essay on Psychiatrists

Batsheva Dori-Carlier - Couples Therapy (translated by Lisa Katz)

Gael Turnbull - It Was As If

John Milton - Samson Agonistes

Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter)

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar

C.G. Jung - Modern Man In Search Of A Soul

Robert Louis Stevenson - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Peter Shaffer - Equus

William Shakespeare - Hamlet

Edmund Pollock - Edmund Pollock - Liner notes to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus

Hans & Rosaleen Moldenhauer - Anton Von Webern, a Chronicle of His Life and Work

Emily Berry - Picnic

Nadia Lines - Talking to my Therapist about Climate Anxiety

Theresa Lola - Two Photographs

Emily Dickinson - After great pain, a formal feeling comes - (372)

Produced by Phil Smith

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Buffy Davis and Simon Tcherniak explore the therapeutic relationship in poetry and prose.

Incarceration2019060220201004 (R3)On the 400th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Piranesi, whose ‘Carceri d'Invenzione' etchings depict foreboding imaginary subterranean prisons, today's Words and Music reflects on all sorts of Incarceration. We'll hear from a hostage in Beirut, a schoolgirl in a young offenders institute, a bored employee, and a housewife trapped by her husband's good intentions. Plus a long-planned prison escape penned by Stephen King and made famous by Steven Spielberg. With music from Anna Meredith, Arvo Part, John Adams, Sam Cooke and Matvei Pavlov-Azancheev, a Russian guitarist who spent a decade in a Soviet Gulag. The readers are Sian Clifford (Fleabag/Two Weeks to Live) and Michael Maloney (Truly Madly Deeply/The Young Victoria).

Readings:

Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Darran Anderson

The Panopticon - Jenni Fagan

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room - William Wordsworth

Grey is the Colour of Hope - Irina Ratushinskaya

Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

De Profundis - Oscar Wilde

How soft this Prison is - Emily Dickinson

An Evil Cradling - Brian Keenan

To Althea, from Prison - Richard Lovelace

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption - Stephen King

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Sian Clifford and Michael Maloney read poetry and prose on the theme of incarceration.

Infidelity2016062620170212 (R3)Fenella Woolgar and Timothy Watson explore infidelity from Tristan and Iseult to Anthony Blunt with texts from Dante, the Earl of Rochester, Robert Browning, Dorothy Parker, W.H. Auden, Hugo Williams and Jackie Kay, accompanied by music from Purcell, Mozart, Diego Ortiz, Rachmaninov, Schoenberg, Pinho Vargas and Nina Simone

Producer: Philippa Ritchie

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and the producer's note.

Texts and music on the theme of infidelity. Readers: Fenella Woolgar and Timothy Watson.

Insects2009030820100221 (R3)They creep upon the earth, and buzz and flit above us in the air, but we rarely think of them. This week's Words and Music is devoted to the tiny invertebrate world of insects, and the beauty and variation to be found within.

The grasshopper singing on a summer is celebrated by Josquin's frotolla El Grillo, and the slow patient progress of a snail reflected by Thom Gunn's poem Considering The Snail. We certainly notice insects that bother us, provoking ire in D H Lawrence's The Mosquito, and Robert Burns's To A Louse, but the invertebrate kingdom brings us great joy as well, through the beauty of butterflies and the industry of bees. Ewan Bailey and Rachel Atkins read poetry to lead us through this minute, mysterious world. (Rpt).

A selection of poetry and music on the theme of insects. With poems by Ted Hughes.

Intimate Letters20100321Christopher Eccleston and Olivia Hallinan read from love letters - real and fictional.
Intoxication, Addiction And Ecstatic States20230122A snow leopard woman who retreats 'into her mute zone' in Pascal Petit's poem, Hunter S Thompson's pharmaceutical excess, William Blake's 'chapel all of gold' and Anna Kavan's alarming hallucinations. Today's programme explores altered states of being arising from depression, the influence of drugs and religious ecstasy. It has been put together by producer Torquil MacLeod working with Radio 3's researcher in residence Sally Marlow, Professor at King's College, London, who specialises in the relationships between mental health, addiction and the arts. Our readers are Tracy-Ann Oberman and Rupert Evans

You can hear Sally Marlow discussing the writing of Anna Kavan in a recent Free Thinking episode available on BBC Sounds. She suffered depression and became addicted to heroin before dying in 1968 aged 67. Her books are now being rediscovered.

Thanks also to Dr Joe Barnby for his suggestions.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Readings & *Music

*Chris Heyne - Zweiter Streit Hildegard mit Abt Kuno & dritte Vision

William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience

Helen Dunmore - Counting Backwards

*Aaron Copland - Grohg: III. Dance of the Opium-Eater (Visions of Jazz)

*Carlos Collado Hernandez - Morpheus

Thomas De Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater

*Gil Scott-Heron - Me and the Devil

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan

*Per Nørg倀rd - Symphony No. 8: III. Più mosso - Lento visionaro

William Blake - I Saw a Chapel

*Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op. 41, TH 75 (Concert Version): No. 6, Cherubic Hymn

*John Tavener - The Veil of the Temple: Mother of God, Here I Stand (improvisation by S. Datta)

Edgar Allan Poe - Mesmeric Revelation

*Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question

*Akaie Sramana - Medicine in Shaman Trance

Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception

*Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Hand of God

Elizabeth Jennings - A Depression

*Sergei Prokofiev - Visions fugitives, Op. 22: XX. Lento irrealmente

Pascale Petit - Snow Leopard Woman

*Gy怀rgy Ligeti - Lux Aeterna

John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale

*Gaetano Donizetti - L'elisir d'amore, Act 2: Dell'elisir mirabile

*Laurie Spiegel - Kepler's Harmony Of The Worlds

Charlotte Bronte - Villette

*Modest Mussorgsky / Arr. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Night on Bald Mountain

*Shipibo Shamans - Icaro For Opening The Mind & Body

*Terry Riley - Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band

Guillaume Apollinaire (trans. Anne Hyde Greet) - Clair de Lune

Anna Kavan - Sleep Has His House

*Hildegard of Bingen - In evangelium: III. Aer enim (antiphona)

Hunter S Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

*Talking Heads - Drugs

Radio 3 researcher in residence Sally Marlow curates a programme about heightened states.

Islands20151101Texts and music on the theme of islands. Readers: Kate Fleetwood and Dominic Mafham.
Italian Fantasy2008070620090801 (R3)A sequence of poetry, prose and music inspired by travellers to Italy.

Actors Emily Bruni and Benedict Cumberbatch read poetry, including works by Byron, arch-Italophile Robert Browning and EE Cummings, who depicts numberless hordes of tourists to Italy clutching cameras. With prose from Henry James, explaining Wordsworth's enthusiasm for a particular Italian pine tree, cookery writer Elizabeth David on white truffles and American writer Eleanor Clark, who found the fountains of Rome surprisingly shocking.

The music includes Berlioz's Harold in Italy inspired by Byron, Bob Dylan's When I paint my masterpiece, Respighi's depictions of the pines and fountains of Rome and the vocal sound of the Italian trallalero team Vagabondo.

Poetry, prose and music inspired by travellers to Italy. With poetry by Byron and Browning

It's Not Dark Yet20161009As the nights begin to lengthen, It's Not Dark Yet.... takes us into the world of prophecy and doom, long despairing nights of the soul, war, loss of faith, our life-long fear of death and the saving brightness of those who do not yield. Malcolm Storry and Michelle Terry read from The Poetic Edda, William Blake, Dylan Thomas and W B Yeats, Shakespeare and Auden, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamieson, Siegfried Sassoon and T H White and we hear the music of Messiaen and Janacek, Bruckner, Tavener, Judy Collins, Maria Callas, Liszt and Beethoven and Al Bowlly.

Readers: Malcolm Storry and Michelle Terry

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

Texts and music centring on how artists articulate tragedy and the human spirit.

Jewels2014020220141123 (R3)Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar are the readers in this edition of Words and Music inspired by jewels and gems. There are readings from the King James Bible, John Webster, James Thurber, Robert Graves and Dorothy Parker and music by Jazeps Vitols, Bizet, Stravinsky, Wolf-Ferrari, Orlando de Lassus, Tchaikovsky and Bartok.

Produced by Philippa Ritchie

First broadcast in February 2014.

~Words And Music inspired by jewels, with readings by Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar.

John Milton20081207Poetry and music inspired by Milton's description of 'darkness visible' in Paradise Lost.
Joy And Sorrow20220918Actors Patrick Baladi (The Office/Bodies) and Charlotte Martin (The Archers) read poetry and prose on the universal joys and sorrows of life - from childhood to parenthood, falling in love and falling out of love, grief, loss, and contentment in old age. With live music from singer and multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney, and BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year saxophonist Xhosa Cole. Featured writers include Khalil Gibran, Ted Hughes, Charlotte Bronte, Nick Hornby, and E.E Cummings.

Recorded at the 2022 Contains Strong Language Festival in Birmingham.

Producers: Ruth Thomson and Nick Holmes

Patrick Baladi (The Office) and Charlotte Martin (The Archers) explore joy and sorrow.

Kafka And Co2015051020151230 (R3)Poetry, prose and music exploring the themes in Kafka - the absurd, isolation, chaos, parents and children, transformation and authority. The readers are Rory Kinnear and Juliet Stevenson. With poems and prose by Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Carol Ann Duffy and U.A. Fanthorpe and music by Martinu, Dvorak, Gideon Klein, Krenek, Talking Heads, Prokofiev, Kurtag and Rufus Wainwright.

Texts and music exploring the themes in Kafka. Readers: Rory Kinnear and Juliet Stevenson.

Keats2021101020221221 (R3)Nicholas Shaw reads from poems and letters written by John Keats. Born in London in 1795, he trained as a doctor at Guy's Hospital before devoting his life to his poetry. He wrote his famous odes, sonnets, epic poetry and romances along with around three hundred letters to friends and family including his great love, Fanny Brawne. In 1820, like his younger brother and his mother, he fell ill with tuberculosis. He sailed to Italy in the hope of recovery but died in Rome in February 1821. Much of the writing on Keats, particularly in the early biographies, focused on his early death and that of his mother and brother, seeing him as a victim. But it's also possible to feel astonishment at the life he led and the work he left us, both in his poetry and the many hundreds of letters to friends and family where he wrote about his great excitement at the travels he took around Britain and his thoughts on poetry.

Some of Keats' earliest memories were from his early life in boarding school where he read his way through the school library and then lay at night listening to his headmaster playing Mozart, Handel and Arne on the piano. Mozart's Divertimento in D Major is heard along with Thomas Arne's Overture no 2 and the Air ‘Water parted from the sea' from Arne's Artaxerxes, a piece quoted by Keats as he sailed in violent storms to Italy in the hope that life there would help him recover from his tuberculosis.

There is also work by composers inspired by Keats' verse - The Smiths' Cemetery Gates, Benjamin Britten's Serenade op 31 and Dorothy Howell's Lamia. And Death and the Maiden by Schubert who lived in Keats' time and, in some ways, a similar and tragic life. The academic Christopher Ricks compared the work of Keats to that of Bob Dylan's, arguing that both of them knew that ‘the calling of a real artist is to keep truth and beauty moving onward; not a-standing still like a statue'. You'll hear Dylan's Love Minus Zero where he sings of love being a fundamental truth in life. In Rome, Keats's friend Joseph Severn hired a piano and played the piano arrangements for Haydn's symphonies for him in his final days, here played by Ivan Ilic.

~Words And Music ends with Keats's final letter to Fanny Brawne in which he fears that his illness has become a barrier between them and his great poem Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art, with Jacqueline du Pre playing the Adagio from J.S. Bach's Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C.

Producer: Fiona McLean

You can find more information about Keats https://keatsfoundation.com/

An episode of Free Thinking called eco-criticism explores contemporary takes on poetry about nature including works by Keats and Wordsworth and another called Romanticism Revisited looks at some of his fellow writers, whilst Goethe, Schiller and the first romantics looks at the German scene in Jena.

The Radio 3 Essay broadcast a series called An Ode to John Keats hearing from the writers Sasha Dugdale, Sean O'Brien, Alice Oswald, Francis Leviston and Paul Batchelor

Main image: Portrait miniature of John Keats. Charles Brown after Joseph Severn. Image courtesy of Keats House, City of London Corporation.

Keats house website: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/attractions-museums-entertainment/keats-house

READINGS

Ode to Autumn

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

On the Sea

Endymion

Letter to John Taylor from Teignmouth

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Letter to Benjamin Bailey

Ode to a Nightingale

This Living Hand

When I have fears that I may cease to be

The Romantic poet's writings on beauty, the seasons, his own health woven with music.

Keep Calm And Carry On2022061220230507 (R3)Keep Calm and Carry On - a slogan that, in World War II, captured the essence of stoicism - and which is often still apposite today. As a prelude to Mental Health Awareness Week, the theme of which this year is `anxiety`, today's programme explores the idea of keeping calm in the face of stress or adversity. We'll have sage advice from Ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, the best-selling Little Book of Calm, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the famous cover of which offers the simple practical motto: `Don't panic.` We'll hear from Sir Francis Drake, who was determined to finish his game of bowls before fighting the Spanish Armada, and Adam Kay, the NHS doctor who has to cope with being left in charge of his hospital patients overnight.

Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth urges her anxiety-stricken murderous husband simply to wash away the blood; James Bond keeps his cool against a shark attack; and the audience at the premiere of one of Haydn's London symphonies still enjoy the concert despite almost being crushed by a falling chandelier. Caleb Femi's poem Coping speaks movingly about personal loss, and Anita Moorjani attributes her recovery from terminal cancer to her positive mindset.

The music includes a calm operatic moment from Beethoven's Fidelio, soothing tracks by Grace Williams and Anna Clyne, and Sam Ryder's nul points-defying UK Eurovision 2022 entry offers solace to lonely space travellers.

Our readers are Colin McFarlane and Madeline Smith - veteran of British film institutions Hammer Horror, James Bond and, most appositely, the Carry Ons.

Producer: Graham Rogers

READINGS:

William Shakespeare: Macbeth

Paul Wilson: The Little Book of Calm

Beryl Bainbridge: Every Man For Himself

Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat

Albert Christoph Dies: Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits

Maurice Riordan: The Billboard

H. E. Bates: The Darling Buds of May

Ian Fleming: Live and Let Die

Anita Moorjani: Dying to be Me

Caleb Femi: Coping

Dylan Moran, Graham Linehan: Black Books

Christina Rosetti: Remember

Francis Drake: Disturb us, Lord

William Wharton: A Midnight Clear

Adam Kay: This Is Going To Hurt

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Tishani Doshi: Poems Lull Us Into Safety

From disastrous concert performances to shark attacks: how do we cope with challenges?

Keys20230917Keys open doors and minds, keep secrets and reveal them, flutter freely from trees and imprison for eternity and they set a musical sound. Readers Yusra Warsama and Darren Kuppan read from works which feature lost keys, magical ones, fumbling at locks, at learning and committing murder. The readings include extracts from works by Dante, Tracy Beaker and a vintage recording of TS Eliot, and music including Chopin's Black Key Study, P J Harvey's Chain of Keys, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, Bessie Smith's Lock and Key, JS Bach channelled by Wendy Carlos and Scott Joplin's Sycamore Rag.

Producer in Salford: Ewa Norman

Readings and *Music

Tom Ramsey - Keys

*Chopin - Etude in G flat major, Op.10 No.5 'Black Keys

Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland

*Oliver Wallace/Sammy Fain/Bob Hilliard - Alice in Wonderland: The Garden /All in the Golden Afternoon

*Mozart - Sonata for violin and piano (K.380) in E flat major, Andante

Ivan Hewitt - What is a musical key?

Emily Dickinson - Poem: 315. He fumbles at your Soul

*Colleen -Geometr퀀a del Universo

Rumi - You suppose you are the trouble

Yuko Minamikawa Adams - Key

*Melanie - Brand New Key

Jacqueline Wilson - Tracey Beaker

*Vaclav Trojan - Fairytales for accordion and orchestra: The Acrobatic Fairytale

Plato - The Republic

*Philip Glass - Etude no. 2 for piano

Marcel Proust - Swann's Way

P J Harvey - Zagorka

*P J Harvey - Chain of Keys

*Hari Prasad Chaurasia - Raga Lalit

Asit Kumar Sanyal - Key-Person

*Bartok - Bluebeard's Castle: Sixth Door + Seventh Doors (excerpts)

Andrew Lang - Bluebeard

JS Bach - It's easy to play any musical instrument

*JS Bach / Wendy Carlos - Brandenburg Concerto No. 3: Allegro

James Joyce - Ulysses

*Bessie Smith - Lock and Key

John Oxenham - His Latch Key

*George Butterworth - 2 English idylls for orchestra: no.2

Robin Robertson - Finding the Keys

*Scott Joplin - The Sycamore

TS Eliot - The Wasteland

*Beethoven: Coriolan - overture (Op.62)

Andrea Gibson - Birthday

*Alexander Scriabin: Piano Sonata No 3 in F sharp minor, Op 23, 'Etats de l'ame '- Andante

C.S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain

Dante - Inferno: Purgatory Canto IX

*Tomas Luis de Victoria - Tu es Petrus

Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger

Lost ones, magical ones and fumbling at locks with Dante, Rumi and Tracy Beaker.

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang!20170806Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang! is a brazen attempt to lure you into temptation. It's a fast ride to a place where sex and violence collide. People literally dance for their lives or are ordered to stay glued to their seats or risk losing theirs. It's the world of noir - the world of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain, Chester Himes and Elmore Leonard. It's a world populated by 'friends of Italian opera' as Billy Wilder famously put it in Some Like it Hot. Rigoletto is a well established gangster favourite but you'll also hear Carreras singing Amapola and Pavarotti's Chi mi frena in tal momento - not to mention John Adams's City Noir, John Zorn's Spillane and Kurt Weill. Tracy-Ann Oberman and Henry Goodman brave the shadows and lead us along the mean streets deep into the poisoned heart of this modern darkness.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Molls, murder and mean streets with Henry Goodman and Tracy-Ann Oberman.

Labyrinth20110327What lies at the heart of the labyrinth? Minotaur or man? Fear or delight? We're all fascinated by labyrinths - whether they're an impenetrable jumble of box hedges in the garden of a stately home or the multiplying reflections in a hall of mirrors. We move through them at the speed of dreams - sometimes as quick as a flicker of lightning sometimes as slow as the drift of sand in an hour glass. From inside they can appear both menacing and beguiling. From outside they can be treated as an engaging puzzle but one where the solution is never in doubt. This evening - should you accept their invitation - you can join Rory Kinnear and Anna Maxwell Martin in a maze of words and music. Along the way you are likely to bump into George Herbert, Thelonious Monk, Arvo Part, Erik Satie, Jorge Luis Borges, Edwin Muir, Bach and Francis Seyrig - some of them more than once....even if you don't lose your way or your nerve.

Texts and music focusing on labyrinths. Readings by Anna Maxwell Martin and Rory Kinnear.

Land's End To John O'groats20150816Today's Words and Music plots the route from Land's End to John o'Groats, featuring literary characters and situations, writers, poets, historical events, and music associated with places along the way. Beginning on the Cornish cliffs with Henry Alford, through Devon with Sir Henry Baskerville on Dartmoor, to Somerset where secret agent Jim Prideaux is lying low in Taunton. John Betjeman's bells in Bristol, across the Severn Bridge into Monmouth, and more bells in Ledbury described by Wordsworth. A recipe from Shrewsbury, witches in Lancashire, and a composer searching for inspiration in the Lake District. Across the border into Scotland and a fugitive hiding in Galloway, old photographs from Glasgow, a fair maid in Perth and a lovely lass in Inverness. Excerpts are read by Claudie Blakley and Greg Wise.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Poetry, prose and music associated with places on the way from Land's End to John O'Groats

Last Things20110130An edition of Words and Music about endings with readers Tim Pigott-Smith and Katherine Parkinson.

The subjects include last love and its consolations; death and what may follow; sound fading into silence and Heaven and Hell. These pieces are often the last words of a writer or a composer's last works and can act as a wry counterpoint, or even a kind of swansong.

So Schubert's 'String Quintet' sits next to John Updike's birthday meditations shortly before his death in 2009; Mozart's 'Requiem' jostles up against the beautiful but bleached words of the narrator in Paul Auster's apocalyptic novel 'In the Country of Last Things'; and The Doors' psychedelic anthem, 'The End', underpins Michael Herr's memories of Vietnam and his eerie vision of a soul slowly unravelling like a parachute.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music about endings, with readings by Tim Pigott-Smith and Katherine Parkinson.

Latin America: Spears, Jaguars And Eagles2020101820210808 (R3)The Spanish colonisation of the Americas, depicted in poems and journals by the Aztecs, Incas and other indigenous peoples, and in the writings of the invading European Conquistadors. Spanish actor Enrique Arce (Money Heist) reads from accounts of Bernal D퀀az del Castillo, a soldier who participated in the 1521 conquest of Mexico, Bartolom退 de las Casas, a Dominican Friar who documented the atrocities committed against the native communities, and Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman born in the early years of the conquest. Brazilian-born actress Thalissa Teixeira (Two Weeks to Live) reads poems and perspectives from the Acolhua philosopher Nezahualcoyotl, Nahua writer Chimalpahin, and other first-hand sources documented in Camilla Townsend's acclaimed new history of the Aztecs, Fifth Sun. Alongside Spanish Baroque there's music by Mexican guitarists Rodrigo y Gabriela, Bolivian singer and champion of indigenous rights Luzmila Carpio, who sings in the Andean Quechua language, and the Afro-Colombian group Sexteto Tabalက.

Readings

Trad Nahuatl: Nothing but flowers...

Christopher Columbus trans. J.M. Cohen: extract from The Four Voyages

Scarlet Macaws: Pascale Petit

Bernal Diaz trans. J.M. Cohen: 'Early next day'...extract from The Conquest of New Spain

Trad Nahuatl: The City is Spread out in Circles of Jade

Camilla Townsend: ‘The frightened girl' - extract from Fifth Sun

Bernal Diaz trans. J.M Cohen: 'The great Montezuma'...extract from The Conquest of New Spain

Mills, Taylor, Graham: ‘You have told us that we do not know' - extract from Colonial Latin America

Garcilaso de la Vega trans. H.V Livermore: The Royal Commentaries of the Incas

Bartolome de la Casas: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Camilla Townsend: ‘The walls of the adobe houses' extract from Fifth Sun

Juan Battista: 'There was more raging and shouting;... extract from the Annals of Juan Batista

Bernal Diaz trans. J.M Cohen: 'As there was such a stench'...extract from The Conquest of New Spain

Bernardino de Sahagún: 'The smell of burning bodies'...extract from the Florentine Codex

Bernal Diaz trans. J.M Cohen: 'Many interested readers'...extract from The Conquest of New Spain

Camilla Towsned: 'The Quill'...extract from Fifth Sun

Nezahualcoyotl: Flowers are our only garments

Producer: Ruth Thomson

The Spanish colonisation of the Americas depicted by indigenous peoples and the invaders.

Law And Order2011042420111220 (R3)Andrew Buchan (Garrow's Law) and Josette Simon OBE (Casualty, Silent Witness) read poetry and prose about Law and Order. Following the model used by a popular American TV series of the same name, they begin by focusing on crime itself with T.S.Eliot's mischievous cat Macavity and extracts from 'Crime and Punishment' and PD James, followed by the appearance of the police - both the uniformed variety and the private detective. Then they are in court with Atticus Finch in 'To Kill a Mocking Bird' (Harper Lee) and Shakespeare's Portia from 'The Merchant of Venice'. Finally sentence is carried out and the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin is hanged and Oscar Wilde is in Reading Gaol writing his famous ballad. Other writers featured include Seamus Heaney, Arthur Conan Doyle, Roger McGough, Carol Ann Duffy and Alfred Noyes.The texts are interwoven with music by Janacek, Britten, Gilbert and Sullivan, Prokofiev and Henry Mancini.

Andrew Buchan and Josette Simon read poetry and prose about crime, police and the courts.

Leadership20240225The qualities we look for in a good leader and the dire consequences of getting landed with a bad one are the focus of this week's episode. In Shakespeare's Henry V, the king goes around the camp on the eve of Agincourt, quelling the fears of his army, while Aeneas brings hope to his despairing followers in Virgil's Aeneid. Emmeline Pankhurst incites a suffragist meeting to rebellion and Elizabeth I gives a similarly rousing speech to her troops. On a more personal scale, Grace Nichols recalls the dedicated leadership of her father in his role as headmaster. There are disappointed leaders too – Napoleon and Toussaint Louverture – and a tyrannical pig in Orwell's Animal Farm. Music includes Dominic Argento's setting of the final diary entry of the leader of a disastrous polar expedition, dedicated activist Paul Robeson singing the spiritual Go Down Moses and John Adams's operatic evocation of President Nixon's historic trip to meet Chairman Mao, plus brilliant drummer and notoriously exacting bandleader Buddy Rich in full flow. The readers are Jemima Rooper and Ewan Bailey.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

READINGS:

Roger McGough – The Leader

Niyi Osundare – The Leader and the Led

Grace Nichols – Picture My Father

Alfred Lord Tennyson – The Charge of the Light Brigade

Virgil (trans. C Day-Lewis) – The Aeneid

Robert Browning – The Lost Leader

Elizabeth I - Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, 1588

William Shakespeare - Henry V: Act IV, prologue

Lord Byron – Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte

George Orwell – Animal Farm

Ivan Krylov (trans. Gordon Pirie) – The Lion's Share

WB Yeats – To a Shade

Dylan Thomas – ‘The hand that signed the paper

Siegfried Sassoon – Base Details

Emmeline Pankhurst – I Incite This Meeting to Rebellion

John Agard – Waiting for Fidel

William Wordsworth - To Toussaint Louverture

Leaders, both good and bad, evoked in music, poetry and prose.

Jemima Rooper and Ewan Bailey with readings evoking leaders from Elizabeth I to Toussaint Louverture to Orwell's Napoleon the Pig with music including John Adams and Paul Robeson.

Legend Of Orpheus20121111Orpheus, 'the Thracian Bard' and son of Apollo, was the great natural musician of Greek mythology. Readers Mariah Gale and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith celebrate the artistry which had the power to charm even rocks and stones, and the love which took him to the dark Underworld to regain his Eurydice, in words by Rilke, Virgil, Goethe and Carol Ann Duffy, and music by Monteverdi, Handel, Beethoven, Gluck and Birtwistle.

Texts and music celebrating Orpheus. Readings by Mariah Gale and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

Less Is More2020022320220313 (R3)Lent starts this week, a time when many people give up something they love in the run up to Easter. But the value of ‘less' to the human experience can be so much more than self-deprivation and abstinence, as this programme attempts to prove.

Minimalist artists and designers have shown that `less is more`. Poets have long understood how to offer much with few words: like Basho and Buson, the Japanese masters of the haiku, or Edgar Allan Poe using repetition in The Bells.

American writer Joan Didion offers a personal experience of how mundane events take on painful but rich significance when we lose a loved one; Walt Whitman enjoys a sun bath in his birthday suit; and Sappho's Fragments suggest art is all the more beguiling when only shards of the original work remain.

Join readers Jane Lapotaire and John Heffernan to experience the power of miniatures, memories, absence and simplicity to stir the spirit and spark the imagination. With music by Joseph Haydn, Duke Ellington, Marin Marais and Ann Southam.

Readings:

Robert Herrick - To Keep a True Lent

W. H. Davies - Money, O!

Haikus by Basho, Boncho and Onitsura (translated by Geoffrey Bownas)

Juan Ram n Jim退nez - Eternidades

Walt Whitman - A Sun Bath: Nakedness

John Pawson - In Praise of Minimalism (excerpt)

Turner Cassity - The grateful Minimalist

Edgar Allan Poe - The Bells: IV (excerpt)

Kalpa Sutra - Life of Mah vra, Lecture 5 (excerpt) (translated by Hermann Jacobi

Caleb Femi - My Father Wore a terrible story of poverty

Madeleine L'Engle - For Lent, 1966

John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn (excerpt)

W. B. Yeats - Never Give All The Heart

Joan Didion - Year of Magical thinking (excerpt)

Sappho - Fragments (translated by Anne Carson)

Rabindranath Tagore - The Gardener: II

Produced by Chris Elcombe

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Jane Lapotaire and John Heffernan enter the world of the simple, the small and the lost.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men20120923Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Tom Goodman-Hill and Emma Fielding are the readers of poems and prose about the celebration of men, the great and the not so noble.

From the Greek and Trojan kings, to the tyrants of the twentieth century via Einstein and the paeans sung by artists to their mentors and heroes. Seamus Heaney mourns Robert Lowell whilst Philip Larkin utters an unalloyed yes to Sidney Bechet.

There's music from Britten, written especially for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and an elegy for Philip Sidney by WIlliam Byrd as well as music by John Adams, Mozart and Berlioz.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

Sequence of poetry, prose and music celebrating men - the great and the not so noble.

Let's Face The Music And Dance2011052920111230 (R3)~Words And Music on the theme of dance read by Imogen Stubbs and Joseph Kloska.
Let's Write A List2017070920190101 (R3)Let's write a list. From the week's shopping to the Ten Commandments, from the pop charts to people of the year, life is full of lists. This exploration of our obsession with list-making includes Mozart's Don Giovanni's conquests, Maria's Favourite Things from the Sound of Music, Polonius's advice to Laertes, Bridget Jones's New Year Resolutions and Herman Melville's catalogue of whales. Readings by Jon Strickland and Emma Powell.

Texts and music on the theme of list-making, with readers Jon Strickland and Emma Powell.

Life In A Cold Climate20151213The many facets of living in the the frozen north. Bill Paterson and Janie Dee read works by Torkilk Morch, John Haines, Jack London, Alootook Ipellie, Gerda Hvisterdahl, Peter Hoeg and Jorma Etto. With music by Edvard Grieg, Terje Bjorklund, John Luther Adams, Jon Oivind Ness, Torgeir Vassvik, Sainkho Namtchylak and Esbjorn Svensson.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and the Producer's Notes.

Texts and music about living in the frozen north. Readers: Bill Paterson and Janie Dee.

Life On The Ocean Wave20170219Music and readings reflecting nautical life, read by Lesley Sharp and John Shrapnel.
Life Rafts2019081820211205 (R3)An unstable wooden platform, an ark, a honey jar: rafts can make the difference between life and death. Yann Martel won the Booker Prize for his novel Life of Pi, tracing the journey made by an Indian Tamil boy and a tiger and a stage version has just opened in London; Edward Lear's The Jumblies set to sea in a sieve; Th退odore G退ricault interviewed some of the survivors after a French frigate ran aground off Mauritania - their experiences of starvation, dehydration and cannibalism became an international scandal which he depicted in his 1819

painting The Raft of the Medusa, described by Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters; in 1947 the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl made headlines travelling by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands; Dina Nayeri fled Iran as an asylum seeker and her book The Ungrateful Refugee charts experiences of immigration which are making headlines now. We also travel on the water with Winnie the Pooh, Huckleberry Finn, Noah and ants observed by Edward O. Wilson. Our music ranges across David Fanshawe, Baaba Maal, Benjamin Britten, Joao Gilberto, Elena Kats-Chernin and Herbie Hancock. The readers are Alia Alzougbi and Shaun Mason.

READINGS:

Mary Coleridge - I Had a Boat

Thor Heyerdahl - The Kon-Tiki Expedition by Raft Across the South Seas

R M Ballantyne - Man on the Ocean: A Book about Boats and Ships

Michael Rosen - The Raft

Anne Carson - Short Talk on the Total Collection

Julian Barnes - A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Ken Thompson - Where do Camels Belong by Ken Thompson

Alfred Russel Wallace - The Geographical Distribution of Animals

Rachel Rooney - Survival Advice from a Caterpillar

Robert Crawford - Crannog

Bert H怀lldobler, Edward O. Wilson - The Ants

Dina Nayeri - The Ungrateful Refugee

Daniel Trilling - Lights in the Distance

A A Milne - Winnie the Pooh

Edward Lear - The Jumblies

Yann Martel - Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Emily Dickinson - `'Hope' is the Thing with Feathers

Sir Ernest Shackleton - South!

Kathleen Jamie - The Blue Boat

Lola Ridge - Interim

Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn

James Carter - Who Cares? (by permission of the poet and published in Weird, Wild and Wonderful by James Carter (Otter-Barry Books 2021)

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Music by Britten, Lili Boulanger, Baaba Maal. Prose about Noah, the Kon-Tiki, refugees now

Life Through A Screen2019090120210530 (R3)It is through computer monitors and handheld devices that so much of existence is experienced today. We view the world through screens, living and loving via smartphones and laptops. Contemporary poets and songwriters have been quick to delight in and reflect upon our age of collapsed distances, global connection and moments of beauty caught and shared via a phone camera. `Your world / is gleaming in my hands` writes Victoria Gatehouse in Phosphorescence.

But the pervasiveness of technology and the increase in `screentime` come at a cost, challenging our notions of time, privacy, intimacy and human contact. As a dialogue by poet Leontia Flynn sets out, Ours is the Age of Interruption, or the Age of Participation, depending on how you see it. And, as Shakespeare's Portia swipes through a list of suitors, or E.M. Forster's Kuno longs for human contact without the aid of `the machine`, our contemporary ways of dating and communicating and sharing ourselves appear not so new after all.

Aoife McMahon and William Hope are our readers, viewing the world through glass screens and handheld devices, with music from Mozart, Holst and Richard Hawley

Readings:

Leontia Flynn - Malone Hoard

Clint Smith - FaceTime

Imtiaz Dharker - Flight Radar

William Shakespeare - The Merchant Of Venice

Sherman Alexie - The Facebook Sonnet

John Donne - Elegy V: His Picture

Victoria Gatehouse - Phosphorescence

Andrew Marvell - The Gallery

Leontia Flynn - Poems Conceived As Dialogues Between Two Antagonistic Voices, Third Dialogue

Jill McDonoguh - Twelve-Hour Shifts

Debora Greger - The War After The War, I.

D.H. Lawrence - From A College Window

Amy Lowell - Towns in Colour, I. Red Slippers

Amy Lowell - Towns in Colour, V. An Aquarium

Dannie Abse - X-ray

Charles Eisenstein - The EcoSexual Awakening

E.M. Forster - The Machine Stops

J. Krishnamurti - Freedom From The Known

Produced by Phil Smith

A Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 3

Aoife McMahon and William Hope view the world through glass screens and handheld devices.

Light2014102620200531 (R3)Cheryl Campbell and William Houston are the readers in a montage of music and speech inspired by ideas of light. The programme looks at different aspects of light from a metaphor for love, birth, innocence, and purity; as a fundamental particle of science; as an expression of the presence of the Divine, observations in the diaries of Antarctic traveller Apsley Cherry-Garrard or made about the paintings of JMW Turner, or quite simply, as our evenings become longer, as a marker of the cyclical day. With music by composers including Haydn, Handel, Eric Whitacre, Thomas Ad耀s and John Tavener.

Producer: Chris Wines

Readings:

Hymn of Apollo - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hymn 50 Surya from The Rigveda - Anon

The Worst Journey In The World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The World - Henry Vaughan

The Divine Comedy - Paradise - Canto XXXIII - Dante

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great - Stephen Spender

Brief Lives - JMW Turner - Peter Ackroyd

Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory - Introduction - Werner Heisenberg

2001 - A Space Odyssey - Arthur C Clarke

The Talmud - Anon

The Little Match-Seller - Hans Christian Andersen

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines - Dylan Thomas

Romeo and Juliet - Act 2 Scene 4 - William Shakespeare

We Grow Accustomed To The Dark - Emily Dickinson

The Dunciad - Book IV - Alexander Pope

Great Expectations - Chapter 8 - Charles Dickens

Present Past - Past Present - Eug退ne Ionesco

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas

The Barracks - Chapter 7 - John McGahern

From space to painting, science to belief. Readings by Cheryl Campbell and William Houston

Light And Shade2021091920230709 (R3)Dammed as depraved, and lauded as a brilliant innovator: the artist Caravaggio often depicted moments of violence and vanity, using the technique known as tenebrism, an extreme dramatic contrast between areas of light and shade. Readings from Ruby Bentall and Justice Ritchie move between darkness and light, from a hymn in praise of darkness by Caravaggio's contemporary Edward Herbert, Lord Cherbury, to the 20th-century poet Rabindranath Tagore's evocation of a world suffused with light, taking in all the shades in between courtesy of Milton, Elizabeth Jennings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, HD, and John Donne. We also hear John Ruskin's assessment of Caravaggio as an artist of darkness and depravity, and Matteo Augello imagines his reply. The music includes madrigals directly depicted in Caravaggio's work, and pieces by Mozart, Ligeti, Offenbach and the Velvet Underground.

This edition also includes original settings of poems referenced in Caravaggio's work: Petrarch's Leave Off Your Veil, and Icarus, as well as Gli Uomini Valenti, taken from a contemporary report of testimony Caravaggio gave at a trial. Original recordings by Electropastiche, Voice and translations by Matteo Augello, Guitars by William Vitali, Produced by Jodi Pedrali. You can find out more about this at dacaravaggio.com

Producer: Luke Mulhall

READINGS:

Johan Huizinga The Waning of the Middle Ages

John Ruskin Review of Lindsay's The History of Christian Art

Elizabeth Jennings Caravaggio's ‘Narcissus' in Rome

John Milton Paradise Lost

HD Evening

Caleb Femi Coping

Sir Henry Wotton To his Mistress

Martyn Crucefix At The National Gallery

George Bradley The Sound of the Sun

Lord Edward Herbery of Churbury Black Beauty

Samuel Daniel Are They Shadows

Gerard Manley Hopkins The Candle Indoors

John Donne On The Sun Rising

Rabindrath Tagore Light

Virgil, tran. A.S. Kline Ecologue X

Elizabeth Jennings A World of Light

Today's theme is prompted by contrasts in the work of Renaissance artist Caravaggio.

Light Fantastic: The 1950s20110626A sequence of poetry, prose and music from the 1950s.
Light In The Darkness2020121320240101 (R3)From Philip Pullman's fictional north to an account of seeing the aurora borealis, the candlelight in a Hanukkah poem and John Donne's Nocturne to St Lucy to a midwinter visit to Maeshowe by poet Kathleen Jamie - we look at ideas about light and darkness at this time of year in nature, art, belief and traditional storytelling. With music from composers including Mahler, Ligeti, Nielsen, Hildur Gudnadóttir, Arvo Part, Johann Johannsson and Brian Eno.

Producers: Kevin Core and Paul Frankl

From Philip Pullman and music inspired by the aurora borealis to candlelight in poetry.

From the candlelight in a Hanukkah poem and John Donne's Nocturne to St Lucy to a midwinter visit to Maeshowe. Music by Mahler, Nielsen, Hildur Gudnadottir, Arvo Part, Brian Eno.

From Philip Pullman's fictional north to an account of seeing the aurora borealis, the candlelight in a Hanukkah poem and John Donne's Nocturne to St Lucy to a midwinter visit to Maeshowe by poet Kathleen Jamie - we look at ideas about light and darkness at this time of year in nature, art, belief and traditional storytelling. With music from composers including Mahler, Ligeti, Nielsen, Hildur Gudnad ttir, Arvo Part, Johann Johannsson and Brian Eno.

Like A Butterfly's Wing20230611Celebrating the creativity of LGBTQ+ writers, performers and composers, this episode hears the evocation of seasons in Radclyffe Hall's 'Well of Loneliness' and Michael Field's poetry; there's the Polari description of life on board ship in Richard Milward's novel 'Man-Eating Typewriter'; 'Sappho's Song' written by the Elizabethan author John Lyly and 'The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica' - a poem by Ocean Vuong. There's also an excerpt from the agonised letter sent by 'Tales of the City' writer Armistead Maupin to his mother and the impassioned analysis of the 'Sex and the City' choices facing trans women outlined in Torrey Peter's acclaimed recent novel 'DeTransition Baby'. Plus, Jackie Kay evokes a jazz trumpeter, Paul Burston reflects on his teenage interest in David Bowie, and AE Housman muses on the persecution of homosexuals following the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

We'll hear ballet music by Tchaikovsky, a love song from Pauline Oliveiros' accordion, Billy Strayhorn taking the A-Train, electronic wizardry by Wendy Carlos and Kenneth Williams singing Noel Coward's impassioned plea to Mrs Worthington.

And our title comes from a phrase in Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando.

The readers for this episode are Alicya Eyo and Arthur Bostrom.

Producer in Salford: Les Pratt

READINGS and MUSIC

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - The lilac fairy [The Sleeping beauty - suite (Op.66a)]

Dean Atta - The Black Flamingo

Jean-Baptiste Lully - Prelude: Psyche

Oscar Wilde - The Portrait of Dorian Gray

Jonathan Dove - From Heaven to Here [Sappho Sings]

John Lyly - Sappho's Song

Pauline Oliveiros - A Love Song

Joelle Taylor - Vitrine

Ethel Smyth - Concerto for violin & horn (2nd mvt: Elegy `In Memoriam`)

Radclyffe Hall - The Well of Loneliness

Walt Whitman - Sometimes with the one I love

Craig Urquhart - Here the frailest leaves of me

Armistead Maupin - More Tales of the City

Nico Muhly - The Street [Station IV: Jesus Meets His Mother]

Angela Morley - A Canadian in Mayfair

Torrey Peters - Detransition Baby

JS Bach arr. Wendy Carlos - Brandenburg Concerto No.3 (1st mvt)

Richard Milward - Man-Eating Typewriter

Noel Coward - Mrs Worthington

Anon - Cud (excerpt) Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet

Jackie Kay - Trumpet

Billy Strayhorn - Take the A Train

Michael Field - A Summer Wind

Francis Poulenc - Sextet for piano & winds (2nd mvt: Divertissement)

Paul Burston - We can be heroes

David Bowie - Rebel Rebel

Chris Lowe / Neil Tennant - It's a sin

AE Housman - Oh who is that young sinner?

Meredith Monk - Passage

Virginia Woolf - Orlando

Dominique Phinot - Pater peccavi

Julius Eastman - Gay guerilla

Carol Ann Duffy - Prayer

Ocean Vuong - Last Prom Queen in Antarctica

Janis Joplin - Mercedes Benz

For Pride month music and readings of Oscar Wilde, Jackie Kay, Dean Atta & Torrey Peters.

Like Father, Like Son?2015101820151231 (R3)Marking the centenary of Arthur Miller's birth - a playwright noted for his fascination with fathers and sons - an exploration of the many facets of this complex relationship, featuring a selection of poetry and prose read by Nicholas Farrell and Sam Troughton and music by Rossini, Stravinsky, David Axelrod and others.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

A selection of poetry, prose and music exploring the relationship of father and son.

Live From The Free Thinking Festival20141102Actors Jonathan Keeble and Sian Thomas are joined by the dazzling folk singer Eliza Carthy, the innovative saxophonist, composer and Radio 3 New Generation Artist Trish Clowes, members of Royal Northern Sinfonia and pianist Kate Thompson for a special live edition of Words and Music. The programme takes the theme of this year's Free Thinking Festival of Ideas, 'the Limits of Knowledge', with readings from Douglas Adams to Thomas Hardy and Kant to Ogden Nash. Music includes Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time', Bach and Bartok, plus folk songs from Eliza Carthy and improvisations from Trish Clowes.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring 'the limits of knowledge'.

Locomotion20101003An edition of Words and Music dedicated to Locomotion. A selection of music and poetry provides the short dash through the A-Z of getting from A-B - and steams its way through the implacable human passion for all forms of locomotion .

Readers Claire Rushbrook and Andrew Wincott guide us through a scenic route -- so music from Wagner, Ellington, Mayfield, Eno and Schubert are among the stops on one branch of the journey while words from Marvell, Lear, Patrick Leigh Fermor and E Nesbit are scheduled destinations on the other.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music about getting from A to B. Readers: Claire Rushbrook and Andrew Wincott.

London2012062420141116 (R3)~Words And Music: London

~Words And Music celebrates the great capital city with music and texts read by two distinguished London-born actors, Dame Eileen Atkins and Sir David Jason.

In many ways a city of contradictions, Words and Music celebrates the Thames, the church bells, the parks and the architecture, along with the less salubrious side of the city - the overcrowding, the noise and the stench which Londoners have complained about for centuries. We view London through the eyes of its chroniclers such as Daniel Defoe and John Evelyn, along with eminent visitors to the city such as Handel and Haydn. There are also references to key events in London's history - the Fire, the Plague, the Blitz, and the terror of Jack the Ripper. Above all, there is a sense of the love of the city from the writings of authors and poets who lived there, including Charles Dickens, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and John Keats.

London has inspired many composers, and the readings are accompanied by music by Vaughan Williams, Walton, Britten, Haydn and Elgar.

Producer: Ellie Mant.

Texts and music celebrating London, with readings by Eileen Atkins and David Jason.

Long Life20230521Writings by Jan Morris, the world traveller who died in 2020 aged 94, begin and end this programme which explores the idea of longevity in humans and extraordinary lifespans in the natural world, such as whales, ocean quahogs and the redwood trees depicted in Richard Powers' prize-winning novel 'The Overstory'. Timothy West and Eileen O'Brien also read extracts from Virginia Woolf, Tove Jansson and George Bernard Shaw's play 'Back to Methuselah' - whom the Bible claims lived to 969, long beyond the `natural lifespan` of `threescore years and ten`.

Music ranges from Arvo P䀀rt's 'Sarah Was Ninety Years Old' based on Abraham's wife in the Book of Genesis, to an 'Elegy' by Elliott Carter who lived to be 103, and music performed by Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen who lived to 100, British harpist Sidonie Goossens who lived until she was 105, and the pianist Menahem Pressler who died at the age of 99 earlier this month.

Producers: Jenny Pitt and Lorna Newman

READINGS:

Jan Morris: In My Mind's Eye (A Thought Diary)

John Agard: Twilight Manoeuvring

Ruth Fainlight: Ageing

Joseph Edwards Carpenter: The King of the Southern Sea

Jonas Jonasson: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

Tove Jansson: The Summer Book

Lewis Carroll: You Are Old, Father William

Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon (Musings of a Geriatric Starlet)

Matt Haig: How to Stop Time

Virginia Woolf: Orlando: A Biography

WB Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium

Steven N Austad: Methuselah's Zoo

Roger McGough: The Oldest Tree on Earth: The Curse of Methuselah (poem six)

George Bernard Shaw: Back to Methuselah

Diana Athill: Alive, Alive Oh! (And Other Things That Matter)

Richard Powers: The Overstory

Elaine Feinstein: Long Life

James Hilton: Lost Horizon

Timothy West and Eileen O'Brien with readings on what it means to live longer than 70

Look To The Skies20150315Poetry, prose and music inspired by the sky and the objects in it.
Looking At Myself20240317From Narcissus, son of a river god, via Dorian Gray to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Looking Back On Childhood2020071220221230 (R3)Poets and writers reflect on their childhoods. With readings by Rebecca Lacey and Abraham Popoola.

What was it like to be a child? What was expected, and what did we wish for? What experiences in the present prompt us to remember? This episode of Words and Music explores how it feels to look back on different stages of childhood.

In a Louis MacNeice poem, the smell of a particular brand of soap is enough to inspire a flood of involuntary memories; while Jackie Kay is watching on the shore as the girl she was walks `out to sea [...] further and further away.` There is part of the poet Alice Oswald that has not yet left her childhood hiding place, inside a laurel bush `in Berkshire somewhere.` Jan Morris's memoir reflects on how it felt to be `born into the wrong body.`

Youth was a wandered-through, clambered-over landscape for the nature poet Wordsworth; for Adrienne Rich, childhood was a time when knowledge was `pure`, even `pleasurable`, contained in encyclopedias, lacking the contradictions and complications of the adult world. Seamus Heaney invokes the imaginative play of siblings at home whose sofa is transformed into a train. Driving in his car listening to Sly and the Family Stone, the poet A. Van Jordan is pulled over by the police. The encounter prompts a lyrical meditation on music, manhood and racism. The music in this episode comes from Charles Ives, Georges Bizet and Stevie Wonder.

Readings:

Alice Oswald - Aside

Melissa Stein - Anthem

Seamus Heaney - A Sofa In The Forties

William Wordsworth - The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time

Adrienne Rich - From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

James Baldwin - Sonny's Blues

Laurie Lee - Cider With Rosie

A. Van Jordan - Que Sera Sera (© 2007 by A. Van Jordan, in arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)

Louis MacNeice - Soap Suds

Thomas Hood - Past and Present

Jan Morris - Conundrum

D.H. Lawrence - Piano

Jackie Kay - The Past

Produced by Phil Smith

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Poets and writers reflect on their childhoods. Read by Rebecca Lacey and Abraham Popoola.

Lost And Found2017042320200202 (R3)Lost thoughts, lost paths, lost time, lost love, lost innocence. Harriet Walter and Don Warrington read poetry and prose on the idea of being lost, both physically and metaphysically. The programme ventures into areas of life which can make us fearful; places where emotional states can be raw, some of the writers here are caught up in the emotion of the moment, occasionally bitter, but many are reflective, considering the truths uncovered in moments when the familiar and the known are gone, or obscured. Does this lead to confusion and regret, or to a eureka moment of clarity? The music includes Beethoven, Bach, Debussy, Jerome Kern and Charles Ives.

Producer: Janet Tuppen

READINGS

Dante Alighieri - Inferno Canto I

William Blake - Little Boy Lost

Georgia Douglas Johnson - Lost Illusions

Ian McEwan - Atonement

John Clare - I Am

Stevie Smith - Not Waving But Drowning

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude

Thoreau - Walden: The Village

Silas Weir Mitchell - Idleness

Adelaide Anne Proctor - A Lost Chord

George MacDonald - Lost and Found

Ivor Gurney - To His Love

Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Grief

Tennyson - In Memoriam AHH

Emily Dickinson - Part Four: Time and Eternity

Zadie Smith - White Teeth

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass: Continuities

Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland

Texts and music on the theme of being lost, with readers Harriet Walter and Don Warrington

Lost In The City Of Waters20080127Jeremy Irons and Anna Massey explore Venice through poetry, prose and classical music.
Loving The Alien20131117Fascination with and love of the strange is the theme for this edition of Words and Music.

Brian Cox and Amara Karan read poems by Tennyson, Ezra Pound and Craig Raine amongst others about Lotus Eaters, Selkies and monstrous and alien delights. There's music from composers, like Carl Maria von Weber, Britten and Gershwin who sought inspiration from other musical traditions and cultures and an extraordinary collaboration between the Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen and the Kronos Quartet. There's the inter-species love of the Owl and the Pussycat described by Edward Lear as well as Caliban's speech of promises to his wondrous new masters and music associated with aliens of the more traditional, extra-terrestrial kind including the theremin.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

Brian Cox and Amara Karan read poems about the fascination with and love of the strange.

Luck And Chance20240407Do you feel lucky? On this edition of Words and Music we hear a selection of poetry and prose and music that we may make us thank our lucky stars.

Anne-Marie Duff and Paterson Joseph treat us to characters from Dostoevsky's gamblers, Ian Fleming's James Bond playing for high stakes in Casino Royale and Roald Dhal's Charlie Bucket's golden Whipple-Scrumptious Fudge-Mallow Delight Wonka Bar. We hear about the downsides of gambling from Charles Baudelaire, about a high-stakes poker game from the American author Colson Whitehead, how life is a game of chance in a poem by Michael Spence and explore the highs and lows of playing bridge in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth.

Musically we hear from Stravinsky's Jeu des Cartes, from Checkmate by Hans-Hubert Schönzeler and Prince Yeletsky's aria from Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades sung by Gevorg Hakobyan. Prokofiev's The Gambler also makes an appearance and we couldn't leave without a burst of Luck be a Lady from Guys and Dolls, the musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and Joni Mitchell singing Lucky Girl.

Producer: Belinda Naylor

Anne-Marie Duff and Paterson Joseph evoke a world of cards, casinos and lucky chances.

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

From a golden ticket found in a chocolate bar to a high-stakes poker game, the musical Guys and Dolls where gambling runs right through to Stravinsky's ballet music Jeu de Cartes.

Madame Bovary And Independent Women2021121220221222 (R3)Actors Emma Fielding and Alex Jennings read from the novel Gustave Flaubert first published in 1856, which depicted the life of a provincial wife trying to escape a life she finds banal and restricting. Public prosecutors attacked it for obscenity when it was serialised in the Revue de Paris but after the author's acquittal it became a best-seller. Its themes of infidelity, guilt, remorse, the struggle to find independence are echoed in other extracts by writers including Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Henrik Ibsen, D.H. Lawrence, Maurice Riordan, Margaret Atwood and Edna St Vincent Millay, alongside a variety of musical examples.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

Readings:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, read by Emma Fielding

Madame Bovary (poem), by Maurice Riordan, read by Alex Jennings

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, read by Alex Jennings

Love by Emily Dickinson, read by Emma Fielding

House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, read by Alex Jennings

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, read by Emma Fielding and Alex Jennings

Bored by Margaret Atwood, read by Emma Fielding

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, read by Alex Jennings

for women who are ‘difficult to love' by Warsan Shire, read by Emma Fielding

Rendezvous by Edna St Vincent Millay, read by Alex Jennings

Up Scoble by Robert Herrick, read by Emma Fielding

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, read by Emma Fielding and Alex Jennings

When We Two Parted by Lord Byron, read by Emma Fielding

Mariana by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, read by Emma Fielding

Emma Fielding and Alex Jennings read from Flaubert's novel about a frustrated wife.

Made In Yorkshire2023081320230924 (R3)Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones/Gentleman Jack) and Paul Copley (Downton Abbey/Last Tango in Halifax) take us on a literary journey through their native Yorkshire starting in the west of the county in the depths of the Calder Valley with poets Ted Hughes and Zaffar Kunial, and the treacherous Cragg Vale Coiners courtesy of novelist Ben Myers. Over the moors we encounter the famous Bronte sisters before heading south to Marsden for some cricket with poet laureate Simon Armitage. In Halifax we meet 19th-century diarist Anne Lister - perhaps better known as Gentleman Jack - before arriving in 1970s Leeds a time when, as novelist Kate Atkinson puts it, Yorkshire was ‘awash with serial killers'. Heading east we get to Hull with 17th century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, and Winifred Holtby who used her mother's experience as an alderwoman in the East Riding of Yorkshire as the basis of her 1935 novel South Riding. Further up the coast we stop of at the oriental themed Peasholm Park in Scarborough with Doncaster poet Sarah Wimbush, and the Victorian seaside town Saltburn-by-the-Sea with Carmen Marcus, daughter of a Yorkshire fisherman. Back inland and further north, vet James Herriot delivers a calf in Thirsk, and Yorkshire dialect campaigner Dorothy Una Ratcliffe describes April in Wensleydale, despite really being from Surrey. With music by Yorkshire composers including Eric Fenby, John Barry, Hannah Peel, and John Hebden, and the bells of Hull Minster reimagined by electronic duo Nightports.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Readings:

Benjamin Myers - The Gallows Pole

Emily Bronte - The Night Is Darkening Round Me

Ted Hughes - The Thought Fox

Charlotte Bronte - Shirley

Zaffar Kunial - Bronte Taxis

Helena Whitbread (ed.) - The Diaries of Anne Lister

Simon Armitage - The Catch

Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

Andrew Marvell - The Fair Singer

Winifred Holtby - South Riding

Sarah Wimbush - Peasholm Park

Carmen Marcus - Skeining

James Herriot - All Creatures Great And Small

Dorothy Una Ratcliffe - April in Wensleydale

You can find a series of programmes being recorded at and broadcast from Leeds from the Contains Strong Language Festival 2023 available on BBC Sounds including Radio 3's Arts & Ideas programme Free Thinking, the new writing programme The Verb, Radio 3's Sunday Drama.

Gemma Whelan and Paul Copley with readings and music from 'God's own county'.

Magic20071209Nicholas Farrell and Miriam Margolyes conjure up words on magic, accompanied by music.
Magic Numbers20201101Numbers are beautiful, and mathematics is an art: that is the formula for this episode, in which Sule Rimi and Alibe Parsons read work from poets and philosophers entranced by the beauty, order, irrationality, and infinite wisdom to be found in digits, numerals, and counting.

In addition, they are accompanied by music from composers embedding numerology and codes into their work, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Olivier Messiaen and Iannis Xenakis.

Readings:

Bertrand Russell - The Study of Mathematics (Extract)

Mary Cornish - Numbers

Philip Larkin - Counting

Jo Shapcott - Shapcott's Variation on Schoenberg's orchestration of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, St Anne (Prom 24)

Carl Sandburg - Number Man

Ben Jonson - VI. - To the Same

Emily Dickinson - It's all I have to bring today

Daniil Kharms - A Sonnet

Velimir Khlebnikov - Numbers

Plato - Epinomis (Extract) (trans. Edith Hamilton, Huntington Cairns)

Emily Dickinson - ‘Tis One by One - the Father counts -

Edna St. Vincent Millay - Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare

Wis?awa Szymborska - Pi

Jakob Bernoulli - Treatise on Infinite Series

Douglas Goetsch - Counting

Paul Erdos - a famous quote

Michael Donaghy - Two Spells for Sleeping

Produced by Jack Howson.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Sule Rimi and Alibe Parsons find beauty and wisdom in digits, numerals, and counting.

Making Music2017090320210801 (R3)A series of readings from Sylvestra Le Touzel and Paul Jesson considering what we do when we create, practice and perform music. The writers featured include Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, John Dryden and James Joyce. The music comes from composers and performers such as Bach, Mozart, Saint-Sa뀀ns, Keith Jarrett, Joni Mitchell, Sidney Bechet and William Alwyn.

Producer: Harry Parker

(Main image: Royal Albert Hall. Credit : Chris Christodoulou)

Sylvestra Le Touzel and Paul Jesson explore, via readings, what we do when we make music.

Malady20100411The great American essayist, Susan Sontag, once said that we all carry two passports - one that allows us into the kingdom of the well and another, less seldom used, which ushers us into the realm of the sick. This week's edition of Words and Music is all about that kingdom of malady - from the famous musical sneeze in Kodaly's Hary Janos suite to the balm of Bach's cantata - Ich habe genug.; from Pinter's description of electroconvulsive therapy to John Evelyn's eye- witness account of the removal of a bladder stone. The readers for this journey into the night-side of life are Rory Kinnear and Anna Maxwell Martin.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music focusing on sickness. Including Kodaly and Bach.

Man And Beast20081026With Hermione Norris and Jim Norton

Love them or loathe them, eat them or beat them, ride them or run from them, animals are ever-present in our lives. In exploring the age-old symbiotic relationship between man and beast, I have alighted on categories that take us, and them, from the home to the high seas, from the farmyard to the zoo, and from English downs to Grecian forests.

It is not all sweetness and light: George Macbeth's warm account of the pleasures of stroking a cat is balanced by Seamus Heaney's disturbing childhood memory of watching kittens drowned, and Vivaldi's breezy evocation of hunting leads directly to Ted Hughes's hard-hitting retelling of the tortured Ovidian tale of Actaeon, the hunter transformed into a stag as punishment for glimpsing the goddess Diana and dying a grisly death as quarry for his own hounds. Tom Waits tells how his hero, Frank, torches his own house just because he 'never could stand that dog', and later on we meet the beast as nemesis in passages from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Melville's Moby-Dick.

Elsewhere we sample a more pastoral atmosphere in Rosebud in June, an English summer folk-song that finds time to celebrate the economic benefits of sheep husbandry, while the early 20th-century nature writer WH Hudson explains the almost human qualities that make a first-rate sheepdog, as related to him by a downland shepherd. There is also a lesson in the rule-of-thumb of judging a good nag in Judith Weir's song On buying a horse, and an appreciation of fine horsemanship from Ben Jonson, while Haydn makes an elegant claim for Man's supremacy in an aria from The Creation.

A rather more intimate kind of relationship between men and animals is investigated in Samuel Pepys's description of one of his gargantuan, decidedly non-vegetarian meals, in Marriott Edgar's comic story of an inquisitive boy swallowed by a lion, and in the bizarre procession outlined by Burl Ives in I know an old lady. More romantically, Mark Roper shows how domestic hens' eggs can soothe the soul, while in The Flea John Donne manages the task of turning a blood-sucking parasite into an instrument of sexual seduction.

We end with the ominous final lines from Orwell's Animal Farm, as the faces of the pigs who had once led the animals in revolt become indistinguishable from those of their erstwhile overlords; and with The beast in me, a plain but harrowing account from Johnny Cash of a body cursed by dual occupancy.

Lindsay Kemp

READERS:

HM = Hermione Norris

JN = Jim Norton

0.00

Fourteen Ways of Touching the Peter (HM)

01.39

Samuel Barber

The Monk and his Cat

Barbara Bonney & Andr退 Previn

DECCA 476 723 2 Tr 27

04.03

The Early Purges (JN)

05.18

Trad. English

Steeleye Span

BGOCD324 Tr 2

08.58

A Shepherd's Life (HN)

10.47

Antonio Vivaldi

‘Spring' from ‘The Four Seasons

Amandine Beyer (violin), Gli Incogniti

ZIG-ZAG ZZT080803 Tr 9

13.00

Joseph Haydn

Anthony Rolfe-Johnson & Michael George

AAM w. Christopher Hogwood

L'OISEAU-LYRE 430 397-2 CD2 Tr 9-10

16.51

An Epigram. To William, Earl of Newcastle (JN)

17.54

Andrew Kennedy & Iain Burnside

SIGNUM SIGCD087 Tr 1

20.11

‘Autumn' from ‘The Four Seasons' (3rd movt)

ZZT080803 Tr 16

23.06

Tales from Ovid (HN)

26.46

Benjamin Britten

Dance of Death (Hawking for the Partridge) from ‘Our Hunting Fathers

Ian Bostridge & Britten Sinfonia w. Daniel Harding

EMI CDC 556 871-2 Tr 13

33.07

The Hen Ark (HN)

34.03

Diary excerpt (JN)

35.26

Alan Mills & Rose Bonne

EMI 576 323 2 Tr 3

38.07

The Lion and Albert

Stanley Holloway (reciter)

CONIFER CMSCD007 Tr 3

42.28

The Flea (JN)

44.01

Modest Mussorgsky

The Song of the Flea

Peter Dawson, un-named orchestra

GOLDEN AGE GX 2515 LP Side 1 Band 5

46.57

Noel Coward

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Noel Coward, orchestra conducted by Ray Noble

EMI CDP 7322802 Tr 2

49.47

Frank's Wild Years

Tom Waits, Ronnie Barron, Larry Taylor

ISLAND 5245192 Tr 10

51.39

Trad. Galli tribe (Ethiopia), trans Anon

If I might be an ox (HN)

52.14

William Byrd

My mistress had a little dog

Ian Partridge, Phantasm

SIMAX PSC1191 Tr 11

58.58

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (JN)

61.04

John Cage

Litany for the Whale (excerpt)

Alan Bennett, Paul Elliott

HMU 907187 Tr 1

63.11

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick (JN)

66.22

Trad English

The Greenland Whale Fishery

The Watersons

TOPIC TSCD471 Tr 2

68.52

George Orwell

Animal Farm (HN)

71.25

Nick Lowe

AMERICAN 74321236852 Tr 3

Hermione Norris and Jim Norton are the readers exploring an age-old relationship.

Man And Beast20090607Radio 3's sequence of music and readings examines the relationship between humans and animals, with readings by Hermione Norris and Jim Norton.

Including poetry and prose by John Donne, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, WH Hudson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among others, interspersed with music from Barber, Vivaldi, Haydn, Britten, Noel Coward, Tom Waits and Johnny Cash among others.

Poetry, prose and music exploring the relationship between humans and animals.

Man Made2010053020120804 (R3)Caroline Catz and Anthony Flanagan read a selection of poetry and prose, serious and light-hearted, celebrating the relationship between humankind, nature and machines.

The programme begins with a look at man's use of machinery through history, including words from Karl Marx and Charles Dickens, and music from Bach and the Beach Boys.

Meanwhile, poets Rudyard Kipling and Carl Sandburg look into the minds of machines and imagine how they must feel as they carry out their work. This leads down the shady avenue of artificial intelligence: the endeavour to create the perfect machine in man's image, an idea investigated by Science Fiction writer Philip K Dick. Interspersed are Olympia the doll's aria from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, and music featuring telephones, typewriters and helicopters.

Philip Larkin's poem The Mower hints at the destructive power of machines, as he finds a mauled hedgehog in the blades of his lawnmower, while Kenneth Grahame's animal characters from The Wind in the Willows have a close encounter with an automobile. D.H. Lawrence ponders where it will all lead, and nature and the man-made dance together in the music of Messiaen.

Sequence of poetry, prose and music on the relationship between man, nature and machines.

Man's Best Friend2018031820181226 (R3)Actors Robert Lindsay and Claire Benedict read from Dodie Smith's 101 Dalmatians, Jack London's Call of the Wild and Dorothy Parker's mischievous Verse for a Certain Dog in this selection of poems, prose and music of all kinds celebrating mankind's greatest ally in the animal kingdom - dogs. With music by Gershwin, Elgar, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. From puppy love to fawning, from fetching a stick to disobedience and the clip of a dog and deer that went viral.

Producer: Paul Frankl

Actors Claire Benedict and Robert Lindsay read poems and prose about all things canine.

Maps2015011120170102 (R3)Hugh Bonneville and Barbara Flynn travel across maps in literature, from 'The Pilgrim's Progress' by John Bunyan to Roger McGough's comical poem, 'The Map'.

This edition of Words and Music looks at the early maps described by Herodotus, and poetic reflections on the Mappa Mundi by John Davies of Hereford and the contemporary poet, Philip Gross. There are reflections too on Captain Cook's cartography, a farcical description of map-making from Lewis Carroll's 'Sylvie and Bruno Concluded', and poems on mapping the next world by John Donne and Joy Harjo.

Music includes the anonymous Italian melody 'Ayo visto lo mappamundi' and John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis.

Elizabeth Arno (producer).

Texts and music on the theme of maps, with readings by Hugh Bonneville and Barbara Flynn.

Maria Callas And The Power Of Singing20231126La Divina, as the American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas was dubbed, made her professional debut in 1941 and went on to become an operatic star. To mark 100 years since her birth on December 2nd 1923, Words and Music celebrates singing with readings of prose and poetry performed by Clarke Peters and Anastasia Hille and a soundtrack of excerpts from operas by Verdi, Puccini and Tosca alongside songs performed by Lisa O'Neil, Andreas Scholl and William Warfield. We'll hear Maria Callas herself talking about the sense of duty that came with her attitude to singing, and how she felt about those she described as her 'enemies'; and passages from the biography of her written by Lyndsy Spence: Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas

Producer: Georgia Mann

BBC Radio 3 on December 2nd marks the anniversary of the birth of Maria Callas with recordings of her singing in Record Review, Music Matters, Sound of Cinema and Opera on 3

READINGS:

I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman

Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

Extract from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Extract from Number 13 by M.R James

Extract from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by E.V Rieu

Extract from Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

Extracts from Casta Diva: The hidden Life of Maria Callas by Lyndsy Spence

The Fair Singer by Andrew Marvell

Extract from The Dubliners by James Joyce

In the House of the Voice of Maria Callas by Steven Orlen

Clarke Peters and Anastasia Hille with prose and poetry about singing

Maria Callas' birth on Dec 2nd 1923 is the inspiration for a programme including readings from Joyce, Austen, Langston Hughes and M R JAMES with music by Puccini, Debussy and Verdi

Mark The Music2009120620110807 (R3)Peter Capaldi and Emily Bruni read poetry and prose on the theme of music, from the metaphysical to the everyday. The programme explores the wide-ranging facets and inescapable power of music: the mystical concept of the music of the spheres, the power of music in childhood and everyday life, music as a psychological tormentor and the beauty of music in performance.

With poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy and Pablo Neruda, and prose by Nick Hornby and Louis de Bernieres. Music to compliment the readings includes works by Messiaen, Purcell, Pergolesi, Charles Mingus, Neil Young and Philip Glass.

Peter Capaldi and Emily Bruni read poetry and prose on the theme of music.

Masks20230730From the masked highwaywoman described by Niamh Murphy, to the masked seducer adopted by the C18 Italian adventurer and lover extraordinaire Casanova, to the masked furies of the ancient Greek stage, masks can conjure up notions of primordial terror. But they can also be fun.

Such images and ideas are evoked in a phantasmagoria of hiding, veiling and concealing, as Nathalie Buscombe and Jot Davies read texts by Yeats, Wilde, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Schnitzler. Ancestral masks and animal masks are conjured up in poems by L退opold Senghor and Philip Larkin, along with masks concealing the symptoms of plague and strangely winsome death masks, all set alongside music by Lindberg, Offenbach, Bach, Rodrigo and Schnittke evoking places and eras in which masking took place. Levi-Strauss and Lucretius provide a philosophical perspective: `all philosophising is masking`, Wilde wrote in `The Need for a Mask`; the conclusion might be that we all need to take care of our masks.

Readings:

Rosamond Lehmann: The Weather in the Streets

H.V.Morton: A traveller in Rome

Sophie Werts Knudsen: Masks and Syphilis

James Harpur: The examined life XLVII: Furies

Jean Lorrain: Monsieur de Phocas

Arthur Schnitzler: Dream Story

W.B. Yeats: The Mask

Paul Lawrence Dunbar: We wear the mask

Niamh Murphy: The mask of the highwayman

Claude Levi Strauss: The way of the masks

Johnston McCulley: The Mark of Zorro

Lucretius: De rerum natura

Leopold Sedar Senghor: Prayer to Masks

Kamau Brathwaite: Masks: Atumpan

Chares Baudelaire: The Mask: An allegorical statue in the style of the Renaissance

Martin Amis: The pregnant widow, read by Jot Davies

Anon: Gas masks for dogs

Philip Larkin: Laboratory Monkeys

Heinrich Schliemann: Mycenae

Pietro Bembo: Letter to Cardinal Binniena

Giacomo Casanova: Memoirs

Karl Edward Wagner: Undertow

Richard Le Galliene: The Worshipper in the Image

Ernest Dowson: A comedy of masks

Cardinal John Deardon: Please hear what I'm not saying

Robin Hardy: The Wicker Man

Producer: Tony Sellors

From highwaymen to the Greek stage, from Lucretius to Philip Larkin and Rosamond Lehmann.

Material World20221204The choice between denim and chiffon skirts is the quandary for the young woman who works for a powerful fashion magazine editor in Lauren Weisberger's novel from 2003 The Devil Wears Prada, whilst in Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho Timothy Price sports a cotton shirt, linen suit, silk tie and leather lace ups. In George Orwell's On Wigan Pier, he writes about new clothes allowing you to 'stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo'. Today's Words and Music is like a draper's shop offering poems by John Donne, Cynthia Miller and Mark Doty. There's music written by Saint-Sa뀀ns inspired by the story of Le Rouet d'Omphale, an episode in the story of Hercules when he was condemned by Apollo to spend three years disguised as a woman spinning wool for Omphale and William Grant Still's orchestration of Florence Price's Dances in the Canebrakes, a thicket of tall cane plants found in the cotton producing regions of the American South. Bobby Vinton croons about Blue Velvet, Lana Del Rey about blue jeans, and Celine Byrne performs the aria 'mi chiamano Mim쀀' from La Boh耀me, Puccini's opera about a seamstress and her artist friends in 1830s Paris. Kim Addonizio declares that what women really want is a tight red dress while Jane Eyre eschews a symphony of silks. Strauss brings music to Moliere's satire Le bourgeois gentilhomme and Madonna declares we are living in a Material World.

Our readers are Kate O'Flynn and Matthew Needham.

Producer: Belinda Naylor

Wool, velvet, cotton, silk: Kate O'Flynn and Matthew Needham with readings set with music.

May Day2010050220120506 (R3)May Day is often associated with English pastoral images: Maypoles, morris dancing and the gathering of greenery. But there's a darker side too, as May Day has throughout history had an undercurrent of misrule, evil practices and sexual liberty. Sarah Alexander and Julian Rhind-Tutt perform poems and prose on the theme by Milton, Chaucer, Herrick and Richmal Crompton, with music including Britten, Debussy, Michael Berkeley, and The Rolling Stones.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

~Words And Music on the theme of May Day. Readers: Sarah Alexander and Julian Rhind-Tutt.

May Day2022050120230430 (R3)Walter Crane's The Workers' Maypole is set alongside Jessica Mitford's account of a Hyde Park march; Gustav Holst's Egdon Heath underscores a reading from Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Richmal Crompton's Just William questions the idea of May Queens; we hear the remembrance of a Sarajevan ceremony from Priscilla Morris's new novel Black Butterflies, and John Stow's Survey of London takes us back to archers demonstrating their skills to Henry VIII. Plus poems by Sara Teasdale, Wendy Cope, Charles Causley and John Betjeman's Seaside Golf. The readers are Robert Glenister and Norah Lopez Holden. Amongst the composers and performers included in this episode are Malcolm Arnold's Cornish Dances, a kingfisher conjured in the music of Sally Beamish, a traditional May song performed by Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy, the Hawaiian May Day is Lei Day and a rendition of Sumer is Icumen In from the choir of Magdalen College Oxford, where every May Day crowds assemble and the bells ring out.

Producer: Fiona McLean

You can find a Free Thinking episode exploring May Day rituals available on BBC Sounds and as an Arts & Ideas podcast and today's Drama on 3 The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff has been written by the folk performers The Young 'Uns.

Robert Glenister and Norah Lopez Holden are the readers in a celebration of May customs.

Memory20080302Saskia Reeves and Alex Jennings read works by Larkin, Carroll and Carol Ann Duffy.
Memory2015022220170103 (R3)'Memories,' according to PG Wodehouse 'are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.'

In this memory-themed edition of Words and Music Tom Hiddleston and Eleanor Bron nonetheless poke around with the soup spoon to discover what's below the surface.

Among the ingredients Wordsworth and Bertie Wooster are in remarkable agreement; Alan Bennett struggles to comes to terms with his mother's dementia; and Fanny Burney recalls her horrific operation. St Peter and Montaigne have trouble remembering; Ted Hughes remembers all too well his honeymoon with Sylvia Plath; William Blake and Elizabeth Jennings look back on happier days. Somewhere in the middle is a large dollop of Proust.

It's all to be found floating in the music of Purcell, Conlon Nancarrow, Chabrier, John Adams, Brahms and Bach.

David Papp (producer).

Texts and music on the theme of memory, with readings by Tom Hiddleston and Eleanor Bron.

Mendelssohn Weekend, The Great Trip20090509Edward Bennett reads extracts from letters Mendelssohn wrote during the 'Great Trip'. In 1829, aged 20, the young and impressionable composer embarked on a tour that lasted until 1832.

It was the longest trip undertaken by any musician in modern times and spanned England, Scotland, the Swiss Alps and European cities such as Vienna, Rome and Paris. The journey concluded in London, a city where Mendelssohn felt particularly at home. Throughout the trip, Mendelssohn wrote letters to his family about his impressions of the landscape, culture and customs of the different countries he encountered. It was also a process of self-discovery where he thought about his future plans and his identity as a German.

In London he sees streets shrouded in fog; in Edinburgh he scrambles up Arthur's Seat for a view of the city.

He notes in Vienna that people do nothing at all. Travelling down the Danube by boat is a highlight and in Pressburg he joins in the celebrations for the crowning of the King of Hungary. His final destination is London, where he is overwhelmed by the enthusiastic reception by audiences.

The programme includes music written by Mendelssohn alongside music the composer would have heard during his years of travelling.

Edward Bennett reads from Mendelssohn's letters about the composer's travels in Europe.

Mermaids2013092920140727 (R3)Amanda Root and Toby Stephens are the readers in this edition of Words and Music which is inspired by the multi-faceted character of the mermaid. Responding to the call of the siren are composers including Debussy, Ravel, Zemlinsky and Gershwin and writers such as Hans Christian Andersen, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and T.S. Eliot.

First broadcast 29 September 2013

Devised by Sarah Peverley

Producer: Philippa Ritchie.

Texts and music on the theme of mermaids, with readings by Amanda Root and Toby Stephens.

Merry Christmas20231225Light the fire, pour yourself a sherry, and join us to celebrate Christmas Day with Dominic West (The Crown/The Affair) and Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones/Gentleman Jack) reading poetry and prose exploring everything that makes for a magical Christmas: family and friends, festive food, the giving of gifts, wintery weather, angels, shepherds, and three wise men. With texts by C.S. Lewis, Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a feast of seasonal music from classical to contemporary.

Producer in Salford: Ruth Thomson

Dominic West and Gemma Whelan with festive readings and music.

With readings from C.S. Lewis, Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a feast of seasonal music from classical to contemporary.

Dominic West (The Crown/The Affair) and Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones/Gentleman Jack) read poetry and prose exploring everything that makes for a magical Christmas, alongside a feast of seasonal music from classical to contemporary. We've a winter walk with Robert Louis Stevenson, Christmas dinner with PG Wodehouse, Christmas music with William Wordsworth and Anne Bronte, a school nativity with Clare Bevan, and the King's speech as imagined by Brian Bilston. And we'll enter the magical worlds of Narnia when Christmas finally comes, the Wind in the Willows complete with Yule-tide mice, and Little House on the Prairie as Laura and Mary discover that Santa has visited them after all. Along the way we'll hear traditional carols and festive music by Kate Rusby, Nils Frahm, Louis Armstong, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Harry Gregson-Williams and Arcangelo Corelli.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Brian Bilston - The Kings Speech

Wendy Cope - Motorway Music

Frank O'Connor - Christmas Morning

Kenneth Graeme - Wind in the Willows

Robert Louis Stevenson - Winter Time

Claire Bevan - Just Doing My Job

P.G Wodehouse - Another Christmas Carol

Anne Bronte - Music on Christmas Morning

William Wordsworth – Minstrels

Laura Ingalls Wilder - Little House on the Prairie

Kingsley Amis - Ending Up

L Kiew - December Began With Shopping

C.S Lewis - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Charles Dickens - Sketches by Boz

With readings from C.S Lewis, Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a feast of seasonal music from classical to contemporary

Metal2018020420200329 (R3)Jemima Rooper and Ewan Bailey read works relating to metallic elements in our bodies, our jobs and our land from authors including Wilfred Owen, Afua Cooper & Homer set to music by composers including Shostakovich, Sanna Kurki-Suonio and Kraftwerk.

We'll meet the people who work with it - blacksmiths in operas by Verdi and Franz Schreker and foundry workers in Henry Green's novel Living. Metal can make extraordinary sounds too, whether it's being blown through by a brass quartet playing a funeral march by Edvard Grieg, or struck to create a clangorous John Cage soundscape. But there's a darker side to metal as well - whether it's the lust for gold inspiring acts of cruelty by Spanish conquistadors in John Adams's El Dorado, or the terrible fate, described by Lavinia Greenlaw, of the young women who painted luminous clock faces and were poisoned by radium.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

READINGS:

Russell Edson - Metals Metals

Ovid (translator AD Melville) - Metamorphosis

Henry Green - Living

Rudyard Kipling - Cold Iron

Ted Hughes - The Iron Man

Edgar Allen Poe - Eldorado

Lavinia Greenlaw - The Innocence of Radium

William Shakespeare - Timon of Athens

Afua Cooper - Red Eyes

Charles Simic - Poem Without a Title

Wilfred Owen - Arms and the Boy

Homer (translator Richmond Lattimore) - the Iliad

Jemima Rooper and Ewan Bailey present poetry and music relating to metallic elements.

Metamorphosis2013012720130907 (R3)Meera Syal and Harry Hadden-Paton are the readers in this edition of Words and Music on the theme of Metamorphosis. How does it feel to be turned into someone or something else? The mischief and mayhem ensuing from unexpected transformation is explored through the words of Ovid, Shakespeare, Kafka, Roald Dahl and Jo Shapcott and the music of Britten, Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, Handel and Lerner and Loewe.

Producer: Philippa Ritchie

First broadcast in January 2013.

Texts and music on the theme of metamorphosis. Readers: Meera Syal and Harry Hadden-Paton.

Mezzogiorno2015011820151229 (R3)Mezzogiorno is the land of lemon trees as well as the Mafia; it's the land of poverty and of plenty; of Giuseppe di Lampedusa as well as Leoncavallo. For centuries, Europe's beautiful south has held the Western imagination captive; so join Alexandra Gilbreath and John Rowe as they explore a region where Aeneas rubs shoulders with the Vespa.

Texts and music centring on southern Europe. Readers: Alexandra Gilbreath and John Rowe.

Middles20120226Texts and music on the theme of middles. Readings by Juliet Stevenson and Peter Marinker.
Mindfulness And 'i': The Sense Of Self2017092420200103 (R3)Poetry, prose and music reflecting on the meaning of our existence. This edition takes you through an imagined mindfulness session, opening up a path of self-awareness. The programme flows as a carefully driven stream of consciousness, but also aims to place the listener in a pre-meditative state. it's a personal journey into your inner-self so the texts mostly an explore the first person, mirroring ordinary human interaction, through feelings like love and anguish, whilst also revealing deeply felt responses to our everyday contact with the outer world, with nature and our environment.

Prose and verse, read by Aiysha Hart and Jonathan Aris, come from writers and thinkers from both East and West, ancient and new, such as Hermann Hesse, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Octavio Paz, W.B. Yeats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Stuart Mill, Jorge Luis Borges, T.S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, Carl Jung, as well as traditional Chinese poets, among them Du Fu and Li Po.

Readings:

Walt Whitman: Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass

Lao Tzu: There is no need to run outside

Kabir: Don't go outside

Carl Jung: The attainment of wholeness

W.B. Yeats: Still Water

John Stuart Mill: The Art of Living

Oliver Wendell Holmes: What lies behind us

Hermann Hesse: Sometimes

Nisargadatta Maharaj: I Am That

Walt Whitman: Me Imperturbe

Walt Whitman: Facing West from California's Shores

Li Po: The birds have banished into the sky

Li Po: The Sun

Lao Tzu: We Are a River

Octavio Paz: Between Going and Staying

Henry David Thoreau: Walden

TS Eliot: Four Quartets, No. 1 - Burnt Norton

Jorge Luis Borges: Elegy for a Park

Anonymous (ancient): Self is everywhere

Scarlett Thomas: The End of Mr. Y

Emily Dickinson: The Consciousness that is aware

Christina Rossetti: The Thread of Life

Fernando Pessoa: Whether we write or speak or do but look

Octavio Paz: Wind, Water, Stone

George Eliot: I grant you ample leave

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance

Walt Whitman: One-self I sing

Traditional Chinese proverb: Renew thyself completely each day

Producer Juan Carlos Jaramillo.

Miniatures20100620Texts and music focusing on miniatures, with readings by John Rowe and Lia Williams.
Mirrors And Reflections2016112020201229 (R3)Readings by Henry Goodman and Lisa Dillon as we peer at our reflections and think about what the mirror tells us. From the topsy-turvy world in Alice's Looking Glass to the corrupted image in Walt Whitman's hand mirror, the cracked shaving mirror in Joyce's Ulysses and Rilke's languid Lady at the Mirror, and Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man to Britten's version of the Greek myth of Narcissus. We begin with Guillaume de Machaut's Ma fin est mon commencement and end with Jackson Hill's version. On the way we'll encounter the music written by Lalo Schifrin for a Bruce Lee film in which Lee confronts his enemy in a mirrored room, Haydn's Symphony No. 47 - sometimes called ‘The Palindrome' because of its third movement, the Menuet al Roverso in which the second part of the Minuet is the same as the first, but backwards and Arvo P䀀rt's infinity mirror Spiegel Im Spiegel in which the tonic triads are endlessly repeated with small variations as if reflected back and forth.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sylvia Plath - Mirror

Walt Whitman - A Hand Mirror

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge - The Other Side of the Mirror

Charles Simic - Mirrors At 4am

Lewis Carroll - Alice Through the Looking Glass

Louis MacNeice - Reflections

Seamus Heaney - Personal Helicon

Charles Baudelaire trans. Roy Campbell - Man and the Sea

Thomas Traherne - Shadows in the Water

James Joyce - Ulysses

Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow - Lady at the Mirror

Thomas Hardy - Moments of Vision

Readings by Henry Goodman and Lisa Dillon. Music includes Haydn, Lalo Schifrin, Arvo P\u00e4rt.

Modernism In The 1920s2022020620220717 (R3)Lisa Dwan and Anthony Howell with readings from the age of Joyce, Eliot and jazz, featuring music from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Including Ezra Pound decrying the state of modern critics, Franz Kafka worrying about those daring airmen, and Joyce's Molly Bloom revelling in the fact she said yes. With a focus of the Proms season being on music from 1922, this Words and Music marks some of the key books published that year and music evoked by them.

Readings:

William Carlos Williams, Kora In Hell, read by Anthony Howell

Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, read by Lisa Dwan

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ready by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot, Preludes, read by Anthony Howell

‘Aramis', Review of Ulysses by James Joyce, The Sporting Times, 1st April 1922, read by Anthony Howell

Virginia Woolf, Reflections on Ulysses by James Joyce, private latter, read by Lisa Dwan

James Joyce, Ulysses, Speech of John F. Taylor, read by James Joyce

James Joyce, Ulysses, read by Lisa Dwan

Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, read by Anthony Howell

Franz Kafka, Airplanes at Bresica, read by Anthony Howell

Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, read by Lisa Dwan

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz Age, read by Lisa Dwan

Ezra Pound, Canto III, read by Ezra Pound

Adolf Loos, Ornament & Crime, read by Anthony Howell

Amy Lowell, The Artist, read by Lisa Dwan

Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, read by Anthony Howell

H.D, Sheltered Garden, read by Lisa Dwan

Claude McKay, On Broadway, read by Lisa Dwan

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, read by Anthony Howell

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Lisa Dwan and Anthony Howell with readings from the age of Joyce, Eliot and jazz.

Moli\u00e8re2022011620221016 (R3)David Furlong and Tim McMullan read extracts from Moli耀re's great plays and a life of the French playwright, who was born on 15 January 1622, written by the Russian author Bulgakov. Today's programme is divided into some of the key themes explored in plays such as Don Juan, Tartuffe and the Misanthrope: Hypocrisy, Theatre, Marriage and the relationships between Men & Women, Religion, Medics, Death; with readings from other authors on these topics including Swift and Nancy Mitford set alongside music by Couperin, Milhaud, Lully and Serge Gainsbourg. The French language is often referred to as the 'language of Moli耀re' and some of today's readings are in French; others come from translations by Ranjit Bolt, Liz Lochead, Martin Crimp, John Wood and David Coward. Birmingham Rep Theatre is currently staging a production of Moliere's Tartuffe.

Producer: Georgia Mann Smith

You can find a Free Thinking discussion about the writing of Moliere available on the Free Thinking programme website and on BBC Sounds.

READINGS:

Extracts from The Life of Monsieur De Moliere by Mikhail Bulgakov translated by Mirra Ginsberg

Don Juan translated by John Wood and David Coward

The Misanthrope translated by Martin Crimp

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme translated by Philip Dwight Jones

Broadway by Sara Teasdale

Thon Man Moliere by Liz Lochead

Tartuffe translated by Ranjit Bolt

The School For Wives translated by John Wood and David Coward

Bridled Vows by Ian Duhig

The Sun King by Nancy Mitford

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

France A History From Gaul To De Gaulle by John Julius Norwich

With speeches about hypochondria miserliness and self deception from the French playwright

Monarchs2010121920120721 (R3)Kings and Queens have long possessed the imaginations and financed the careers of poets, playwrights and composers. Readers Samantha Bond and Simon Chandler play a host of historical kings and queens, from Shakespeare's Henry V and IV to Schiller's Queen Elizabeth I and Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts.

Royal coronations with their pomp and visual grandeur have inspired some of the greatest music ever written. Handel's Zadok the Priest and Walton's Crown Imperial provided the soundtracks to the coronations of George II and VI respectively; and we hear Samuel Pepys relate the incredible sight of '24 violins' at the coronation of Charles II in 1661.

The predicament of kingship was one of Shakespeare's most enduring fascinations, his Henry IV and V soliloquize in some of his greatest verse on the isolation of the ruler's plight, an isolation that may have been understood only too well by Shakespeare's great patron: Elizabeth I. Music by Donizetti and Schumann, and drama by Schiller capture the tragedy of Elizabeth's relationship with her passionate cousin Mary, Queen of Scots; whose last letter we hear, written on the eve of her execution.

Texts and music on the theme of monarchs. Readings by Samantha Bond and Simon Chandler.

Money2011022020111222 (R3)Money makes the world go round. It also tends to bring out the worst in people, and a wealth of novels and poems have been written on and around the subject. The gentlemen in Jane Austen's novels usually have plenty of it, while the unfortunate Katerina Ivanovna in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment certainly does not. Defoe's Moll Flanders and F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby are on the make, while characters in Dickens and E Nesbit are in a ruinous state through losing their money. And Martin Amis's John Self thinks he's making money, later to find that he's actually losing it too.

Sylvestra Le Touzel and Dan Stevens read poems and texts which show the impact money, or lack of money has on literary characters' lives, with music by Beethoven, Puccini, Stravinsky and Abba.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Texts and music on the theme of money. Readings by Sylvestra Le Touzel and Dan Stevens.

Money2021022120220123 (R3)With tax return deadlines looming and rises in the cost of living, we've a financial theme as Jonathan Keeble and Emily Pithon perform readings from The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and from Martin Amis's 1984 novel Money, from George Eliot's Silas Marner, which depicts a lonely weaver who hoards gold coins and Imtiaz Dharker's poem about today's consumerist society, The Garden Gnomes are on Their Mobile Phones, as well as Michael Lewis's investigation of investors on Wall Street, The Big Short. The music includes Beethoven's Rage Over a Lost Penny, Franz Lehကr's Gold and Silver Waltz, Eartha Kitt singing Brother Can You Spare a Dime and Pink Floyd's Money.

You can find a Free Thinking episode exploring different aspects of Money in the playlist How We Live Now on the Free Thinking programme website.

Producer: Nick Holmes

READINGS:

Martin Amis Money

JRR Tolkein The Hobbit

Florence May Alt The Millionaire

Henry Austen Preface to Persuasion and Northanger Abbey

George Eliot Silas Marner

Emily Dickinson Simplicity

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Friday Black

ɀmile Zola Money

Michael Lewis The Big Short

Anthony Trollope The Prime Minister

Charles Dickens Little Dorrit

Chester Himes A Rage in Harlem

Kathleen Raine Worry about Money

Philip Larkin Money

Simon Armitage Ten Pence Story

Imtiaz Dharker The garden gnomes are on their mobile phones

Amos Russel Wells Things! Things

Jonathan Keeble and Emily Pithon with readings from Trollope to Larkin and Imtiaz Dharker.

Monkey Business2016082120181104 (R3)It begins in mischief and ends in confusion. Monkeys are the lords of misrule. They're as entertaining as they are mischievous. In their needs and affections they can also seem almost human. Are we monkeys or are they men? In Monkey Business the actors Rosalie Craig and Philip Franks will be leaping about between the probable and the improbable. Searching for airborne fun rather than earthbound enlightenment. They'll be swinging from the cosmology of 16th-century China to the simian aspirations of The Jungle Book and will conjure mayhem from Satie, Beethoven, Britten and Ligeti to hasten them on the way. As Kipling put it - 'here we go in a flung festoon, half-way up to the jealous moon.

Producer: Zahid Warley

All things ape with Philip Franks and Rosalie Craig.

Monsters20081214A selection of poetry and music on the theme of monsters, with readings by Don Warrington and Carolyn Pickles. Including works by Jack Mapanje, Christina Rossetti, Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Brian Patten, Carol Ann Duffy, Tennyson and Ted Hughes, and music including Grieg, Knussen and Schubert. NB: This broadcast starts at approximately 22.50

Music and poems on the theme of monsters read by Don Warrington and Carolyn Pickles.

Moonstruck2010052320160117 (R3)Art Malik and Alexandra Gilbreath read poetry and prose that explores our ancient and continuing fascination with the moon, in various guises: as a symbol of purity, as a capricious, changeable being, as an object to reach in the imagination and through scientific exploration. With texts by Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, and music from Mendelssohn, Debussy, Schumann, Judy Garland, and Radiohead.

Music, poetry and prose about the moon, with readings by Art Malik and Alexandra Gilbreath

Mothers And Daughters2018030420200322 (R3)On Mothering Sunday, this edition of Words and Music explores mothers and daughters. The readers are real-life mother and daughter Samantha Bond and Molly Hanson. From Shakespeare's domineering Lady Capulet and bewildered Juliet to Austen's neurotic Mrs Bennet and her brood of daughters, the mother and daughter relationship is one fraught with concern and competition but also - often - full of love. From the adoration of Christina Rosetti in her Sonnets are full of love to the tussle over identity in Gillian Clarke's Catrin, this is a journey through one of life's most multi-faceted relationships with music by Ives, Dvorak, Laurie Anderson and Richard Strauss.

Producer: Georgia Mann

Readings

Sylvia Plath - Morning Song

Christina Rossetti - Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome

Shakespeare - extract from Romeo and Juliet Act One, Scene 3

Angela Carter - extract from Extract from The Bloody Chamber

Anne Sexton - Extract from letter

Anne Sexton - Dreaming The Breasts

Jane Austen - Extract from Pride and Prejudice

Gillian Clarke - Catrin

Erica Jong - Extract from Mother

Sophocles translated by Anne Carson - Extract from Elektra

Jeanette Winterson - Extract from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Louisa M Alcott - Extract from Little Women

Lola Ridge - Mother

Carol Ann Duffy - The Light Gatherer

Dodi Smith - Extract from I Capture the Castle

Elizabeth Akers Allen - Extract from Rock Me to Sleep

~Words And Music on the theme of Mothers and Daughters.

Movies2022032720240310 (R3)Bogey, Marilyn, Laurel and Hardy, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire all make an appearance in today's programme celebrating the movies as the Academy Awards are handed out this weekend. The programme include poems by Anthony Brode, Sharon Olds, Jack Mitchell and Roger McGough and prose by Raymond Chandler, Katherine Mansfield and F Scott Fitzgerald. The music draws from Max Steiner's score for Casablanca, vintage Erich Korngold, Bernard Herrmann; songs by Elizabeth Lutyens and Francis Poulenc, and film inspired music for the concert hall by John Adams, Charles Koechlin and Arnold Schoenberg. The Kinks look back to their Celluloid Heroes and there's Hitchcock inspired music by Danny Elfman and from John Williams's Star Wars.

The readers are no strangers to the world of film - Robert Powell and Amanda Donohoe.

Producer Chris Wines

You can now find a playlist on the Free Thinking website Film on Radio 3: music, history, classics of world cinema

From Matthew Sweet on soundtracks to star performers through films which have created an impact to old favourites

including programmes on Marlene Dietrich, Asta Neilsen, Jacques Tati, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Satyajit Ray, The Tin Drum, Touki Bouki, Kurosawa, Dziga Vertov, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Penny Woolcock, Mike Leigh, Spike Lee. Plus Radio 3's regular exploration of the Sound of Cinema and classic cinema scores.

Readings:

I Lost My Girlish Laughter by Jane Allen

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

The Movie by Ken Shapiro

The Last Tycoon by F Scott Fitzgerald

Pictures by Katherine Mansfield

The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster

Bogey by Lee L Berkson

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

Death of Marilyn Monroe by Sharon Olds

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett

Sunday Observance by Anthony Brode

Leytonstone by Stephen Volk

Cinema Exit by Richard Aldington

If Life's A Lousy Picture Why Not Leave Before The End? by Roger McGough

Robert Powell and Amanda Donohoe with readings celebrating cinema set alongside music.

With the Academy Awards given out today, the literary sequence turns to the movies alongside the sounds of Erich Korngold and Max Steiner, John Williams, John Adams and Poulenc.

From Matthew Sweet on sound tracks to star performers through films which have created an impact to old favourites

Mozart: An Inspiration20110102Mozart's genius has inspired many artists to comment on his musical creativity. This edition of Words & Music focuses on the writers inspired by Mozart to a new creativity of their own. Michael Pennington and Olivia Williams read from authors including Eduard Morike, Sara Teasdale, Hardy, Goethe, and Wallace Stevens, accompanied by some of Mozart's finest music.

Texts and music focusing on writers inspired by Mozart to a new creativity of their own.

Mushrooms20211017A foraging trip is the scene of a failed marriage proposal in Anna Karenina, wild mushrooms form the key ingredient in a Meera Sodha meal, they inform the psychedelic experiments of Timothy Leary. Alice in Wonderland encountered the caterpillar, composer John Cage became interested in them, musing on the idea of playing Beethoven making a mushroom more edible. These are some of the readings in today's programme exploring fungi, with music from a range of composers including Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, which Disney used for a scene with dancing mushrooms in Fantasia; Anna von Hausswolff's Theatre of Nature; a pygmy song for gathering mushrooms from the Bayaka people and Dvorak's evocation of a Bohemian forest. Our readers are Youssef Kerkour and Verity Henry.

Producer: Ewa Norman

You can find a Free Thinking discussion called Fungi: An Alien Encounter hearing from Merlin Sheldrake, in which Matthew Sweet cooks up some mushrooms for his guests available to download as an Arts and Ideas podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dr46 and listen out for an upcoming Late Junction in which Merlin Sheldrake's brother Cosmo composes with the actual sound of mushrooms.

With extracts written by John Cage, Merlin Sheldrake, Margaret Atwood and Emily Dickinson.

Music On The Brink20140105Poetry, letters, diary excerpts and music about the world on the brink of war.
Napoleon2021050220221223 (R3)Orwell's pig in Animal Farm, Beethoven's Eroica, Ruth Scurr's biography which focuses on his interest in gardening, Berlioz' setting of the nostalgic poem ‘Le Cinq Mai' - the date of Napoleon's death, Thomas Keneally's novel about his friendship with a girl on Elba who ended up living in Australia, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev's evocations of the Russian campaigns, ABBA - Napoleon has fascinated writers and musicians through the centuries since his death. It's been calculated that Napoleon attended 163 different operas, and his favourite composer was Giovanni Paisiello. Today's Words and Music mixes examples of music he might have heard with composers inspired by him, and words from novels and poems. The readers are Sir Simon Russell Beale and Natalie Simpson.

Producer: Nick Holmes

You can find a Free Thinking discussion about Napoleon and his interest in both gardening and artworks available on BBC Sounds and as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Readings:

Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice

George Orwell Animal Farm

Josephine Letter to Napoleon

Anthony Burgess Napoleon Symphony

Ruth Scurr Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows

Andr退 Fran瀀ois Miot de M退lito Description of Napoleon

Charlotte Bront뀀 Villette

Lord Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Anon Napoleon the Brave (Broadside Ballad)

Thomas Keneally Napoleon's Last Island

Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventure of the Six Napoleons

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace

Walter de la Mare Napoleon

Joseph Ogbonna Napoleon to Josephine

William Wordsworth The Ruined Cottage

William Thackeray Vanity Fair

PG Wodehouse Napoleon

Miroslav Holub Napoleon

John Clare To Napoleon

Simon Russell Beale and Natalie Simpson with readings from fact and fiction about Napoleon

Nature And The City2019063020210509 (R3)Poets and composers have long sung the virtues of the green spaces and the wildlife encountered in our urban centres. Ottorino Respighi celebrates the birds and pine trees of Rome, and Rufus Wainwright sings through all weathers and the wild flowers of Berlin's Tiergarten park. Matthew Arnold, in Kensington Gardens, marvels at the 'endless, active life' he finds all about him at his feet and in the air.

Human cities might, though, be viewed as islands too, pushing out and paving over the natural world, towering evidence of the anthropocentric. For the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, 'the big cities are not true; they betray the day, the night, animals and children' while Edna St Vincent Millay mourns the loss of the 'thin and sweet' music of dancing tree-leaves, drowned out in the 'shrieking city air' of horns and alarms and industry evoked in the music of Steve Reich. And as some writers begin to dream of green hills and escaping the din of the metropolis, the forces of nature are already gathering inside the city walls: rabbits, herds of deer, bears and the sea begin to re-wild and reclaim the human spaces, reminding us that, for all our skyscrapers, we are not separate from but of nature.

Produced by Phil Smith

A Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 3

Poetry and prose on plants and people in the metropolis.

Nature Of The British Isles20230326To complement the Wild Isles series on television and iPlayer, Words and Music island hops around Britain, with readings by Georgie Glen and Tom Durham.

A cavern on the Isle of Staffa inspired Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave.

Martin Martin, in A Late Voyage to St Kilda, describes life in 1698 in what was the most remote spot in the British Empire.

Far to the south west Angeline Morrison sings, from the perspective of his mother, of the unknown African boy, washed up after the wreck of a slave ship and buried on St Martin's in the Isles of Scilly.

In 1980 Lucy Rendall was the first child to be born at Rackwick in Hoy for 32 years. The chronicler of Orkney life, George Mackay Brown, wrote Lullaby for Lucy in celebration, and Peter Maxwell Davies set it. We learn of Hebridean life centuries earlier in the Orkneyinga Saga.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, set in Skye, was inspired by Godrevy lighthouse, off St Ives.

Shetland fiddler Aly Bain and squeezebox player Phil Cunningham pay tribute to their pianist friend in Violet Tulloch Queen of Lerwick.

Brenda Chamberlain's Tide Race is an account of her life on Bardsey - Ynys Enlli, the island in the current, in Welsh. We hear music by the triple harpist of Anglesey, Ynys Mon, Llio Rhydderch, from her album album Enlli.

Wordsworth wrote in praise of Grace Darling, tragic heroine of the Farne Islands, as has, in our time, Michael Longley.

John Keats wrote wonderful letters and poems while staying on the Isle of Wight, where Brits winners Wet Leg are are writing interesting words and music today.

Sarnia is the old name for Guernsey, inspiration for a piece of that name by John Ireland.

Readers: Georgie Glen and Tom Durham.

Producer: Julian May

From Orkney, George Mackay Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies to Keats on the Isle of Wight.

Neptune's Kingdom2013072120140817 (R3)The undersea world is evoked in a sequence of words and music. Emily Taaffe and Nicholas Farrell read poetry and prose by Rita Dove, William Shakespeare and Charles Kingsley and the submarine music is provided by Britten, Hovhaness and Holst.

Songs of mackerel shoals and whale tales swell the ocean and the seas pick clean the bones of the drowned. There's beauty, death and the sea-change of new life here in the deep.

Texts and music evoking the undersea world. Readers: Emily Taaffe and Nicholas Farrell.

Night Owls2019012720210131 (R3)The night time is the right time', as John Lee Hooker sings - Words and Music joins birds and humans hunting, playing, and hounding each others' souls between dusk and dawn. We find owls and nightingales fighting each other while just outside the wood the army of Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth prepares itself for battle. In Italy, an exiled Shelley sighs his sorrows to the chant of the little owl, his wife is inside facing the night-time terror of Frankenstein . Poets Helen Dunmore and John Burnside write of all those on the night shift and others who cannot sleep - .to an accompaniment of the hoots, screeches and soulful squeaks of tawny, little, long-eared and barn owls. With the sounds of John Lee Hooker, William Sharpe, Ma Rainey and Dolores Keane plus Chopin, Wagner and Debussy, Elgar, Sonny Rollins, Public Service Broadcasting and John Tavener. Readings from naturalists like Neltje Blanchan, Leigh Calvez and Gilbert White. The poetry of John Burnside, George MacBeth, Caroline Carver, Fiona Wilson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Douglas Stewart, Tennyson and Walter Scott. The readers are Sam Dale and Carolyn Pickles.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Bird and human life and creatures of the mind alive between dusk and dawn as we go owling.

Nights In The Gardens Of Spain2019092920211222 (R3)The Alhambra Palace in Granada is our focus today. The city was home to one of Spain's greatest poets, Federico Garcia Lorca, from the age of 11 through to his 20s. Field recordings made in Granada combine with music and readings connected to this captivating city, from the epigraphic poems that are written into the very walls of the Alhambra, to the medieval verse of Abd Allah ibn al-Simak, through to the verse and letters of Lorca. Actors Candela Gomez and Khalid Abdalla also read contemporary takes on Granada's Flamenco bars by Victoria Hislop, and a melancholy modern-day visit to the Alhambra from Sameer Rahim's latest novel which considers its imprint of Islamic rule.

The Spanish soundtrack includes Flamenco specially recorded in one of Granada's historic guitar workshops by singer Juan Panilla and guitarist Francisco Manuel Diaz, pieces by that great Andalusian Manuel Da Falla as well as fellow Spaniards Albeniz and Granados, and a song from the Algerian singer Souad Massi who wrote a whole album inspired by the Arab-Andalusian poets. The music melds with the sounds of Granada's fountains, cicadas and birdsong for this special edition of the programme as we transport you to Al-Andalus.

Producer: Georgia Mann. Recordings in Granada made by Robert Winter.

READINGS:

Epigraphic poem on the Basin of the Lions at the Alhambra

Epigraphic poem from the Hall of the Two Sisters at the Alhambra

Extract from a letter by Federico Garcia Lorca to Melchor Fernandez Almagro

Garcia Lorca -La Guitarra

Washington Irving - Tales of the Alhambra

Sameer Rahim - Asghar and Zahra

Garcia Lorca - Baladilla de los tres r퀀os

Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi -The Battle

Victoria Hislop - The Return

Gerald Brenan - South of Granada

Abu J'far, Ahmad ibn Sa'id - The Procuress

Abd Allah ibn al-Simak - The Garden

Extract from a letter by Federico Garcia Lorca to Benjamin Palencia

Garcia Lorca - Arbol退, Arbol退

Th退ophile Gautier - The Last Sigh of the Moor

Garcia Lorca - Little Tales of the Wind

Epigraphic poem Comares' Gate at the Alhambra

Garcia Lorca - Holy Week in Granada

Actors Candela Gomez and Khalid Abdalla with readings, music and recordings from Granada.

Nine Lives20110918From the mew of the pussycat to the roar of the lion, Nine Lives pays homage to the musicality and poetry of the feline form. Juliet Stevenson and Kenneth Cranham read poetry and prose from Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Ruth Padel and Grace Nichols accompanied by music from Saint-Saens, Rossini, Telemann, John Tavener, Ravel and Tchaikovsky.

Producer: Baya Cat

Texts and music on the theme of cats. Readings by Juliet Stevenson and Kenneth Cranham.

No Stronger Than A Flower2013121520141226 (R3)Emilia Fox and Jamie Glover are the readers in this edition of Words and Music inspired by flowers, which despite their seeming frailty, or perhaps because of it, are a potent symbol of both transience and rebirth.

There are readings from Shakespeare, John Clare, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Michael Longley and a book of Victorian Flower Etiquette and music by Schumann, Delibes, Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss, Robert Chilcott and Fats Waller.

Produced by Philippa Ritchie.

Texts and music inspired by flowers, with readings by Emilia Fox and Jamie Glover.

Nocturne2011020620111120 (R3)Texts and music inspired by the night, with readings by Sian Thomas and William Hope.
Nomads2019051920220619 (R3)Emma Paetz and Nicholas Farrell read from Cervantes and Louise Doughty to Abd al Qadir as today's journey of words and music moves from the desert to tramping along English country roads ahead of Refugee Week 2022 (June 20th - 26th).

Our past is nomadic. Our ancestors roamed around, moving according to the seasons and the availability of food. The historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that our subsequent adoption of settled, agricultural lives represented a massive blow to human well-being, bringing with it unstinting labour and disease. Does this go some way to explaining the distrust and unease with which the settled have tended to regard nomads? Is there an atavistic envy at its root? That desire to wander still burns within many of us. We may be tethered to a particular part of the world by our work, our homes, our families, but we are restless, forever planning journeys to somewhere distant, somewhere new.

This programme explores the relationship between the nomad and that settled world. Nomads not just in the sense of traditionally itinerant people (including Bedouin, some Native American tribes and Roma - referred to as ‘gypsies' by some of the writers here), but also those who are homeless or refugees. In short, those who have no fixed abode. So we hear field recordings both of Tuareg singers with a traditional Danse de tazengharaht, and an unnamed homeless man singing a hymn in Gavin Bryars's Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet. The chorus of Hebrew slaves from Verdi's Nabucco echoes the painful longing for a lost homeland experienced by refugees through the ages, while songs by Sibelius and Schubert show the figure of the wanderer in nature, gripped by both a sense of freedom and existential melancholia.

Readings:

Bakhu Al-Mariyah - My longing for a tent

Abd al Qadir - The Life of the Nomad

T.E. Lawrence - The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - To the Driving Cloud

Louise Doughty - Fires in the Dark

Miguel de Cervantes - La Gitanilla

Matthew Arnold - The Scholar Gypsy

Thomas Hardy - A Trampwoman's Tragedy

Dominic Hand - Borderlines

Martha Sprackland - Refugees [juvenilia]

J.M. Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians

John Masefield - Sea Fever

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Emma Paetz and Nicholas Farrell read from Cervantes and Louise Doughty to Abd al Qadir.

Nonsense2016052920171226 (R3)Texts and music on the theme of nonsense. Readers: Griff Rhys Jones and Debra Stephenson.
Nordic Noir20200202The actors Lars Mikkelsen (House of Cards, The Killing, Borgen and Ride upon the Storm) and Vera Vitali (star of the mega-hit series Bonus Family) read from the misdemeanour, magic and poetry of Scandinivian gloom and Nordic Noir - the term given to a genre of crime writing established in the Martin Beck series of novels by Maj Sj怀wall and Per Wahl怀怀. Other crime writing featured in the programme includes Jo Nesbø, Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, along with the philosophising of Søren Kierkegaard and prose by William Heinesen that straddles the spirit-world and imagination. As ever, music shapes and charges the atmosphere even further. Sibelius, Nielsen, Hildur Gu
Northern Lights: The North Pole2015120620180101 (R3)Texts and music related to the North Pole. Readers: Olivia Williams and Charles Edwards.
Northumbria2022092520230723 (R3)As the BBC Proms broadcast from Sage Gateshead, today's programme takes inspiration from the writers and music associated with Northumbria. From Bede and Anglo-Saxon verse to the Percy family depicted in Shakespeare's Henry IV, our journey takes in the wildlife illustrated by Thomas Bewick and the landscapes cut through by Hadrian's Wall. The music includes the sound of Northumbrian pipes and folk performers, alongside recordings by the Royal Northern Sinfonia who are based at Sage Gateshead. The readers are Zoe Hakin and Ross Waiton. We also hear a new poem commissioned by Radio 3 from New Generation Thinker Jake Morris-Campbell and Professor Michelle Brown reading from the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Readings:

Entry for the Year 793, Laud Chronicle, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle trans G.N. Garmonsway

Basil Bunting, Briggflatts

Katrina Porteous, The Sea Road, Howick

The Lindisfarne Gospels an extract read by Professor Michelle Brown

Jake Morris-Campbell, The Lindisfarne Gospels, Somewhere on the A1(M) commissioned for Words & Music

Gordon Burn, The North of England Home Service

Anne Cleeves, The Moth Catcher

Sean O'Brien, On The Toon

Alexander Rose, Kings in the North The House of Percy in British History

William Shakespeare Hotspur Henry IV, A.IV sc.3, Henry IV, P.1

Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

Katrina Porteous, The Sea Road, Lindisfarne

Basil Bunting, Fishermen

Anne Stevenson, Jarrow

Anne Stevenson, Hadrian's Poems 1955-2005

W.H. Auden, Roman Wall Blues

Durham trans. S.A.J. Bradley

The Dream of the Rood trans. S.A.J. Bradley

From the Lindisfarne Gospels and Bede to poetry by Sean O'Brien and Katrina Porteous.

Nostalgia2017051420180909 (R3)Texts and music on the theme of nostalgia, with readings by Samantha Bond and Scott Handy.
O Albion2017052820171221 (R3)How could you resist the temptation of 'a full English' with Meera Syal and Philip Franks? The star of Goodness Gracious Me joins forces with the narrator of The Rocky Horror Show to explore the meaning of England and Englishness to a score provided by Thomas Ad耀s, Edward Elgar, Cornershop, William Byrd, Fairport Convention, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Purcell amongst others.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of England, with readings by Meera Syal and Philip Franks.

Obsession2011072420190407 (R3)Obsession requires a commendable mental agility', according to Nick Hornby and this edition of Words and Music wrestles with ideas that inexorably take hold of the brain. Readers are Olivia Colman and Toby Stephens.

There is nothing more absorbing than being in the throes of love, and the more unrequited it is, the more obsessive the lover becomes - from the id退e fixe of Berlioz, in his almost gothic passion for Harriet Smithson, to the hormone-fuelled obsession with the teen idol, as suffered by the young Allison Pearson.

But this passion can disintegrate into something more sinister, and so enter the stalker, courtesy of Ian McEwan and The Police, and the narcissist, taken to fantastical extreme in The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

And there are those whose minds work in a way they struggle to control - Dr Johnson may have had a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, there is the hoarder, the hypochondriac, and the keeper and interpreter of minutiae, like Nick Hornby's football obsessive.

And finally the all-absorbing, all-encompassing epic grand passion, the inability to concentrate on anything else - Ahab's quest for the white whale, and the Arthurian knight's mission to find the Holy Grail.

Music from jazz, pop, rock and classical, including Cole Porter's rather unsettling (in this context) 'Night and Day', the romanticism of Schubert, Berlioz and Wagner, and the joyous piling up of insistent ostinati by Herbie Hancock.

Olivia Colman and Toby Stephens with words and music on the theme of obsession.

Texts and music on the theme of obsession. Readings by Olivia Colman and Toby Stephens.

Ode To Gaia20080113A selection of words and music on a theme of the planet, from WH Auden and Mahler.
On The Edge20170129~Words And Music exploring the idea of on the edge, writing and musical marginalia and tension. From birth to death, the seashore to the cliff, precipices and sleep, beginnings and endings, roadsides and corners, featuring artists as diverse as Wagner, Kafka, Ligeti, Ballard

With David Threlfall and Alexandra Gilbreath

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the idea of 'on the edge'.

On The Road2014081020150524 (R3)Head out on the highway with Jack Lowden who won an Olivier for his part in Ibsen's Ghosts and Anna Madeley, the star of Yael Farber's production of The Crucible at the Old Vic. They'll be exploring the code of the road with Frost, Cummings, Nabokov, Schubert, Adams and Van Morrison -- so it promises to be a wild ride ... just strap on your leathers and prepare for adventure and whatever comes your way.

Producer: Zahid Warley

First broadcast 10/08/2014.

Texts and music on the theme of the road, with readings by Jack Lowden.

Once Upon A Time...2016050820171227 (R3)Once upon a time, quite recently, two of Britain's leading actors read a selection of fairy tales and fairy tale-inspired poetry and prose. Join Jim Broadbent and Helen McCrory as they enter a deep, dark forest of texts: some funny and irreverent, others creepy and sinister.

Along the way they find not only Charles Perrault and a pair of Grimm brothers, but also the likes of Roald Dahl and Carol Ann Duffy, Angela Carter and Italo Calvino. Stay close to Jim and Helen! Because over there it looks like a scary bit of Freudian analysis is going to jump out and make you feel a bit queasy. And what's that you hear? Yes, it's music by Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg, and Steve Reich, among others...

David Papp (producer).

Texts and music about fairy tales, with readings by Jim Broadbent and Helen McCrory.

Only Connect20200607On the 50th anniversary of EM Forster's death, we focus on the words ‘Only connect - ' - the epigraph to his novel Howards End - and consider some of the many connections that we might experience. Attempts to connect with others and the pain when those attempts fail. The solace provided by seeking a connection with nature, communication with alien species, the ingenious process of deduction, the technology that connects us to one another, the associations we draw from treasured objects. And there are musical connections from Brahms, Kate Bush, Messiaen, Suzanne Ciani and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan among others.

Readings:

EM Forster - Howards End

Robert Browning - Two in the Campagna

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - To Nature

Paul Muldoon - Milkweed and Monarch

John Masefield - Up on the downs

Adrienne Rich - Face To Face

RS Thomas - They

Wendy Cope - For My Sister, Emigrating

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Stockbroker's Clerk

Ivor Gurney - The Telegraph Post

Jenny Erpenbeck - Go Went Gone

Anne Sexton - When Man Enters Woman

John Keats - On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer

Naomi Mitchison - Memoirs of a Spacewoman

George Herbert - Deniall

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

In the Free Thinking playlist and available as an Arts and Ideas download - you can hear the authors Deborah Levy and Laurence Scott discussing with Shahidha Bari What's So Great About EM Forster in a discussion recorded with an audience at the British Library in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0873lxv

Inspired by the words of EM Forster, we look at some ways in which we connect.

Out Of My Head20190505Out of My Head is a binaural journey about intoxication and inspiration.

Like any good party we begin with an invitation from Kurt Weill as he staggers from bar to bar in Alabama Song. He's joined by Baudelaire and Rimbaud but age and time are elastic and before long we are battering down Huxley's Doors of Perception and entering the psychedelic realm of Jefferson Airplane. It will sound like it too, particularly if you put on headphones, as the programme is a binaural transmission. You will hear the sun moving across the stereo picture talking to Frank O'Hara and nightingales jamming with Clive Bell's shakuhachi flute; you will hear rain and footsteps as you enter the upside down world of Thomas Traherne's great metaphysical poem, Shadows in the Water. Imagination is our vehicle - the imagination that leads Sasha Dugdale to conjure the grieving spirit of William Blake's wife, Catherine: or allows us to leap with Anne Sexton into the heart and mind of an old woman stricken with Alzheimer's but still able to recall a favourite tune as writers conjure different images of mental health.

The voices you'll be hearing in your head are those of the actors Grace Cookey-Gam and Toby Jones.

Producers: Zahid Warley, Christopher Rouse and Georgia Mann Smith

READINGS:

Baudelaire - Be Drunk

Aldous Huxley - Doors of Perception

Rimbaud - Deregulation of the Senses

Lewis Carroll - The Hunting of the Snark

Emily Dickinson - The brain is wider than the sky

James Merrill - Voices from the Other World

Shakespeare - Ophelia's soliloquy from Hamlet

Sasha Dugdale - From Joy

Anne Sexton - Mister Wait

Rumi - The Turn

Clare Shaw - Tree

Frank O'Hara - A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island

Thomas Traherne - Shadows in the Water

Actors Grace Cookey-Gam and Toby Jones & a journey of intoxication, inspiration and loss.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes2018091620230103 (R3)Lindsey Marshal and Richard Harrington are the readers in a programme that explores the mysterious link between wisdom and innocence. As well as often making us smile with what they say, children sometimes come out with surprisingly perceptive comments that can elude even the most intelligent adults. It is as if, in some way, there were a relationship between wisdom and innocence. This relationship has been explored at length in literary and televisual/cinematic narratives where children outwit the grown-ups, usually in a comic manner, but occasionally it also presents itself in extraordinary real-life characters, such as Anne Frank.

Lindsey Marshal has performed leading roles in many theatre productions, including alongside James McAvoy in the 2009 West End production Three Days of Rain, and in Greenland at the National Theatre. She also appeared in The Hours, BBC period drama Garrow's Law, and most recently in the TV series Trauma. Richard Harrington has had starring roles in Hinterland, Bleak House, Jimmy McGovern's Gunpowder, Treason & Plot, and Gavin Claxton's comedy feature film The All Together.

Producer's note (Dominic Wells)

Earlier this year my life was turned upside down with the arrival of my son, whose voice opens this edition of Words and Music: Out of the Mouths of Babes. This phrase (biblical in origin) refers to surprisingly insightful words of wisdom uttered by the young, and while I can't pretend my son's brief contribution offers anything especially wise, it seemed like a good way to start. Thomas Traherne's depiction of the infant Christ coming into the world provides a rather more profound statement, as does the child Christ, who appears to the Selfish Giant in Oscar Wilde's children's story, promising solace to the reformed character. On a lighter note there's Arthur Weir's amusing account of how a baby, simply by gurgling and giggling, can outwit a supposedly clever, powerful, magical creature. The magic continues courtesy of the trio of spirit children in Mozart's The Magic Flute, guiding various characters along the right path. Similarly, in the TV series Stranger Things, it is invariably the kids who demonstrate greater wisdom than the grown-ups. But the relationship between wisdom and innocence is not limited to children, and we momentarily consider its adult counterparts through two historical archetypes: the Wise Fool (a favourite Shakespearean character) and the Wise Virgin, who finds voice in the music of the extraordinary 12th-century composer, poet and mystic, Hildegard of Bingen. The final reading and music ties all three of these elements together with an excerpt from the very last entry in the diary of Anne Frank, whose level of perception - not only about others, but also about herself - reflects a wisdom far beyond her years.

Music and words that explore the mysterious link between wisdom and innocence

Outbreak20140622~Words And Music from around Europe at the start of World War I read by Emma Fielding and Harry Hadden-Paton. With words by Edward Thomas, Stefan Zweig, Edmund Blunden, Winston Churchill, Katherine Mansfield, Anna Akhmatova and Rupert Brooke and music by Vaughan Willliams, Berg, Debussy, Zemlinsky, Koechlin, Elgar and the recruiting songs which encouraged men to join up for the Front.

Part of Radio 3's WWI season, Music in the Great War.

~Words And Music from World War I, with reading by Emma Fielding and Harry Hadden-Paton.

Partition20170820August 1947 - just seventy years ago - and Britain grants independence to India but at the same time splits its dominion to create Pakistan. The actor Sanjeev Bhaskar, whose own family was caught up in the turmoil, joins Ayesha Dharker in a programme that traces the emotional and psychological cost of Partition. There are readings from the work of Intizar Husain, Saadat Hasan Manto, Kushwant Singh, Amrita Pritam and Anita Desai, amongst others, and music that reflects the turbulence - whether it's a rallying cry, a lament, the sound of stunned incredulity or simply strangulated laughter in the face of bureaucratic insanity.

Partition deepens religious divisions on the subcontinent. Twelve million people are displaced and are forced to find new homes in the new states. Sickness and starvation claim many on the road; many more die in sectarian violence. Some historians put the death toll as high as two million. It's a huge political earthquake in the life of southern Asia and the aftershock is still being felt today.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

A sequence of music and readings about the Partition of India and its legacy.

Party!2013122920141214 (R3)Texts and music for the festive season, with readings by David Neilson and Naomi Bentley.
Passing The Time Of Day2014011220161222 (R3)Today's Words and Music takes the duration of a day as its theme, with different times pinpointed as a snapshot into characters' literary lives. So Ralph from Stephen King's Insomnia is woken by birdsong at 5.15, Elizabeth Bennett takes an ill-advised early morning walk, and Jerome K Jerome's 3 Men have enormous trouble finding the 11.05 to Kingston. A big furry, stripy tiger unexpectedly comes to tea, and Henry James celebrates the agreeable time between mid-afternoon and dusk. By seven o'clock the evening is in full swing with a lavish party over at Jay Gatsby's, while Louisa May Alcott's Little Women are too distressed to go to bed. There is poetry too, with Rossetti's Silent Noon, Emma Saiko's evocative poem about waking from an afternoon nap, and a teacher in DH Lawrence's poem Last Lesson of the Afternoon who can't wait for the bell to ring. TS Eliot depicts dusk in his Preludes, and Dorothy Aldis' narrator quietly sets the supper table for her family.

The music also highlights different times of day, beginning with a dawn chorus from Janequin, and Strauss's Morning Papers. Bach's Coffee Cantata for mid-morning, and Arnold's Day Dreams for after lunch. The evening section features Strauss's Der Abend, Harbison's Remembering Gatsby and Purcell's One charming night from The Fairy Queen. The programme ends with Bridge's setting of Shakespeare's 43rd sonnet, which suggests that sometimes you can see most clearly when you are asleep. Extracts are read by Sally Phillips and Jonathan Keeble.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Texts and music about the duration of a day. Readers: Sally Phillips and Jonathan Keeble.

Passion Play2015040520190310 (R3)In Words and Music this evening the actors Houda Echouafni and Patrick O'Kane explore the story of The Passion and the way that it reverberates in our minds today. Christ's betrayal, the crucifixion and resurrection conjure up powerful images that many of us have grown up with, but images whose clarity, paradoxically, cloak much that is mysterious. The Passion has always inspired writers and composers and their very different ways of understanding it determine the path taken by Houda and Patrick - beginning with the Easter call to prayer of the Orthodox Church in Greece and Romania and traversing the more familiar territory of Handel's Messiah, Bach's St John Passion, as well Arvo Part's Passio and John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary. The words too combine the known with the less well known: the King James Bible with Housman, Michael Symmons Roberts with Philip Pullman and Colm Toibin.

Producer: Zahid Warley

The Passion seen through ancient and modern eyes with Patrick O'Kane and Houda Echouafni.

Pastiche And Parody2015041220201206 (R3)In tribute to the actor John Sessions (11 January 1953 - 2 November 2020) another chance to hear him and Debra Stephenson displaying their vocal talents with an impression of Alan Rickman reading from Craig Brown's Lost Diaries which satirises the writing style of various literary diarists, Shaw's Pygmalion in the style of Rex Harrison, an imitation of a Greek epigram read in the voice of Helena Bonham Carter and Judi Dench giving a speech from Twelfth Night. Music includes a version of Thespis by Arthur Sullivan, Percy Grainger's Mock Morris and a piano performance by Dudley Moore as Little Miss Britten followed by Benjamin Britten's music for the wall scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream as the programme presents examples of pastiche and parody from characters in novels or operas pretending to be something, or someone, they are not to examples of out-and-out fakery.

Producer - Ellie Mant

Readings:

Poems of Ossian by James McPherson read by John Sessions

Twelfth Night by Shakespeare read by Debra Stephenson as Judi Dench

The Lost Diaries by Craig Brown read by John Sessions as Alan Rickman

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray read by Debra Stephenson

Ode 1.22 (In the Style of Edgar Allen Poe) read by John Sessions as Ian McKellen

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith read by Debra Stephenson

Selling Hitler by Robert Harris read by John Sessions

The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet by Caryl Wetmore read by Debra Stephenson as Maggie Smith

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald read by John Sessions

Fragment in Imitation of Wordsworth by Catherine Maria Fanshawe read by Debra Stephenson as Penelope Wilton

The Darkening Ecliptic by Ern Malley read by John Sessions

Small World by David Lodge read by Debra Stephenson

A Guidebook to Intellectual Property, Patents, Trade Marks, Copyright and Designs by The Rt. Hon. Sir Robin Jacob, Daniel Alexander, Lindsay Lane read by John Sessions

To Mr. Pope. An Imitation of a Greek Epigram in Homer by Elijah Fenton read by Debra Stephenson as Helena Bonham Carter

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw read by John Sessions as Rex Harrison

The Ballad of Imitation by Henry Austin Dobson read by Debra Stephenson as Imelda Staunton.

Debra Stephenson and the late John Sessions with a range of impersonations.

Paying Attention20240121From Rachel Carson finding solace in noticing 'the exceeding beauty of the earth', via the deductions of Sherlock Holmes, a dog walk with poet Mark Doty to Joyce Sutphen's advice on How to Listen: today's programme celebrates paying attention to the variety of life. Walt Whitman hears the 'grand opera' of the city, Mr. Darcy can't help but notice Elizabeth Bennett, Audre Lorde speaks her truth to those who might listen, and Taylor Mali fights for his students' Undivided Attention. Our readers are Nathan Osgood and Sarah Slimani and our music ranges from Purcell and Byrd to Sondheim and Diana Ross.

Producer: Rachel Gill

Nathan Osgood and Sarah Slimani with readings ranging from Arthur Miller to Mary Oliver.

Poets and composers often in their work help us to pay attention and notice the overlooked. In our spotlight today: ideas from Walt Whitman, David Foster Wallace, and Audre Lorde.

Peace And Protest2019031720200802 (R3)Actors Juliet Stevenson and Jamie Glover with readings and music exploring themes of activism, protest and the search for peace as part of a pairing of Words and Music episodes marking the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

John Lennon said of peace that it `is not something you wish for; it's something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away`. Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono staged two `bed-ins`, one in Montreal and one in Amsterdam; welcoming the world's press to join at their bedsides. While in Montreal, Lennon recorded his 'Give Peace a Chance' anti-war song. We also hear Yo-Yo Ma's Donna Nobis Pacem (Give us Peace) followed by Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps, written when he was a prisoner of war in German captivity and first performed by his fellow prisoners. And in Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha, Mahatma Gandhi makes a plea for non-violent resistance to injustice. The selection of readings includes All of these People by Michael Longley, Jerusalem by Naomi Shihab Nye and Ann Pettitt's Walking to Greenham.

The selection of readings also includes Between Waves, Heather Glover's winning poem in the Poems for Peace competition run by the Royal Society of Literature. We also explore the peace of nature in WB Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree, in which the poet longs for the tranquillity of the island where he went as a boy, away from his adult life in the city. He imagines a life similar to that of the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, living in nature at Walden Pond. We end with Denise Levertov's Making Peace on the need for poets to write of peace, creating an energy field more intense than war.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Readings:

Archive BBC World Service John Lennon and Yoko Ono

How the World Split in Two - Moniza Alvi

All of These People - Michael Longley

Immigrant Blues - Li-Young Lee

Jerusalem - Naomi Shihab Nye

Between Waves - Heather Glover

Walking to Greenham - Ann Pettitt

Prince Charming - Christopher Logue

The Iliad - Homer trans Martin Hammond

The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

The Lake Isle of Innisfree - WB Yeats

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Walden - David Henry Thoreau

Making Peace - Denise Levertov

Poetry and music on peace marking the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Perchance To Dream2012123020160124 (R3)Freud argued that dreams could be interpreted, and for many literary characters, such as Winston in 1984 and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina the dream is used as a device to reveal the character's true or subconscious feelings. Nightmares are also well represented, with chilling passages from Moby-Dick and Wuthering Heights. There are also aspirational dreams from real people such as Churchill and George Mallory, and literary figures; Jude the Obscure is desperate to escape his miserable life through learning, while Rebecca Sharp sees a rich husband as her salvation. Prophetic and opium-induced dreams also feature, alongside music by Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Stravinsky and Handel. Extracts are read by Sophie Thompson and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

~Words And Music on the subject of dreams. Readings by Sophie Thompson and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Perfection2012042220120908 (R3)Physical beauty is the ultimate expression of human perfection. In geometry, the circle is, according to Aristotle, 'the perfect, first, most beautiful form'. This week's Words and Music goes in pursuit of perfection - an often elusive intangible concept for many writers and musicians. It can be an unattainable state, ending only in disappointment and failure. But there is still hope, for comfort can be found in the simplicity and stability of its sibling, imperfection. With readings by Helen Baxendale and David Schofield.

Producer: Gavin Heard.

Texts and music on the theme of perfection. Readers: Helen Baxendale and David Schofield.

Piano20121014Piano Season on the BBC.

Louise Jameson and Joshua Richards with poetry, prose and music celebrating the piano.

The piano inspires a kaleidoscope of musical styles, but packs an emotional punch as well. Join actors Louise Jameson and Joshua Richards for poetry and prose that celebrates love, loss, nostalgia, grim determination and joy, all inspired by the piano. With music to match, of course.

Texts and music celebrating the piano. Readings by Louise Jameson and Joshua Richards.

Pictures At An Exhibition2021051620220626 (R3)Drop off for spies, meeting place for lovers, or gallery openings which are part of the social whirl - the readings in today's Words and Music range from John le Carr退 and Julian Barnes to poems inspired by artworks from, among others, Percy Shelley, Elizabeth Jennings, Ben Okri, WH Auden - also contemporary poet Sarah Howe reads a poem inspired by a piece from the Liverpool Museum as part of the TIDE project. The main readers are Graham Seed and Lara Sawalha, and the music includes pieces inspired by art and museums from Modest Mussorgsky's sequence which gives the programme its title to Puccini's painter Mario Cavaradossi in Tosca, to other representations of paintings by the likes of Ruth Gipps, Ottorino Respighi, Cole Porter, and music by Leonardo Vinci (not the painter, but a good enough artistic pun), among others. Public galleries and museums in England are due to re-open later this week and commercial art galleries are already staging exhibitions.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

You can find out more about the TIDE project http://www.tideproject.uk/

On Free Thinking in the coming weeks you can hear discussions about some of the exhibitions opening including Alice in Wonderland at the V&A, James Ensor at the Serpentine Gallery, Jean Dubuffet at the Barbican and already broadcast- a discussion featuring the portraits of Thomas Lawrence at the Holburne Museum Bath and a conservator working on Barbara Hepworth's art ahead of the exhibition opening at the Hepworth Wakefield.

A programme celebrating the inspiration we find in galleries and museums as they re-open.

Pictures Of The Floating World2018090220210725 (R3)With readings by Alice St Clair and Peter Marinker, this programme moves from Japanese haikus to the Antarctic and ballooning in the Chiltern hills.

Pictures of the floating world have a way of lodging in our minds. Whether we realise that they've actually fluttered there all the way from 17th century Japan or not. Just think for a moment -- a huge, spume-topped wave curling and about to crash; a symmetrical snow-capped peak; ornamental cherry blossom against an equally ornamental moon; black- haired courtesans in silky sleeves stooping to serve tea or sake to their customers; threads of rain stitched onto a landscape; or maybe just lovers locked in a close embrace. These are just some of the images we associate with Edo - or Tokyo as we now call it. - a place where peace has reigned for more than two hundred years and where however hierarchical the society the common goal is pleasure. It's somewhere that bears more than a passing resemblance to our own world and this evening's Words and Music takes this as a starting point. Almost immediately we're in the `pleasure district` -- the realm of sex and fashion and the heart of any floating world with a simple invitation to follow our heart's desire. Side by side with this urgent hedonism though there's the kind of quiet contemplation that gave rise to the haiku - each a kind of snapshot but also a spell, like the one cast by the Kyoto water chime that you'll hear near the beginning of the programme. Before long the emphasis shifts and the idea of floating takes over and we drift from century to century. This is not without jeopardy as falling is one aspect of floating.

The actors, Alice St Clair and Peter Marinker take us on a trip from Basho and Saikaku, via Pope and Coleridge to Ian McEwan, Jenny Diski and James Hamilton-Paterson. Mendelssohn, Django Reinhardt, Takemitsu and Ravel amongst others keep us sonically buoyant - all you'll need are your ears, a mind prepared for weightlessness and maybe some metaphorical water wings!

On the Free Thinking programme website you can find a playlist of discussions, essays and features exploring different aspects of Japanese culture

Producer: Zahid Warley

A Japanese-inspired episode with readings by Peter Marinker and Alice St Clair.

Pilgrimage2016082820190421 (R3)Robert Powell and Josette Simon with an anthology of words with music reflecting the spirit and idea of pilgrimage through the ages, from Canterbury to Graceland.

We begin in Kent, encountering some of Chaucer's famous travellers and music by George Dyson, a contemporary of Vaughan-Williams, whose 'Canterbury Pilgrims' is his undoubted masterpiece. Music by Handel suggests the crusades matched with a marvellously researched French novel by Zoe Oldenbourg,

The story of Christian pilgrimage changes with the Reformation. Josette Simon reads an anonymous medi怀val lament to the shrine at Walsingham, which also inspired recusant and keyboard composer William Byrd. Arguably the greatest of all English pilgrimage texts is that by John Bunyan, which inspired multiple pieces by Ralph Vaughan Williams. We hear his opera, A Pilgrim's Progress but you could say each of his musical settings of this text form a king of pilgrimage.

We also hear Joseph Conrad's powerful account of Muslims crossing terrible seas on the Hajj in Lord Jim and in contrast, the almost calming account of a visit to shrines by the 17th-century poet Matsuo Bash? - Japanese master of the haiku

Not all pilgrimages are religious and for the 19th-century Romantics, a journey to the 'land where lemons grow' was de rigueur so I have chosen Lord Byron's Childe Harold, mirrored by the music of Berlioz and Liszt. And then there is the 'temple' on the little hill at Bayreuth and Saint Wagner - as Mark Twain described the composer.

Our journey ends beside the grave of Oscar Wilde in Paris, now surrounded by plate glass to protect the Epstein monument from the pilgrims who come to kiss the stone with lipstick.

Producer: Chris Wines.

Robert Powell and Josette Simon with words and music about pilgrimage through the ages.

Pirates And Outlaws20230416Film music from The Sea Hawk, Pirates of the Caribbean and Disney's Robin Hood, is set alongside stage works, like Bellini's Il Pirata, G&S' The Pirates of Penzance, and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera. Readings performed by Rory Kinnear and Buffy Davis range from depictions of pirates and outlaws as romantic figures to morally flawed individuals. We'll hear about Bonnie & Clyde and some English celebrated seamen, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, deemed pirates by the Spanish crown because of their exploits in their Caribbean colonies, as well as extracts from writing by Robert Louis Stevenson, J. Meade Falkner, Lord Byron, John Keats, Rebecca Simon and David Graeber.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

Texts

The Corsair (excerpt), by Lord Byron

The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast, by Michael Scott Moore

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Henry Martin, traditional popular ballad

Pirates of the Caribbean, by Emily Grosholz

Robin Hood. To a friend (excerpt), by John Keats

Poem by Bonnie Elizabeth Parker

Poem by Clyde Chestnut Barrow

Pirate Queens, by Rebecca Alexandra Simon

Danger On The Barbary, by James Casey

Moonfleet, by J. Meade Falkner

Pirate Story, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Pirate Enlightenment, by David Graeber

Upon Sir Francis Drake's Return from His Voyage about the World, and the Queen's Meeting Him - Anonymous

Text by Luis Antonio de Oviedo y Herrera

Sir Walter Raleigh's letter to King James, at his return from Guiana

From Bellini and Gilbert and Sullivan to Robert Louis Stevenson, Keats and David Graeber.

Plague, Pox And Pestilence2018010720181125 (R3)From Daniel Defoe to WB Yeats. The readers are Michael Fenton Stevens and Josette Simons.
Planes, Trains And Automobiles2021100320220821 (R3)With live music from Warwickshire harmonica virtuoso Will Pound and guitarist Jenn Butterworth, and from singer Amy Kakoura and violinist Simon Chalk with the Coventry composer and co-director of Talking Birds, Derek Nisbet.

Martins Imhangbe (Bridgerton) and Ruth Bradley (Humans) take us on a journey of discovery on various types of transport inspired by Britain's 'Motor City' - Coventry. In 1896 Henry Lawson had founded the Daimler Motor Company and built The Motor Mills - the factory which would give birth to the first British car. Companies including Jaguar, Chrysler, Rover and Humber then located in the Coventry area, leading the city to become the target of the Luftwaffe in the second world war.

We're on Planes, with the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Frank Whittle - the Coventry-born inventor of the jet engine. We're on Trains, with Duke Ellington, Wilfred Owen, and Anna Karenina. And we're in Automobiles, with Jay Gatsby, Rachel Cusk, and Toad of Toad Hall.

We're going underground with Seamus Heaney, we're flying inside our own bodies with Margaret Atwood, and we're floating in space with the cosmonaut Karpov.

Recorded at the Contains Strong Language poetry and spoken word festival at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. Other Radio 3 recordings from the festival include episodes of The Verb, The Essay, a Sunday Feature exploring the rebuilding of postwar Coventry and a Free Thinking discussion about the Tudors and historical literature from Walter Scott to Philippa Gregory.

A new Contains Strong Language Festival takes place in Birmingham, across the weekend of September 8th - 11th 2022 when more Radio 3 programmes will be broadcast live and recorded.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Image: Coventry Transport Museum

Image Credit: Garry Jones

Actors Martins Imhangbe and Ruth Bradley at Contains Strong Language in Coventry.

Portraits20230618From Amy Sackville imagining Velazquez painting his masterpiece Las Meninas and Robert Lowell looking at Holbein's Thomas More, to Edward Elgar's friends, whose moods inspired his Enigma Variations, and Rembrandt's The Night Watch as seen by King Crimson. As the National Portrait Gallery in London opens its doors again for the first time since 2020, let our readers Chlo뀀 Sommer and Ewan Bailey guide you round a sonic exhibition of portraits, where you'll encounter Dorian Gray gazing at his own likeness and reflecting sadly that he will age, while the painting remains unchanged (spoiler alert: that's not quite how it pans out). In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett's feelings about Mr Darcy undergo a transformation as she stands looking at his portrait, while Wendy Cope is moved to tears by a painting of a long dead couple. The music includes Margaret Bonds' portrait in song Minstrel Man in which a Black man sings of the pain and humiliation of the role he has to play, there's also The Gnome from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Joni Mitchell revealing the multiple facets of Charles Mingus's personality, and Missy Mazzoli's distinctive take on Rembrandt's Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

You can hear music associated with particular portraits in the National Portrait Gallery collection being played on BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme and an episode of Free Thinking considers the idea of creating a portrait in a documentary, photo series and through oral history, as well as images seen on the gallery walls.

Readings & *Music

*Ralph Vaughan Williams - 3 Portraits from the England of Elizabeth: No. 1, Explorer

Wendy Cope - Dutch Portraits

*Pehr Henrik Nordgren - Portraits of Country Fiddlers, Op. 26 (Arr. D. Woodruff): II. Tuumsi Tuumsikelija (The Thinker)

Robert Lowell - Sir Thomas More

*Modest Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition, Piano Concerto Version: I. Gnomus

Josephine Tey - The Daughter of Time

*Charles Mingus - Portrait

*Sam Prekop - Faces And People

Jake Morris-Campbell - Self-Portrait in Passport Photobooth

*Michael Nyman - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Scene 3: The Photographs: What is this?

*Kraftwerk - Spiegelsaal

Eavan Boland - The Photograph on My Father's Desk

Edward Lear - Self-Portrait of the Laureate of Nonsense

*Gregory Porter - Mona Lisa

David Dabydeen - A Harlot's Progress

*Margaret Bonds - 3 Dream Portraits, Minstrel Man

Amy Sackville - Painter to the King

*King Crimson - The Night Watch

Sophie Haydock - The Flames

*?riks Ešenvalds - In My Little Picture Frame

*Oneohtrix Point Never - Last Known Image of a Song

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Portrait

*Edward Elgar - Enigma Variations, Op. 36: I. C.A.E.

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

*Missy Mazzoli - Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

*Gerard Schurmann - 6 Studies of Francis Bacon: VI. Self-Portrait

Elizabeth Jennings - Old Man

*Joni Mitchell - God Must Be a Boogie Man

Keith Douglas - Vergissmeinnicht,

*Vladimir Michailovich Jurowski - Symphonic Pictures 'Russian Painters': III. Portrait of an Unknown Woman

Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady

*Nikolai Myaskovsky - 12 Romances After Lermontov, Op. 40: No. 4, To the Portrait

Thomas Randolph - Upon his picture

*Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian - Cave Painting

As the National Portrait Gallery re-opens, the art of portraiture on the page and in music

Proust20221120Seven volumes, 4,300 pages in one translation, featuring more than 2,000 characters: Proust's
Quest2013041420140803 (R3)Dragons, damsels, storms and the terrors of the Underworld confront the hero on his journey in this edition of Words and Music on the theme of Quest.

Jasper Britton and Imogen Stubbs read poetry and prose ranging from Homer, Malory and Tennyson to TH White, L Frank Baum and UA Fanthorpe, with music by Monteverdi, Purcell, Bartok, Dvorကk, Richard Strauss, Birtwistle and Arvo P䀀rt.

First broadcast 14 April 2013

Producer Philippa Ritchie.

~Words And Music on the theme of Quest, with readings by Jasper Britton and Imogen Stubbs.

Rain2012071520131013 (R3)The rainstorm is an invitation to pause and step outside the normal stream of everyday time and to reflect or remember; for some an irritant, for others an opportunity and for others a reminder of the power of nature or God and the impotence of man.

In this edition of Words and Music Tim McMullan and Emily Taaffe read poems and prose by John Clare, Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson with music from Sibelius, Finzi and Debussy.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

Texts and music on the theme of rain, with readings by Tim McMullan and Emily Taaffe.

Razor Sharp2020112220210704 (R3)From barbers to seashells, sharp notes to cutting remarks. With readings by Clare Corbett and OT Fagbenle, today's programme plays with the phrase ‘razor sharp', revelling in the drama and disruption inherent in these two short words. We'll hear the writing of Jane Austen, Dorothy Parker and Sandra Cisneros, and an example of the wonderful one-upmanship of Ethel Merman singing Anything You Can Do. Robert Graves looks at the unshaven ‘Face in the Mirror' and Rossini's Barber of Seville and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd compete to showcase their particular wares. Gangs of youths from the music of West Side Story to the TV series Peaky Blinders to Graham Greene's Brighton Rock emanate menace, razors glinting in the sunshine, or tucked neatly into caps. Dizzee Rascal might be looking sharp, but it's the words of Malcolm X which cut through. You can hear how he moves from sharp-suited youth to the civil rights activist whose racially charged words challenge white Americans in the 1960s. Musically, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and JS Bach play with sharp keys, while Handel's music floats across the water as the 18th-century pleasure barge organised by the Sharp family glides down the Thames.

Producer: Katy Hickman

BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a reading of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock at 10.45 each weekday evening across this fortnight.

The Razor Shell - Vernon Watkins

Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells - Helen Scales

The Good Sharps - Hester Grant

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

The Face In The Mirror - Robert Graves

The Massacre - Walter De la Mare

Tired - Langston Hughes

Brighton Rock - Graham Greene

Miscast I - Amy Lowell

The Autobiography - Malcolm X

Loose Woman - Sandra Cisneros

Emma - Jane Austen

Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare

Interview - Dorothy Parker

From clam shells to barbers, sharp words to sharp notes.

Reach For The Sky2014030920171126 (R3)Texts and music about mankind's yearning to fly. Readers: Kate Fleetwood and Will Howard.
Rebel, Rebel20181230~Words And Music this week marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the American novelist, J.D. Salinger, whose classic novel The Catcher in the Rye told the story of the troubled teenager Holden Caulfield, at odds with a world he feels is cruel and unfeeling. First published as a novel for adults it's become popular with teenagers around the world: it's very hard to believe it was first published at the end of WWII. Rebel Rebel visits the world of those who don't obey from composers and performers including the wild living Debussy and the minimalism of the pioneer Erik Satie and later the American composer Steve Reich who broke all the rules from the very start of his career in the 1960s, fighting against the musical establishment with his groundbreaking style. And, of course, you'll hear the work of Mozart who did everything from composing his country's national anthem to writing cruel parodies of his contemporaries' work to make fun of them. You'll also hear Don't Rain on My Parade from Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's musical Funny Girl, performed by Barbra Streisand who has had a hugely successful long career in Hollywood while refusing to conform to the rules. Samuel West and Natalie Simpson read words including poetry from the maverick Emily Dickinson who refused to live in the real world and the French writer Arthur Rimbaud who wrote nearly all his work between the ages of 16 and 20 before he abandoned poetry. Yearning to get away from the conventions of society he chose to give up his artistic life for that of a vagabond in East Africa. You'll also see Samuel read from Shelley's Ode to the West Wind and Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, poems by two writers who broke all the rules, moral and artistic, both involved in the social and political problems of their revolutionary age. Byron said of himself that he was ‘born for opposition'. Natalie reads from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a character who, like Roald Dahl's Matilda, begin their difficult early lives as passionate, intelligent and defiant children. And in a special linking up with the Poetry Society's Young Poets Network, Jade Cuttle and Aisha Mango Borja's writing is featured.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Marking JD Salinger's birth on January 1 1919 - a programme of teenage tearaways.

Recipes20140831A celebration of all things culinary and mixological, from an ancient recipe for chocolate to James Bond's iconic 'Vesper' Martini. Texts come from Charles Dickens, Enid Blyton and Fannie Flagg, while music includes morsels by Martinu, Bernstein and Rodrigo. Recipes, factual and fictional, basic and outlandish, read by Ben Miles and Emily Joyce.

Texts and music about food and drink, with readings by Ben Miles and Emily Joyce.

Reconciliation20110731In our personal lives or on the world stage, reconciliation is an essential part of humankind's co-existence and civility. It can sometimes be a painful process, admitting our mistakes or failings, but it can also be a moment of celebration where we achieve redemption and forgiveness; where we can put the past behind us and move forward with great hope and optimism. Actors Harriet Walter and Oliver Dimsdale read poetry by John Donne, Peter Porter and Christina Rossetti, with music by Tchaikovsky, John Adams and Nick Cave.

Texts and music related to reconciliation. Readings by Harriet Walter and Oliver Dimsdale.

Reconciliation20180429In our personal lives or on the world stage, reconciliation is an essential part of humankind's co-existence and civility. It can sometimes be a painful process, admitting our mistakes or failings, but it can also be a moment of celebration where we achieve redemption and forgiveness; where we can put the past behind us and move forward with great hope and optimism. Actors Harriet Walter and Oliver Dimsdale read poetry by John Donne, Peter Porter and Christina Rossetti, with music by Tchaikovsky, John Adams and Nick Cave.

Texts and music related to reconciliation. Readings by Harriet Walter and Oliver Dimsdale.

Red2021090520240204 (R3)A colour that demands attention - Red - the colour of love and passion and war. Fiery red, crimson, vermillion and madder all feature as artists, writers and musicians attempt to describe its essence. In today's programme Orhan Pamuk, Wassily Kandinsky and the composer Arthur Bliss delve into its depths.

There is the life-affirming red of Sylvia Plath's tulips that pulsate by her hospital bedside, while Derek Jarman and Claude McKay search for something more sexually alluring. The poet L.L. Barkat rolls Vermillion round her tongue in Love, Etc. (https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/book/love-etc-poems-of-love-laughter-longing-loss/) from T. S. Poetry Press (https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/book-series/all-books-ts-poetry-press/)

Communists and Martians vie for attention, transformed by the music of John Adams and Gustav Holst. And the blood red river flows through Hildegard de Bingen and Beth Orton, with Gabriel Jackson's piano duet Rhapsody in Red throbbing ominously. The poet Liz Berry sends her wearer of the red shoes dancing off into the sunset untamed, while Tom Waits sings of the lover alone in her red shoes waiting by the drugstore.

The ‘red priest' himself Vivaldi marks the autumn, and the great fictional red-heads Anne of Green Gables and Uriah Heep are brought to life by the readers - the flame-haired Bettrys Jones and Tom Goodman-Hill.

Producer: Katy Hickman, another redhead

The red-headed Tom Goodman-Hill and Bettrys Jones bring us red shoes, paint, love, death.

A colour that demands attention – Red – the colour of love and passion and war. Fiery red, crimson, vermilion and madder all feature as artists, writers and musicians attempt to describe its essence. In today's programme Orhan Pamuk, Wassily Kandinsky and the composer Arthur Bliss delve into its depths.

The ‘red priest' himself Vivaldi marks the autumn, and the great fictional red-heads Anne of Green Gables and Uriah Heep are brought to life by the readers – the flame-haired Bettrys Jones and Tom Goodman-Hill.

The colour of love and war, of passion and blood. With readings from Anne of Green Gables, Claude McKay, Orhan Pamuk and Liz Berry. Music by Vivaldi, John Adams and Tom Waits.

Remembering Weimar 1919-193320191110The Weimar Republic may barely have spanned fifteen years from the adoption of a new German constitution in August 1919 (following the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918) to the beginning of 1933 but there can rarely have been a more disturbing and yet thrilling period in Germany's history. Political turbulence and violence were matched by radical developments in the arts and a new kind of sexual candour. Germany's military was still smarting after defeat in the First World War but that conflict's violence seemed to have found a fresh outlet in social and political upheaval. As the demand for war reparations began to bite the economy collapsed; housewives found that they needed barrow loads of cash to buy their groceries and by 1933 there were six million people out of work. At the same time, and maybe in part, because of the hardship and social turmoil, cabaret culture flourished; ragtime took over from the waltz; Berg and Schoenberg forged a new musical language; Brecht began to create a revolutionary theatre; Dada was born; the satire of Otto Dix and George Grosz sharpened its claws; Alfred Doblin and Robert Musil wrote books that would become landmarks of modernist fiction; and the Bauhaus, through its teaching as well as its practice, began to transform our understanding of architecture and design.

This edition of Words and Music with Sheila Atim and Philip Franks is about the historical Weimar, of course, but it's also about how we continue to think about Weimar.

You'll be introduced to the quintessential Weimar woman - Vicki Baum's ash blonde, Ypsi Lona, as well as to the emblematic figure of Moosbrugger, the murderer who haunts Musil's novel, The Man without Qualities. The artist George Grosz gives a first-hand account of what it was like to live in Weimar's capital, Berlin and we hear one of the pieces dedicated to him by the Dadaist composer, Erwin Schulhoff. There's also an encounter with one of the very first examples of Schoenberg's twelve tone composition and a chance to hear soprano Barbara Hannigan's Berg- like account of Gershwin's But Not for Me , recorded just a couple of years ago. Berg and Gershwin admired each other's work and actually met in Vienna in 1928 so the affiliation is historical as well as aesthetic. Berg figures in his own right too, of course, with extracts from his two great prophetic operas, Lulu and Wozzeck. You'll find more links between Weimar and the myth of Weimar in two famous film performances - Marlene Dietrich's cabaret number, Falling in Love Again, from Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel and Joel Grey from the sound track of Bob Fosse's Seventies classic, Cabaret.

As with the music so with the words..... take Marc Behm's thriller, Queen of the Night from which I've chosen an extract. Its set in the Twenties at the height of the Weimar period but was published in America in 1977 - testament to the period's way of jumping out of time. Chronology is also deliberately jumbled in the programme's ending where the great star of the Weimar stage, Lotte Lenya, gives a twentieth century tone to the words of the nineteenth century philosopher, Nietzsche. It may be a hundred years since the establishment of the Weimar Republic but it seems somehow perfectly natural that many of the ideas and impulses of that time find echoes in the present as well as in the past.

Readings:

Ypsi Lona by Vicki Baum translated by Don Reneau

Moosbrugger by Robert Musil translated by Sophie Wilkins

A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz translated by A.J. Pomerans

Queen of the Night by Marc Behm

Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kastner translated by Cyrus Brooks

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

Erinnerung an die Marie A by Bertolt Brecht translated by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn

First Dada Manifesto by Hugo Ball translated by Ralph Mannheim

What I saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 by Joseph Roth translated by Michael Hofmann

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin translated by Michael Hofmann

Vereinsamt Nietzsche freely translated by M Z Warley

Producer: Zahid Warley

Poems, prose, song and music inspired in and by the brilliant but doomed German republic.

Remembrance2014110920161113 (R3)Remembering those who died in war over the last century including poetry by Seamus Heaney, Vera Brittain, Owen Sheers, Rupert Brooke, Michael Longley, Primo Levi and Margaret Postgate Cole and music by Ravel, George Butterworth and Samuel Barber. The readers are Simon Russell Beale and Hattie Morahan.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Texts and music remembering those who died in war over the last century.

Rest And Respite2020070520221228 (R3)This is a moment of pause and peace. Even with the cosmic stop-button pushed by the pandemic and global lockdown, it can still seem that the world is obsessed with speed: hyperactive work patterns, immediate information transfer, group video conferencing, a psychological drive towards ever-increasing productivity, more and more of everything all at once.

Slowing things down for a short while, David Ajao and Florence Roberts read sedentary and still poetry, where resting is a human right, a spiritual act, a conversation with nature, a rebellion and resistance, a naughty break from normality. Meanwhile, musical evocations of rest and repose come from Jacques Ibert, Meredith Monk, Henry Purcell, and William Walton.

If you need permission to let your body and mind recover and rejuvenate, rest here a while ...

Readings:

Phyllis Webb - Sitting

John Brehm - Layabout

A.E. Housman - Yonder see the morning

Mardsen Hartley - The Very Languor

Goldwin Smith - The True Business Of Live (Epigrams, V, 20)

Emily Dickinson - I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl (443)

Rhina P. Espaillat - `Find Work`

Paul Laurence Dunbar - A Lazy Day

Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Triumph Of Life (extract)

Shuntaro Tanikawa - I Sit (trans. Takako U. Lento) from `The Art Of Being Alone: Poems 1952-2009` © Takako U. Lento, a Cornell East Asia Series book published by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

Thierry Paquot - The Art Of The Siesta (extract - trans. Ken Hollings)

Douglas Dunn - Modern Love

Anne Boyer - Extract from `No` © Anne Boyer, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, in 2018.

Audre Lorde - A Burst Of Light: Living With Cancer (extract)

Miyo Vestrini - Schedule (trans, Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig)

Kwame Dawes - Before Winter

Wendell Berry - The Peace Of Wild Things © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from The New Collected Poems. Broadcast by permission of Counterpoint Press.

Kei Miller - The Longest Song

Dora Maar - I rested in the arms of my arms

John Berger - Once In A Poem (extract)

Yehuda Amichai - I, Who Am Still Living, May I Rest In Peace (trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfield)

Produced by Jack Howson.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Poems of pause and peace, read by David Ajao and Florence Roberts.

Retail Therapy2012111820151221 (R3)Poetry and prose exploring all aspects of shopping and trade, read by Phil Davis and Raquel Cassidy. From Madame Bovary's compulsive spending and The Mayor of Casterbridge selling his wife to the betrayal of Christ for thirty pieces of silver and Charlie Bucket's life-changing purchase of that golden ticket-lined Whipple-Scrumptious Fudge-Mallow Delight.

Texts and music exploring shopping and trade. Readings by Phil Davis and Raquel Cassidy.

Revenge20121125This week's edition of Words and Music satiates itself on the cold dish of revenge. It's an act of passion meted out on our foes, ourselves, love, old age, the sun....So many subjects have been the focus of humankind's ire. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus opens the programme with a threat to the foul offender who shall quake at the feet of revenge. And we hear music composed for some of literature's most famous revenge scenes: Romeo's revenge on Tybalt for murdering Mercutio; Diana's revenge upon Actaeon for espying her naked; or the chilling revenge of the Pied Piper upon the citizens of Hamelin. With music by Prokofiev, Mendelssohn and Janacek; and words by Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and Charles Dickens. The readers and Samantha Bond and Kenneth Cranham.

Producer: Gavin Heard.

Texts and music on the theme of revenge. Readings by Samantha Bond and Kenneth Cranham.

Richard Wagner: Transformations And Transfigurations2013051920131208 (R3)The much loved actors Juliet Stevenson and Michael Pennington present a selection of prose and poetry combined with music, evoking the spirit and art of Richard Wagner.

As part of BBC Radio 3's bicentennial celebrations of the birth of Richard Wagner, this edition of Words and Music does homage to one of the most outstanding of all Romantic composers - the man, it is claimed, who stands alongside Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte as having inspired more printed words than anyone else.

Transformations and transfigurations; music , memory and myth emerge through the poetry and prose of the 'Nibelungenlied'; the works of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarm退, and Gabriele D'Annunzio; the programme finds the 'Wagnerian' in the writings of TS Eliot, DH Lawrence and Oscar Wilde; and gathers homages, portraits and reposts to the 'Master' in the words of those who knew him, including Wagner's 'Parsifal muse', Judith Gautier; the philosopher Freiderich Nietzsche; and Wagner's wife, Cosima. Each verbal leitmotif is sheathed in the Wagnerian glories that are Tristan, Parsifal, Lohengrin, The Mastersingers and The Ring.

Texts and music evoking the spirit of Wagner, with Juliet Stevenson and Michael Pennington

Rings20221009'Do you see this ring?'

Robert Browning's poetic description of transformational metal work follows Ovid's Love Book, and both romance and discovery circle this selection of readings. After all, jeweller's rings are often a physical representation of love and longing, not to mention good and bad magic. Their perfectly unbroken, eternal shape also makes them the ideal metaphor - think of Saturn, motorways, halos and pealing bells. With music including a celestial Mozart, the broken-hearted Freda Payne and the end of Wagner's great operatic cycle, Susan Twist and Chris Jack read from writers including Anita Desai, Shakespeare and Doris Lessing. And where would a ring be without its Gollum?...

Produced in Salford by Ewa Norman

Readings:

Ovid: Elegy XV - The Art of Love

Robert Browning: The Ring and the Book - Book 1

Anita Desai: Feasting, Fasting

Jo Clement: Inheritance

J. Koenderink: Therefore Its Name Is Called Babel

WG Seabald: Rings of Saturn

Anthony Joseph: Conductors of His Mystery

John Donne: Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Meditation XVII

Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook

William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

Carol Ann Duffy: Valentine

Tolkein: The Lord of The Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring

Cathy Galvin: Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva

Sam Hickford: Poems Sketched upon the M60 - First Journey: Moston

Virginia Woolf: The Waves

Graham Moore: The Last Days of Night

Joseph Silk: The Infinite Cosmos: Questions from the frontiers of cosmology

Simon Parkin: Elden Ring review - an unrivalled masterpiece of design and inventiveness

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein

Ameen Rihani: A Sufi Song

Hermann Hesse: Wandering - Notes and Sketches

J. Walker McSpadden: Stories from Wagner

Robert Frost: Ring Around

Marriage, motorways and magic: writers on rings, read by Susan Twist and Chris Jack.

Rivers2019051220211230 (R3)The Nile to the Yangtze, the Ouse to the Severn and the Suck: today's Words and Music is a journey along some of the world's greatest rivers. Readers Nicola Coughlan and Raymond Fearon take us from the 'sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal' of a river in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, to the 'waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth' in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The musical flow includes Gerald Finzi's luscious A Severn Rhapsody, Joni Mitchell's haunting River and Sun Ra's atmospheric evocation of The Nile.

Producer: Georgia Mann Smith.

READINGS:

Kenneth Grahame -The Wind in the Willows

Joseph Conrad - The Heart of Darkness

Alice Oswald - A Sleepwalk on the Severn

Olivia Laing - To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

Langston Hughes - The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Michael Longley - The Man of Two Sorrows

Leigh Hunt - A Thought of the Nile

Jane Clarke - The River

Sarah Howe - Yangtze

Wordsworth - Sonnets from The River Duddon: After-Thought

Nicola Coughlan and Ray Fearon with readings about the Nile and the Yangtze to the Ouse.

Rooms2014122820160327 (R3)A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of rooms.
Route Nationale20100815Music and poetry set in provincial France. Readings by Jonathan Firth and Haydn Gwynne.
Ruins20140223The actors Kenneth Cranham and Joanna David contemplate ruins in texts from anonymous Anglo-Saxon verse, telling of the ruined city of Aquae Sulis, which is most probably Bath, to the ruins of Empire, as vividly portrayed by Derek Walcott. They also reflect on the ruins of ancient lands like Egypt, romantic sham ruins, human ruins and ruined minds. This edition of Words and Music includes texts by Walter de la Mare to Philip Roth and Wordsworth to Rilke, and music reconstructed from ancient Rome, Rachmaninov and Kurtag.

Texts and music on the theme of ruins, with readings by Kenneth Cranham and Joanna David.

Rule Breakers20151115Joseph Millson and Naomi Frederick are the readers in this edition of Words and Music on the theme of rule-breaking, curated by New Generation Thinker Corin Throsby. With music by Monteverdi, Beethoven, Stravinsky and The Clash and words by Shelley, Byron, Virginia Woolf and Roald Dahl.

Producer: Philippa Ritchie

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and Curator's and Producer's Notes.

Texts and music on the theme of rule-breaking. Readers: Joseph Millson and Naomi Frederick

Rules And How To Break Them20151108From St Mary's Church in Gateshead, a special live edition of Words and Music as part of this year's Free Thinking Festival on the theme 'Tearing Up The Rule Book'. Patricia Hodge and Stephen Tompkinson read texts and poetry about Rules and How to Break Them, accompanied by live music from members of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, choir Voices of Hope, and pianist John Reid.

There are literary characters who railed against the rules, such as Winston in Orwell's 1984, and the unfortunate boys in Golding's Lord of the Flies, real life people like Charles Darwin and Emmeline Pankhurst who dared to challenge the status quo, and writers who broke the rules with their writing style or content. Musically there has been a long tradition of rule-breakers, from Byrd and Shostakovich using their music to subvert religious or political laws, to innovators such as Beethoven, Schoenberg and John Cage who changed the musical direction for all who followed them.

For Free Thinking 2015, texts and music on the theme of 'tearing up the rulebook'.

Russia After The Revolution20171105A sequence of readings and music from Russia in the century since the revolution, ranging from writings banned in the early Soviet years (Bulgakov's surreal novel The Master and Marguerita) to the futuristic post-Soviet writing of Vladimir Sorokin. Music includes the two titans of the Stalin era, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as the polystylistic blendings of light and serious music by Alfred Schnittke.

Readings by Henry Goodman and Dolya Gavanski.

Part of Radio 3's season Breaking Free: A Century of Russian Culture.

A sequence of readings and music from Russia spanning the century since the Revolution.

Russian Dreams20090830A journey to Russia, as imagined by poets and musicians: natives, exiles and foreigners.

Music by French composer Tournemire conjures up the bells of Moscow, while verses by Marina Tsvetaeva give a Russian literary slant on the same subject. Stravinsky depicts his homeland from the perspective of both resident and emigre, one in an unabashedly Russian vein, the other unmistakably coloured by his exposure to American jazz.

Including poems by Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Lermontov and Osip Mandelstam, and music by Borodin, John Field and Schnittke. Readings by Andrew Sachs and Siobhan Redmond.

Saints And Sinners2015021520171228 (R3)~Words And Music on saints and sinners. With readings by Jonathan Pryce and Jenny Agutter from Shakespeare, Dickens, TS Eliot and Tennyson, and music from Poulenc and Schoenberg.

This edition is about actual saints - such as St Simeon Stylites and St Joan, and about the saintly - such as Amy Dorrit from Dickens' novel who selflessly looks after her father.

We hear about the fall of Th' infernal Serpent from Heaven in Milton's Paradise Lost, whilst one devil writes to another in one of CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters. There's a reading of the poem about sin that inspired Schoenberg's music of the same name, Verkl䀀rte Nacht.

And there's music from the final scene of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carm退lites, when the nuns go to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Texts and music focusing on saints and sinners. Readers: Jonathan Pryce and Jenny Agutter.

Sand And Deserts2022022720230716 (R3)Robyn Davidson, Frank Herbert, Alex Garland and Robert Louis Stevenson provide some of today's prose and poetry, whilst music includes pieces by Philip Glass, Naseer Shamma and Handel. We'll be playing at the beach, trekking through the Outback with camels, moving physical borders between countries and looking to the stars through glass made from sand in the Whitsundays. The readers are Seroca Davis and Tommy Sim'aan.

Producer: Barnaby Gordon

Readings:

Katherine Gallagher South Beach

Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island

Lewis Carroll The Walrus and the Carpenter

Edgar Allan Poe A Dream within a Dream

Folk tale, translated by Malcolm C. Lyons 1001 Nights

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A Psalm of Life

Alex Garland The Beach

Meghan Hicks How to Run the Marathon des Sables

Frank Herbert Dune

Robyn Davidson Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias

Tim Marshall Prisoners of Geography

Lucy Eddy Singing Sands

Paul Duffield At One with the Universe in Queensland

Seroca Davis and Tommy Sim'aan with readings from Robyn Davidson to Alex Garland.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning20230514Tom Glenister and Ellie Haddington bring us readings reflecting on what a night out looks like in the working men's club depicted in Alan Sillitoe's first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and a description of a Sunday stroll after visiting the Pump Room in Bath in a Jane Austen novel. We hear about the animals assembling on a Sunday to receive their orders in George Orwell's Animal Farm and about the loneliness of a student listening to Miles Davis conjured in Caleb Azumah Nelson's novel Small Worlds. Other music includes Mendelssohn, Handel, and Elton John.

Producer: Paul Frankl

From the dance floor to a Sunday sermon, loneliness to loud music, a night out to lying in

Scents And Perfumes20240114Tom Hollander and Anna Maxwell Martin reading prose and verse, from roses to rotting rubbish, from Marie Antionette's perfume to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, from chrysanthemums in DH Lawrence to cyanide in a Poirot story: today's programme conjures our sense of smell with music from Duke Ellington, Chopin, Gustav Holst, Edith Piaf to Gounod.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

READINGS:

Scent of Irises by D.H. Lawrence

Scent by Yrsa Daley-Ward

Havisham by Carol Ann Duffy

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

My Mother's Perfume by Pascale Petit

Ars Poetica XVI, from the collection Bright Fear, by Mary Jean Chan

As A Perfume by Arthur Symons

Exotic Fragrance, from Les Fleurs du mal, by Charles Baudelaire

Odour Of Chrysanthemums by D.H. Lawrence

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Elixir by Theresa Levitt

The Adventure in the Egyptian Tomb by Agatha Christie

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

Tom Hollander and Anna Maxwell Martin with readings set alongside music inspired by scents

From roses to rotting rubbish, chrysanthemums in DH Lawrence to cyanide in a Poirot story: today's programme conjures our sense of smell with music from Ellington to Gounod.

Scotland2010022820101017 (R3)This week's Words and Music explores Scottish landscape and history. Jimmy Yuill and Stella Gonet read poems and prose by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Muir, Muriel Spark, John Burnside, Jackie Kay and Robert Crawford. The music reflects Scotland's rich heritage with work from Scottish composers and musicians including James MacMillan, Judith Weir, Tommy Smith, Thea Musgrave, Aly Bain and Jean Redpath as well as from the many composers like Peter Maxwell Davies and Max Bruch who have been inspired by Scotland.

Poetry, prose and music on a Scottish theme. The readers are Jimmy Yuill and Stella Gonet.

Secrets And Discoveries2019111720220529 (R3)Bettrys Jones and Kingsley Ben-Adir with readings on this week's theme of Secrets and Discoveries - one which suggests not only the realms of science and investigation, but also the inner world of the human heart. The choices run from a Polari version of the Genesis story through an oratorio inspired by the life and work of code-breaker Alan Turing, to the fossils which inspired a poem by Thomas Hardy and the meditations on life and grief in Maggie Nelson's Bluets to Colin Matthews' completion of Holst's The Planets with the newly discovered Pluto.

Producer: Caitlin Benedict

We begin with the first secret, and the first discovery: in the Garden of Eden. Genesis, and the story of the Tree of Knowledge is presented in Polari, the coded patois that was utilised in the underground gay culture of 20th century Britain. Meditations on the Apple, the Tree, and the Fall of Man from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman to Haydn show the sheer range of interpretations that story has bred.

The dramatic potential of secret love is a recurring theme, from American poet Lola Ridge's obscure Secrets to Barbara Strozzi's secular song L'amante segreto (The Secret Lover), and the mysterious thirteenth variation of Elgar's Enigma Variations begins a section dealing with coded expressions of affection. Each variation was named for a friend of Elgar's, and this highly romantic movement, given only as `***` is suspected to refer to Helen Weaver, who was once engaged to the composer. Brahms's Sextet for Strings no. 2 and Berg's Lyric Suite both spell out the names of women with whom their composers were infatuated.

What E.M. Forster refers to as `a great unrecorded history` of LGBT+ love stories are revealed in the next section. De Profundis, the great letter Oscar Wilde wrote, ostensibly to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, during his time imprisoned in Reading Gaol, introduce a swathe of queer love letters - from Tove Jansson to Vivica Bandler, from E.M. Forster about his lover Mohammed el-Adl, from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, and Benjamin Britten to Peter Pears. A E Housman's Because I Liked You Better, about a doomed and possibly unrequited secret love between men and never published during Housman's lifetime, is given in contrast to Perfume Genius's Alan, which depicts the delicate, casual intimacy of a marriage between men today.

The link between discoveries inside the human soul and out in the wide universe begins with Alan Turing, who kept the secret of his sexuality whilst making game-changing discoveries during the second world war, is the subject of James McCarthy's Codebreaker oratorio. Musical and written accounts of Turing's enigmatic persona and major codebreaking discoveries give way to Thomas Hardy's reflection on seeing an archaeopteryx fossil In A Museum, Emily Dickinson's much-debated metaphoric treatment of the earth's surface in The reticent volcano keeps, and to two very different takes on archaeology. Mike Pitts' history of British archaeology resonates with eerie ancient Scandinavian music performed on a bone flute, reconstructed from an archaeological discovery made in Sweden.

Anna Meredith's Blackfriars, a piece Meredith refuses to ascribe or reveal any meaning to, accompanies fragments of American poet Maggie Nelson's Bluets. Colin Matthews's completion of Holst's The Planets, adds Pluto - the Renewer. Pluto was discovered as a planet well after Holst wrote his Planets suite, and then tragically demoted from planet status after Colin Matthews went to the effort of writing it into the suite.

This edition of Words & Music ends a journey from secrecy to discovery on a complicated note: Margaret Atwood's Journey to the Interior expresses an uneasy desire to venture out into the undiscovered worlds of the wilderness and the self, whilst out of the multi-layered chaos of Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, a love story to rise to the surface: lovers on a park bench. Not a million miles away from the garden we started in.

'And what sort of story shall we hear? Ah, it will be a familiar story, a story that is so very, very old, and yet it is so new.'

Hidden messages, secret loves and journeys of discovery in poetry, prose and music.

Self-improvement20110501Anna Maxwell Martin and Matthew Macfadyen explore through poetry and prose a subject that has exercised some of the greatest minds of all time: self-improvement. What is the value of seeking out knowledge, physical improvement and enlightenment through self-teaching and motivation? With words of wisdom from a variety of sources across the ages including Confucius, Kant, Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte and Alan Bennett, together with music by Elgar, Clementi, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Bob Dylan.

Anna Maxwell Martin and Matthew Macfadyen in readings on the subject of self-improvement.

Serpentine2016041720171219 (R3)Texts and music on the theme of snakes. Readers: Tracy-Ann Oberman and Ewan Bailey.
Seven2018052720191223 (R3)Seven days in the week, colours in the rainbow, notes in the diatonic scale; The number seven is considered lucky, mystical and holy in many different cultures and religions and appears frequently in nature as well as literature. Hayley Atwell and Simon Callow read texts and poems related to this most important of numbers, including last words, deadly sins, veils, brides, brothers, and dwarfs. With music by Haydn, Bartok, Strauss and Bowie.

Readings

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - Peter Clayton and Martin Price

Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm translated by DL Ashliman

Serenade - Edgar Allen Poe

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

As I was going to St Ives - Anon

The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie

As You Like It - William Shakespeare

Seven Times the Moon Came- Jesse Belle Rittenhouse

The Parson's Tale - Chaucer translated by Larry D Benson

Seven Times One - Jean Ingelow

Seven last words - The Bible

Bluebeard - Charles Perrault translated by Andrew Lang

The Prisoner of Chillon - Byron

Monday's Child - Traditional

The Seven Sorrows -Ted Hughes

The Rainbow - Christina Rossetti

Salome - Oscar Wilde

Nightfall - Giovanni Pascoli translated by Arlotte M Abbott

Secret Seven - Enid Blyton

In the Seven Woods - WB Yeats

As I Walked Out One Evening - WH Auden

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Hayley Atwell and Simon Callow read texts and poems related to the number seven.

Seven Ages Of Christmas2021122420231224 (R3)Readers Nina Sosanya and Robert Webb delve into a Christmas stocking of poetry and prose covering all ages. According to popular song, Christmas is 'the most wonderful time of the year', but whether or not you agree might depend on your age. Taking our cue from Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man, Words and Music explores the varying attitudes to Christmas for different age groups - from the baby in a manger to wide-eyed, Santa-obsessed youngsters; blas退 teenagers to relationship-stymied 20 and 30 somethings; life-weary parents to grumpy old men and women. We hear from Jane Austen's Emma and Mr Knightly's reluctance to leave his fireside on Christmas Eve to visit friends, a cash-strapped teenage Adrian Mole, singletons Queenie and Bridget Jones, 11-year-old Anne of Green Gables overcome with wonder at her Christmas dress, eight-year-old Kevin, who finds himself unexpectedly Home Alone for Christmas, fastidious planner and cooking guide for so many of us Delia Smith, T.S. Eliot's Magi, and the ultimate Christmas humbug, Ebenezer Scrooge himself.

The musical soundtrack is packed with seasonal favourites, with carols ranging from a mediaeval lullaby through to Florence Price, Sally Beamish and John Rutter, and popular songs from Louis Armstrong and Mariah Carey. And as it's Christmas Eve, there's music especially written for this magical night by Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker); Corelli (Christmas Concerto); and Puccini (La Boheme).

From the contemplative and spiritual to raucous party fun, whatever your view of Christmas, there will be something that chimes with your festive outlook.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Robert Webb and Nina Sosanya present a mix of festive music, poetry and prose.

Readers Nina Sosanya and Robert Webb delve into a Christmas stocking of poetry and prose covering all ages. According to popular song Christmas is 'the most wonderful time of the year', but whether or not you agree might depend on your age. Taking our cue from Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man, Words and Music explores the varying attitudes to Christmas for different age groups - from the baby in a manger to wide-eyed, Santa-obsessed youngsters; blasé teenagers to relationship-stymmied 20 and 30 somethings; life-weary parents to grumpy old men and women. We hear from Jane Austen's Emma and Mr Knightley's reluctance to leave his fireside on Christmas Eve to visit friends, a cash-strapped teenage Adrian Mole, singleton Queenie, eleven-year-old Anne of Green Gables overcome with wonder at her Christmas dress, eight-year-old Kevin, who finds himself unexpectedly Home Alone for Christmas, fastidious planner and cooking guide for so many of us Delia Smith, T.S. Eliot's Magi, and the ultimate Christmas humbug, Ebenezer Scrooge himself.

The musical soundtrack is packed with seasonal favourites, with carols ranging from a mediaeval lullaby through to Florence Price, Sally Beamish and John Rutter, and popular songs from Louis Armstrong and Mariah Carey. And as it's Christmas Eve, there's music especially written for this magical night by Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker); Corelli (Christmas Concerto); and Puccini (La Bohème).

READINGS

Sarah Teasdale: Christmas Carol

Nicholas Moore: On Christmas Eve

Esther Freud: Hideous Kinky

John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Alice Beer: December 24th

LM Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables

Tod Strasser: Home Alone

Marion Strobel: On Christmas

Sue Townsend: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾

Sharyn November: Christmas

Candice Carty-Williams: Queenie

Jane Austen: Emma

Shona Kerr-Hill: Christmas Shopping

Delia Smith: Delia Smith's Christmas

Judith Holder: The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman

Pam Ayres: Goodwill To Men - Give Us Your Money

Agatha Christie: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

Elizabeth Strout: Oh William!

TS Eliot: Journey of the Magi

Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol

What does Christmas mean to different age groups? Nina Sosanya and Robert Webb read festive poetry and prose describing the manger and nativity plays to cooking and unwanted gifts.

Seven Ages Of Love2018021120210214 (R3)Samuel West and Hattie Morahan with poems and prose on love from young to old.
Seventh Heaven20080309The number seven provides the theme for a programme of words interspersed with music.
Shakespeare And Jealousy20160423'O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on'

Juliet Stevenson and Tim Pigott-Smith perform readings accompanied by centuries of music inspired by one of Shakespeare's darker themes: jealousy - live from the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Other Place theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of Radio 3's Sounds of Shakespeare.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

BBC Radio 3 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare with a season celebrating the four centuries of music and performance that his plays and sonnets have inspired. Over the anniversary weekend, from Friday 22nd to Sunday 24th April, Radio 3 will broadcast live from a pop-up studio at the RSC's The Other Place Theatre and other historic venues across Stratford-upon-Avon.

Music and Shakespearean texts on jealousy. Readers: Juliet Stevenson and Tim Pigott-Smith.

Shakespeare And Power2016042320160716 (R3)Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown'.

Actors Juliet Stevenson and Tim Pigott-Smith perform readings accompanied by centuries of music inspired by one of Shakespeare's favourite themes: the power of royalty and monarchy as a metaphor for the relationship between men and women.

Producer: Fiona McLean

First broadcast live from the RSC's The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 2016.

Juliet Stevenson and Tim Pigott-Smith with readings and music on the power of royalty.

Shakespeare, Youth And Age20160424Student actors from Stratford's Shakespeare Institute perform prose and poetry on the theme of - what else? Youth! Live from Radio 3's pop-up studio at the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Other Place theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of Radio 3's Sounds of Shakespeare weekend.

Producer: Zahid Warley

BBC Radio 3 is marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare with a season celebrating the four centuries of music and performance that his plays and sonnets have inspired. Over the anniversary weekend, from Friday 22nd to Sunday 24th April, Radio 3 will broadcast live from a pop-up studio at the RSC's The Other Place Theatre and other historic venues across Stratford-upon-Avon.

Student actors from the Shakespeare Institute with prose and poetry on the theme of youth

Sisters20220306For there is no friend like a sister, and in this International Women's Day edition of Words and Music, Pippa Nixon and Sarah Amankwah explore the complex relationships between sisters. From delighting in each other's company with readings of Wordsworth and Austen's Pride and Prejudice, to seething with jealousy in extracts from Arifa Akbar's Consumed and CS Lewis's Narnia, to sadness at parting in Diana Hendry's Parting and Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half. There are many types of sisters: not just blood relatives, but friends, loved ones, and those rallying together to change the world. Emily Dickinson celebrates a sister-in-law, and Rupi Kaur celebrates sisters-in-heart, while we turn to Magi Gibson makes a call to arms for sisters in her poem ‘Wild Women of a Certain Age'. We also hear about musical sisters, Nanerl Mozart and Fanny Mendelssohn.

Musically, we hear figures twisting around one another like sisters in Bach's Double Concerto and Brahms's Concerto for Violin and Cello. Our soundtrack also includes piano duets played by the Labeque Sisters. As well as Fanny Mendelssohn, there's music from sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger. We explore jealousy and sadness in songs from Hamilton and by the Unthank Sisters, and celebrate sisterhood with Angelique Kidjo.

Readers: Sarah Amankwah and Pippa Nixon.

Producer: Sofie Vilcins

Image: Susannah Harker (L) and Jennifer Ehle (R) as sisters Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC's 1996 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice

You might also be interested in the Free Thinking episode on International Women's Day March 8th in which Shahidha Bari talks to the Unthank Sisters and to the authors Oyinkan Braithwaite and Lucy Holland and feminist historian Professor Sally Alexander.

READINGS:

Christina Rossetti Goblin Market

William Wordsworth To My Sister

Spike Milligan My Sister Laura

Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice

Brit Bennett The Vanishing Half

Rupi Kaur It isn't blood

Emily Dickinson One Sister Have I In Our House

Colm T ib퀀n Brooklyn

Daisy Johnson Sisters

Diana Hendry Parting

Vicki Feaver The Witches

Louisa May Alcott Little Women

Arifa Akbar Consumed

CS Lewis The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Letter

Anna Beer Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music

Cicely Hamilton Marriage as a Trade

Magi Gibson Wild Women of a Certain Age

Charlotte Mew The Peddler

Dorothy Wordsworth, Fanny Mendelssohn, Hildegard of Bingen, the Labeques and Unthanks.

Sleep20080907A giraffe only needs two hours sleep a night, an African elephant just over three. We humans like to think we need a good eight. Regular sleep is essential for our survival, however, its purposes are not completely clear. Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and Margaret Thatcher only had four hours a night, whilst Thomas Edison said it was a complete waste of time. It's said that it gives the body chance to recover from the day's hard work, yet scientists say we barely save any energy sleeping. What we do know is that without sleep our memories fail, we have problems thinking, and our mood suffers.

Descending into slumber has proved a topic of rich pickings for this edition of words and music. In Shakespeare's 27th Sonnet, sleep gives us respite from life's toils. In his essay, ‘On Dreams', William Hazlitt says we are honest with ourselves in our sleep. Debussy's faun rests on the sensual edge of waking and sleeping in the 'Prelude a l'apres midi d'un faune', whilst Laurence Binyon asks where those visions come from in the shadowy land ‘Before Sleep Comes'.

Musically there's Peter Warlock haunting settings of John Fletcher's 'Sleep'. There's the sublime 'September' - the second of Richard Strauss's 'Four Last Songs', as Summer closes its weary eyes. And John Lennon ruminates on the joys of staying in bed with The Beatles' 'I'm Only Sleeping'.

Getting to sleep proves troublesome for many. John Updike in ‘Tossing and Turning' describes how with each turn we believe with fresh hope that sleep will visit us. Meredith Monk's percussive cello solo ‘Pine Tree Lullaby' accompanies Elaine Feinstein's ‘Insomnia', whilst the white hot intensity of Sylvia Plath's Californian desert followed by the austere opening of Cecilie Ore's ‘Schwirren' leads us slowly though the sensual pleasures of sleep to its unhappy bedfellow, death.

Jeremy Evans (producer)

Readers Lisa Dillon (LD) & Adrian Rawlins (AR)

Chopin

Berceuse in D flat major Op 57

M. Pollini [piano]

Dg 431 623-2

To Sleep - John Keats

AR & LD

A. Kennedy

The Pavao Quartet

Landor Records LAN279

Sleep - John Fletcher

Aaron Jay Kernis

Before Sleep and Dreams

A. Russo [piano]

Black Box BBM1107

Mendelssohn

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Judi Dench [narrator]

Tanglewood Festival Chorus

Boston Symphony Orchestra

DG 439 897-2

‘A Midsummer Night's Dream' in Regent's Park - Derwent May

Elgar

Dream Children Op 43

BBC Symphony Orchestra

A. Davis

TELDEC 4509 923-2

John Playford

Nightpiece

M. Emerson [violin]

T. Harries [double bass]

A. Cutting [accordion]

Beautiful Jo Records BEJOCD 33

From On Dreams - William Hazlitt

Faure

Apr耀s un rꀀve

V. Gens [soprano]

R. Vignoles [piano]

Virgin 7243 5 45360 2 1

Dreams - Ann Bloch

Before Sleep Comes - Laurence Binyon

Pr退lude a l'apr耀s-midi d'un faune

The Cleveland Orchestra

P. Boulez

DG 435 766-2

John Cage

Dream for Piano

J. Pierce [piano]

Wergo WER 60157-50

Sonnet 27 - Shakespeare

John Dowland

Care Charming Sleep

J. Potter [voice]

S. Stubbs [chitarrone]

J. Surman [sax]

M. Homburger [baroque violin]

B. Guy [Double bass]

ECM 476 052-2

J. Lennon and P. McCartney

Apple CDP 464412

Tossing and Turning - John Updike

Dolmen Music - Pine Tree Lullaby

R. Een [cello]

ECM 825 459-2

Insomnia - Elaine Feinstein

Salvatore Sciarrino

Cruel Nocturne No 2 - Rage

M. Formenti [piano]

Col legno WWE 1CD 20223

Philip Glass

Resource from Koyaanisqatsi

The Philip Glass Ensemble

Nonesuch 7559 79660 2

Macbeth III, 2 Come Seeling Night - Shakespeare

Sleep in the Mojave Desert - Sylvia Plath

Nordic Voices

Aurora ACD 5055

Gershwin

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra

Leonard Slatkin

EMI CDD 7 64084 2

Britten

Sonnet from Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Sop 31

I. Bostridge [tenor]

Bamberg Symphony Orchestra

I. Metzmacher

EMI 7243 5 56871 2 8

Variations On The Word Sleep - Margaret Atwood

Morten Lauridsen

Sa nuit d'退t退 from Nocturnes

Polyphony

M. Lauridsen [piano]

S. Layton [conductor]

Hyperion CDA67580

Touch - Thom Gunn

The Sleepers - Sylvia Plath

Howard Skempton

Toccata

J. Tilbury [piano]

Sony SK 66482

Before Sleep - Anne Ridler

Herbert Howells

Nunc dimittis (Collegium Regale)

Choir of Kings College, Cambridge

S. Williams [tenor]

P. Barley [organ]

S. Cleobury [Director]

Argo 430 205-2

Pipe Dream - Brian Patten

Carlos Salzedo

Song in the Night

Y. Kondonassis [harp]

Telarc CD-80418

September from Four Last Songs

R. Fleming [soprano]

Munich Philharmonic

C. Thielemann [conductor]

Decca 478 0647

Sonnet XLV from Delia - Samuel Daniel

John Tavener

Song for Athene

Westminster Abbey Choir

M. Neary [conductor]

Sony SK 66613

Poetry and music on the theme of sleep, including music by Strauss and poetry by Keats.

So Emotional2019033120191231 (R3)There are seven universal emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise and contempt. Readers Brid Brennan and Iain Glen take us on an emotional roller coaster with words ranging from the 17th century lusciousness of Milton to the high impact sparseness of 'insta-poet' Rupi Kaur.

Our emotional journey begins with the laughter of a four year old, Judy Garland bidding us to 'Get Happy' and Jack Underwood's touching portrait of Happiness. But sadness has a beauty of its own and Milton hails Melancholy, while the 14th century mystic Margery Kempe immerses herself in the misery of Christ's suffering. No one does misery like Morrissey so The Smiths are here to tell us: Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. Dylan Thomas and Elvis Costello deliver some explosive anger, while Dorothy Parker and Lulu have a surprise for their disappointing lovers. Roald Dahl's truly disgusting description of Mr Twit's beard will put you off extravagant facial hair for life, while Henry James and Benjamin Britten deliver the fear-factor in the spine-chilling Turn of the Screw. Our emotional journey ends with the chillingly inhuman contempt of Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho and a look back to the medieval practice of fasting to fine-tune human emotions.

You can find a collection of discussion programmes exploring different emotions recorded at the 2019 Free Thinking Festival in a collection on the programme website

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07vq5kw

Readings:

Jack Underwood: Happiness

Aatish Taseer: Extract from The Twice Born: Life and Death on the Ganges

Milton: Extract from Il Penseroso

John Clare: I Am!

Margery Kempe translated by Barry Windeatt: Extract from The Book of Margery Kempe

Rupi Kaur: What is Stronger than the Human Heart?

Dylan Thomas: Not This Anger

Charlotte Bront뀀: Extract from Jane Eyre

Ted Hughes: Crow Blacker Than Ever

Roald Dahl: Extract from The Twits

Sara Teasdale: Fear read by Iain Glen

Henry James: Extract from The Turn of the Screw

Dorothy Parker: Surprise

Bret Easton Ellis: Extract from American Psycho

Translated by Hetta Howes: Extract from Speculum Sacerdotale

Producer: Georgia Mann

Iain Glen and Brid Brennan journey through the seven universal emotions.

Solitude2009111520101121 (R3)We shut out the hustle and bustle of the outside world and explore the emotion and experience of solitude through a sequence of poetry, prose and music. Readings by Paul McGann and Kirsty Besterman.

With words from Alexandre Dumas, William Wordsworth, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou and music from Bach, Delius, Strauss, Scriabin and Thelonious Monk.

Poetry, prose and music exploring the emotion and experience of being alone.

Solo2014020920171022 (R3)The actor Toby Jones reads the words of John Clare, Ralph Ellison, Edward Thomas, John Williams and George Herbert amongst others; musical triangulation is provided by Elliott Carter, Mozart, John Coltrane, Hildegard von Bingen, Philip Glass, Billie Holiday, Gyorgy Ligeti, Puccini and Bach - masters of the ensemble but also of the solo.

This week Toby Jones is also making his own selection of music which you can hear on Thursday night from midnight and is downloadable as The Late Junction Mixtape.

For this Words and Music the readings explore the gap between solitude and loneliness. You can enjoy your own company and yet dislike being abandoned to your own devices. You can argue that we're born alone, live alone and die alone and yet we live life navigating our relations with other people. Even when we are in splendid and palpable isolation at times it feels as if there is more than one of us in the room.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Actor Toby Jones performs all the readings on the terrain between loneliness and solitude.

Somewhere Or Other2018022520201115 (R3)With actors Georgie Glen and Rupert Holliday Evans.

Songs, poems and notes of yearning over love, life and death and the exuberance of the sheer unquantifiable, marvellous, strange, exuberant nature of existence. Somewhere or other must surely be ... a love lost or never found, hugely enjoyed or deeply regretted; somewhere or other the perfect home awaits ... or a terrible death ... or a lesson hard learned ... or extraordinary luck ... or an encounter of no significance at all which happened once - never to be repeated but never forgotten.

The readings come from Christina and Gabriel Rossetti, Kevin Crossley Holland, W B Yeats, Federico Garcia Lorca, A A Milne, Freya Stark, Donald S Murray and Mark O'Connor amongst others; with the voices of Van Morrison, the Salzburg Boys' Choir, Elizabeth S怀derstr怀m and Ella Johnson plus the melodies of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, Judith Weir, Dave Brubeck, Benjamin Britten, Aram Khachaturian, Peter Maxwell Davies and others.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

In search of the perfect person, the perfect place and things that happen along the way.

Song For Ireland2009062820100207 (R3)A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the identity of the Irish through the landscape, with readings from Irish actors Lorcan Cranitch and Orla Charlton.

Literature featured spans the 9th century to the present day and includes some of the best-loved Irish poets - WB Yeats, Seamus Heaney, PJ Kavanagh, Derek Mahon and Paul Durcan. Music ranges from the pastoral idyll of Bax's Moy Mell and the chaotic Irish circus of John Cage's Roaratorio to the sound of Liam O' Flynn on Uillean pipes and young flute player Michael McGoldrick.

Lorcan Cranitch and Orla Charlton with readings evoking the Irish landscape.

Sons And Daughter Of The Soil2017011520181209 (R3)Emilia Fox and Alex Jennings with a selection of readings and music reflecting the lives of those who work the land, including poems by

Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Sasha Dugdale, Dylan Thomas and Virgil. Music of an agricultural nature comes from Benjamin Britten, Debussy, Duke Ellington, Scott Walker and Ivor Gurney among others.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Texts and music on the theme of working on the land read by Emilia Fox and Alex Jennings.

Sons Of Russia2010012420110227 (R3)Actors Mackenzie Crook and Jason Isaacs explore male fragility in Russian literature. The tensions between generations and classes are revealed with readings from Gogol, Turgenev and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, whilst adulterous love infuses his short story The Lady with the Dog. Perhaps above all, why do these men have such an attachment to their Motherland? Why does the average Russian 'Ivan' place his country above everything else, even God? With music by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Schnittke.

In the past decade, Mackenzie Crook has quickly established himself as a versatile character actor after appearing in the BBC TV comedy The Office and Pirates of the Caribbean films. Mackenzie reads from Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment, Gogol's The Government Inspector and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Jason Isaacs, introduced to a new generation of film lovers as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, reads passages from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters and short story The Lady with the Dog, as well as extracts from Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Sound Frontiers: Rebirth20160925A live reading of poetry and prose by Fiona Shaw and Robert Glenister with music reflecting the renewal experienced in post war periods and the spirit of rebirth which accompanied the founding of the Third Programme and the building of the Festival Hall. The programme ranges across the centuries including poems from T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson and Ovid and music by Schubert, Benjamin Britten and Joni Mitchell on the theme of 'Rebirth'. We begin with Bach's Suite no 1 in G major with Yo-Yo Ma.

Sound Frontiers: BBC Radio 3 live at Southbank Centre

Celebrating 7 decades of pioneering music and culture

Producer: Fiona McLean.

A live reading of poetry and music reflecting feelings of renewal in the postwar world.

Sound Frontiers: Turning Points2016100220171222 (R3)John Sessions and Juliet Stevenson are in Radio 3's pop-up studio at Southbank Centre to perform forward-looking prose and poetry accompanied by music to tie in with the theme of this year's London Literature Festival, which begins later this week. The selection includes Debussy, Chopin, Mozart, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, Charlie Parker, Charles Ives and PG Wodehouse.

Sound Frontiers: BBC Radio 3 live at Southbank Centre

Celebrating 7 decades of pioneering music and culture

Producer: Harry Parker.

John Sessions and Juliet Stevenson with forward-looking prose and poetry with music.

Sound Of Cinema: At The Movies2009122720101227 (R3)
20130915 (R3)
For Sound of Cinema, a selection of poetry, prose and music inspired by the movies. Poets and composers have been associated with the cinema since it began well over a hundred years ago. In the early years Russian poet Mayakovsky, Jean Cocteau, W.H. Auden and Bertolt Brecht were all involved as were the composers William Walton, Erich Korngold, Max Steiner and Elmer Bernstein.

In Words and Music at the Movies poems include Tony Harrison's 'Continuous', Carol Ann Duffy's 'Big Sue and Now Voyager', EE Cummings's 'your slightest look' (heard in Woody Allen's 'Hannah and her Sisters') and Roger McGough's 'If life's a lousy picture, why not leave before the end?' with music from Michael Nyman, Mozart, Schumann, Bernard Herrmann, Aubert, Miles Davis, Nino Rota, Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone.

The readers are Barbara Flynn and William Hope.

A mixture of poetry, prose and music inspired by film.

Space20080511Miranda Richarson and Tim McMullan read works by Walt Whitman, Arthur C Clarke, Wordsworth and Craig Raine, as well as from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. With music evoking the sound of space, including Brian Eno's Apollo, Holst's The Planets and Frank Sinatra's Fly me to the Moon.

With readings of works on the theme of space by Whitman, Wordsworth and Douglas Adams.

Speed20110904A hymn to speed: agitation and restlessness; frenzied, dynamic performances; and the feverish adrenaline of high-speed travel. 'We declare,' wrote Marinetti in his Manifesto of Futurism, 'that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.

With music by John Adams, Charles-Valentin Alkan and Bach; and words by Pablo Neruda, Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson, read by Maxine Peake and Andrew Scott.

Texts and music on the theme of speed with readings by Maxine Peake and Andrew Scott.

Sport2009031520101128 (R3)Elgar loved football, Debussy composed a tennis match, and Honegger wrote a musical game of rugby. Poet Laureates from William Wordsworth to Wole Soyinka and Gwyneth Lewis have all turned their pen to sporting passions. Sports crowds in return use music and song to raise their hopes and cheer on their flagging sporting heroes, from Sunderland FC, who come out to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, to Liverpool FC's footballing anthem, 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.

~Words And Music this week explores the world of sport. The original Greek Games had their origins in a poetic and musical tradition, and sport - the human endeavour, the triumphs and failures - continues to hold a fascination for writers and composers.

From the obvious sporting worlds of cricket and rugby to the more esoteric, like hang gliding and rock climbing, Ioan Meredith and Angela Wynter read poetry from Ian McMillan to Jean Binta Breeze, with music from Ives, Ravel and Holst, the New Zealand All Blacks and Liverpool FC's triumphant Kop.

Music and poems on the theme of sport read by Angela Wynter and Ioan Meredith.

St Cecilia20151122Behind today's feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music, lies an extraordinary account of courage and faith. Her story is told through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; commentary comes from Dryden, Pope, Auden and Blunden, while music is by Haydn, Finzi, Charpentier and Britten. Readers are Zoe Telford and Michael Maloney.

Sequence of poetry, prose and music telling the story of St Cecilia, patron saint of music

Star Light, Star Bright2016073120180128 (R3)Lorelei King and John Paul Connolly are looking heavenwards, with poetry and music on the beauty, science and influence of the stars.

Includes poetry by Keats, Whitman, Katherine Mansfield and Gerard Manley Hopkins, plus wise words from theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, and music from John Cage, Vaughan Williams, Kraftwerk and Britten, to name only a few.

Producer Note

This edition of Words and Music celebrates the ancient pastime, art and science of star-gazing, beginning and ending with whatever secret wish upon a star you need to make...

The sheer vastness of the starry height is described for us by Katherine Mansfield and Gerard Manley Hopkins, accompanied by silvery starlit music from Eriks Esenvalds and a violin concerto by Oliver Davis that takes as its inspiration the NASA Voyager probe, speeding through the galaxies. And Jerry Goldsmith's expansive Star Trek theme morphs into Holst's 'Venus' - we know now it's a planet, but it was known to ancient civilisations as both the morning and the evening star...

Poetry from Louise Gluck and prose from Thomas Hardy express the feeling of human insignificance when set against the rolling night sky, as Jennifer Higdon's piano quintet 'Scenes from the Poet's Dreams' races through stars, and as Robert Frost, underdog, leaps and barks with the great overdog - Canis Major.

Walt Whitman's poetic impatience with the learned astronomer's facts and figures is understandable perhaps, but those astronomers of old, the Magi, embraced both science and theology in their quest for the Star of Bethlehem. And staying with the theology for a while, Mary was commonly known as Our Lady, Star of the Sea in medieval times - a symbol of hope and guidance.

But back to the science - Philip Glass wrote his piece 'Orion' as an evening-long piece for the 2004 Athens Olympics, as the constellation is visible from both hemispheres. We hear part of 'Australia', complete with didgeridoo, accompanying Sir Patrick Moore with a brief excerpt from 'The Sky at Night' in which he runs through part of his own 'Caldwell Catalogue' of star clusters, nebulae and galaxies. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman has no objection, as you might expect, to speaking of the wondrous science of astronomy, and we have an ... unexpected contribution from Professor Stephen Hawking as well. The words in the electro-pop offering from Kraftwerk tell us that 'From the deeps of space radio stars are transmitting pulsars and quasars'. Christine Paice's poem 'A star against the eye' was written for National Science Week 2010 - 'Science Made Marvellous'.

A change of pace next with music by William Herschel, who not only was a composer of numerous symphonies, sonatas and concertos but was also Court Astronomer to George III and the discoverer of the planet Uranus. I have also included part of 'Atlas eclipticalis' by John Cage, a piece of music that is made by superimposing musical staves over star charts, He writes that the piece is 'a heavenly illustration of nirvana,' and a performance 'should be like looking into the sky on a clear night and seeing the stars.

We can't ignore the effects of stars on lovers, courtesy of Shakespeare, Keats and Puccini's aria from Tosca, whereas the hope or perhaps fear that the movements of the stars affects human fate is expressed by Siegfried Sassoon, Peter Grimes in Britten's opera, and in a catalogue of the stars in the zodiac in Vaughan Williams 'Sons of Light'.

The programme draws towards a close with hymns to the stars of evening, and finally, against a backdrop of Terry Riley's quirky 'Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector', Louis MacNeice wrestles with the mind-blowing concept that the light from the stars began its journey millennia before we were born, and that we will never see the light that is setting out on that journey right now. Easier perhaps, to wish upon a star than to comprehend one...

Texts and music on the theme of stars, with readers Lorelei King and John Paul Connolly.

Strauss 150: Strauss's Library20140608In this special edition of Words and Music, Charles Edwards and Pooky Quesnel delve into Richard Strauss's library and imagination. Strauss was an avid reader and, like many of his contemporaries, was extremely well versed in the writings of Goethe. He was also fascinated by the literature of Ancient Greece, modelling his operas on works by Sophocles, as in the example of Elektra.

This edition of Words and Music weaves a Goethe strand - texts by Goethe or inspired by Goethe - with a strand on texts that Strauss used in his operatic works. There are also letters from his correspondence with his librettist Hoffmannsthal and modern poems on subjects that inspired Strauss, from the stories of Salome to Ariadne.

Strauss loved Mozart, Wagner and Couperin. The music of these composers features alongside that of Strauss himself.

Texts and music focusing on Strauss, with readings by Charles Edwards and Pooky Quesnel.

Streetlife2014042020200503 (R3)Toby Jones and Mariah Gale read literature about life on the streets by Charles Dickens, James Joyce and Baudelaire, with music by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Janacek and Bernstein.

Producer: Clara Nissen

Readings:

TS Eliot - The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist

Stephen Crane - Maggie

Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South

Various news reports

Monica Ali - Brick Lane

Charles Baudelaire - Twilight from Les Fleurs du Mal translated by William Aggeler

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited

Kenneth Slessor - Choker's Lane

Matthew Arnold - West London

James Norman Hall - Fifth Avenue in Fog

~Words And Music about life on the streets, with readings by Toby Jones and Mariah Gale.

Suburbs2013071420170226 (R3)Emily Joyce and Philip Franks take a literary walk through the suburbs, to music by JS Bach, Philip Glass, Kaikhosru Sorabji and others.

Suburbs sprung up in the 19th century along the rail routes that led out of rapidly growing cities like London and the major industrial centres. Suburbs now cover large swathes of our post-industrial landscape and have led to a particular culture which has evolved from the daily commute to work.

This edition of Words and Music wanders through suburbs, from those dark industrial places of Dickens's times to the uniform towns experienced by Hanif Kureishi and Adrian Henri. Suburbs provide a peaceful haven at the end of the working day, a near-rural setting, a nice place in which to grow up, in which to learn certain morals, but also a place of ennui, monotony and rebellion. The programme includes texts from Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop, Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia, and poems by John Betjeman, DH Lawrence, William Cowper, Emerson, Tennyson, Arthur Guiterman, Gwen Harwood, Aesop, Margaret Atwood, Hardy, Kipling, TS Eliot, John Davidson, EE Cummings and Adrian Henri.

Texts and music on the theme of the suburbs, with readers Emily Joyce and Philip Frank.

Such Sweet Sadness20170618With readings from the actors Siobhan Redmond and Harry Anton - today's programme features the music of Schumann, Strauss, Brahms and Stozel, Paul Clayton and the Modern Jazz Quartet plus prose from A A Milne to Henry James, from Shakespeare to Guy de Maupassant, plus Robert Burns, Oscar Wilde, James Thompson and Charlotte Smith.

The voice of the nightingale and the lonely impulse of delight, embroidered with the sentimental and sublime, for lovers young and lovers old and those who sigh as they smile and look to die upon a kiss.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music, with readings by Siobhan Redmond and Harry Anton.

Summer Nights2016081420200726 (R3)Simon Russell Beale and Sian Thomas read prose and poetry reflecting on the final hours on a summer's day.

`Oh, how beautiful is the summer night, which is not night, but a sunless, yet unclouded day, descending upon earth with dews and shadows and refreshing coolness` was how the American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described the twilight hours. The English landscape is evoked in Vaughan Williams' setting of `The Water Mill` by Fredegond Shove and in John Clare's `Summer Evening` in which he captures the fearful animals, insects and birds disturbed by ‘proud man'.

American summers are evoked in the description of one of the famous parties in F. Scott Fitzgerald's `The Great Gatsby` where, in Gatsby's blue gardens, there is a `sea-change of faces and voices under the constantly changing light` heard with Miles Davis' `Once upon a Summertime`. The overwhelming heat of New York is brilliantly caught by Langston Hughes and by Sara Teasdale's description of the ‘fragrant darkness' of the Hudson river.

T.S. Eliot's mysterious evocation of the summer midnight rituals of man and woman `in daunsinge, signifying matrimonie` is heard with Philip Glass' `Hymn to the Sun` from Akhnaten. Carol Ann Duffy's` The Midsummer Night` is heard with Mendelssohn's Notturno from `A Midsummer Night's Dream`. Wallace Stevens' poem, `The House was Quiet and the World was Calm`, captures the calm of the poet's home as he sits reading a book alongside the calm of the universe on a summer night and the poet's desire to be one `to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought`. The poem is heard with the American composer Samuel Barber's `Nocturne`, a piano setting which may well be exploring a similar ‘access of perfection' to Stevens' poet's dream.

Summer Nights ends with A. E. Housman's `When Summer's End is Nighing`, an elegy for lost youth which ends with the hope of a new beginning. As summer's end nears the poet's heart is reawakened:

‘The ear too fondly listens

For summer's parting sighs,

And then the heart replies.

~Words And Music ends with Vaughan Williams' `The Lark Ascending`, his beautiful evocation of the English countryside, written on the eve of war in 1914 and imagining the losses to come

Readings:

Oh, how beautiful - Henry Longfellow

Night Drive - Seamus Heaney

Summer Evening - John Clare

The Prelude - William Wordsworth

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight - Emily Bront뀀

Song - Walt Whitman

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Summer Stars - Carl Sandburg

Summer Evening - Sara Teasdale

The Four Quartets - TS Eliot

The House Was Quiet - Wallace Stevens

Summer Night - Langston Hughes

Midsummer Night - Carol Ann Duffy

When summer's end is nighing - AE Housman

Music set against seasonal prose and poetry read by Sian Thomas and Simon Russell Beale.

Sunday20180812Frances Barber and Greg Wise read texts and poems covering many Sunday-related occupations and states of mind, as well as thoughts about the very purpose of Sunday. A full list of the music and readings can be found on the Words and Music programme website.

Jane Eyre is enduring a freezing cold walk to church, Jim Dixon is nursing the mother of all hangovers, Peter Grimes is fishing and William Brown is looking forward to creating havoc on a Sunday School outing. For some Sunday is a day of rest, a chance to play sports, cook a roast, and read the papers. For others it's planned around one, or in the case of Samuel Pepys, several trips to church. For children it can be a day of utter tedium, captured beautifully by Margaret Atwood in her poem Bored. But for adults Sunday can be an opportunity for a rare day off, to take a moment to dream about the past, as Edward Hirsch does in his poem Early Sunday Morning, or to contemplate the week ahead. Extracts include works by Jane Austen and Graham Swift, with Sunday-themed music by Vaughan Williams, Haydn, Sondheim, and Ellington.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Enjoy your day of rest with a literary and musical celebration of Sunday.

Swimming20220508Yeats brings us fish; Emily Dickinson mermaids; Marriott Edgar Channel swimming; and Lewis Carroll a pool of tears. We visit the Ladies Pond at Hampstead in a poem by Linda Gregerson and are transported to the east coast of America in John Cheever's short story The Swimmer, brought alive by Marvin Hamlisch's haunting score from the film version. But swimming can also bring perils and we look back to Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning and observe ponds and lakes as places where bodies are on display in EM Forster's Room with a View and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Our music comes from composers including Max Richter, Fanny Mendelssohn, Bed?ich Smetana and also from Marvin Hamlisch, Anna Calvi and REM. Our readers are Shaun Evans and Rebekah Murrell.

Producer: Belinda Naylor

You can find a Sunday Feature from Radio 3 in which Alice Roberts explored wild-swimming and the legacy of Waterlog by Roger Deakin still available on BBC Sounds

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00051dl and a Free Thinking episode featuring the poet Elizabeth Jane Burnett and writer Philip Hoare https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wn520

From deep ocean fish to Hampstead ponds and EM Forster's pool party in Room with a View.

Symphony Of A City20100912Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage read poetry and prose on the theme of a 'Symphony of a City', recording and evoking the movement of a city day. This Words and Music takes as its departure point the silent 'city symphony' documentaries of the 1920s, from Walter Ruttmann's 'Berlin: Symphony of a Great City' to Dziga Vertov's 'The Man with a Movie Camera'. These were among the first documentaries to take the city as both character and subject, highlighting the inherent musicality of the heterogeneous mass of the modernist city.

The rhythms of daily city life are evoked not just in the subject matter of this poetry and prose but in the very rhythms of their performance. And yet, we also see that the study of these daily movements of city life does not just belong to the modernists. The beauty, the energy, and the strange terror of city life, are evoked here by poets and authors across time, from Swift, Dickens and Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams.

Music from Gershwin, Varese, Byrd, Steve Reich and Charles Ives.

Emilia Fox & Richard Armitage read poetry & prose on the theme of a 'Symphony of a City'.

Tailor-made2009020820101212 (R3)What do our clothes say about us and what do we say about them? Are they, as Coco Chanel once said, a reflection of the heart or something merely contingent on the weather? This week's Words and Music, with poems and prose read by Maxine Peake and Ralf Little, is a mischievous examination of our attitudes to what we wear. Its an adventure in the bespoke - from Achilles' armour to Colline's overcoat with, as you might expect, the odd plunge into the mysteries of underwear and the seductions of the veil. There'll be compositioins by John Tavener as well as Puccini, Miles Davis and The Coasters, and the lyric poet Robert Herrick will find himself hanging snugly next to the Beat generation's Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Poetry, prose and music examining our attitudes to what we wear.

Take Me To The River2010050920101205 (R3)Every Sunday evening Radio 3 brings you a sequence of music, poetry and prose on a theme, this week inspired by rivers.

Tonight, Juliet Stevenson and Jamie Glover read poetry and prose by Wordsworth, U.A. Fanthorpe, Ezra Pound, John Clare and Elizabeth Jennings with music by Tippett, Delius, Duke Ellington, Gorecki and Talking Heads.

Texts and music inspired by rivers, with readings by Juliet Stevenson and Jamie Glover.

Tanglewood Jungles20160110From the forests of Olde England to the Tropics via good, evil and the affairs of the human heart, Anna Chancellor and Julian Rhind-Tutt read prose and poetry raised by the idea of Tanglewood Jungles

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and the Producer's Notes.

Anna Chancellor and Julian Rhind-Tutt in prose and poetry evocative of tanglewood jungles.

Tears, Idle Tears20130331This words and music is about tears and weeping.

Music is, famously, the art form most likely to make people cry. Tolstoy is said to have wept at Tchaikovsky's String Quartet Number 1 and Mozart himself, on his death bed, broke off writing his Requiem at the Lacrimosa to weep. That is, at least according to one source.

Tales of great weeping are the stuff of legend. Sorrowful Niobe is so drained by her lamentations and grieving that she is transformed into a great, dry mountain and Lamia, here in Keat's version, is made monstrous by grief. Like Medea in the Greek and La Llorona, the child-eating weeping woman of Mexico, the figure of the woman so bereft she becomes terrible and terrifying is common to many stories and cultures.

For Elizabeth Barrett Browning grief is passionless: only those with hope can weep. The melancholic protagonist in Schubert's Winterreise finds his tears are frozen despite the burning passion in his heart and Mary Barnard's cool princesses adorn themselves with reasonable tears like bright ice jewels.

Lovers' tears lace the centuries: Desdemona remembers and sings a sad song of Willow, F Scott Fitzgerald's partygoer sails her sobs on a sea of champagne, the Anglo Saxon voice wails for her Wulf, and Julie London conjures a salt river of loss.

The tears of children and about children can seem puzzling. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman imagine the crying children of their poems to be somehow unsure of the source of their tears. Whitman offers reassurance in the nightly rebirth of the planets and stars whilst Hopkins gives a glimpse of the child's future and her understanding that to be human is to weep.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

Texts and music on the theme of tears, with readings by Samantha Bond and Samuel Barnett.

Temperatures Rising2019080420211107 (R3)From John Clare's white woolsack clouds to the daydreaming figure under Meleager's plane tree, summer days have long been a time for writers to wander into fantasies and idylls.

But summer can be a time for extreme weather too - cathartic storms and raging wildfires burst forth in the music of Vivaldi and the epic accounts of Imru' al-Qais and Cassius Dio. And the fierce sun inspires a particular vividness in the African desert of H Rider Haggard and the noontime scene in southern India that Kamala Das conjures.

These extremes may have had an exotic appeal in the past; but now, they hint at what is likely to become far more familiar, as temperatures rise.

Pack your sunscreen and join readers Raad Rawi and Pearl Chanda in the hot landscapes of past, present and future, with music by Debussy, Orff and Jobim.

Readings:

Sonnet - John Clare

Tuck Everlasting - Natalie Babbitt

Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide - Maura Dooley

King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard

Wasteland - T. S. Eliot

A Hot Noon in Malabar - Kamala Das

A Something In a Summer's Day - Emily Dickinson

The Day-dream - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Epigram 196 - Meleager

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan - Isabella Bird

On the Idle Hill of Summer - A. E Housman

Hyperobjects - Timothy Morton

A Mancunian Taxi-driver Foresees His Death - Michael Symmons Roberts

Sonnet - Antonio Vivaldi

Ode - Imru' al-Qais

Roman History - Cassius Dio

In A Dark Time - Theodore Roethke

Produced by Chris Elcombe.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Raad Rawi and Pearl Chanda evoke lush summer and parched deserts.

Temptation20130623Texts and music on the theme of temptation. Readings by Emma Fielding and Tom Goodman-Hill
Tendrilled Avenues2011121120141231 (R3)Tendrilled Avenues': poetry and prose from Pliny to Proulx celebrating and cautioning, lamenting and laughing, about humanity's complex relationship with alcohol, read by Sally Dexter and Jon Strickland.

Pliny the Elder gives a sober judgement of wine's effects. Dickens and Lowry describe in poetic detail, the interior of two drinking establishments; Colette's heroine Claudine becomes light-headed on sparkling wine and new love. Shakespeare's Falstaff is unequivocal in his praise for 'good sherris sack', while Martin Amis's John Self discovers the embarrassment of over-indulgence at a dinner party. Whalers on shore-leave caper wildly in Moby Dick; Proulx's fishing community party takes a violent turn. And DH Lawrence meditates on humanity's ancient and mysterious relationship with the 'tendrilled avenues of wine and the otherworld'.

With drinking songs from Verdi, Warlock and Tom Waits, and orchestral interludes ranging from reflective to euphoric, by Ravel, Copland and Milhaud.

A sequence of texts and music about humanity's complex relationship with alcohol.

The 1920s2021011720230319 (R3)From the Harlem Renaissance and the world of the Charleston, the Great Gatsby and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb to the financial crash at the end of the decade. Today's programme hears readings by Adjoa Andoh and Guy Burgess of poems and prose by authors including Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf and Jean Toomer with music by Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith, Ravel and Vaughan Williams.

The 1920s were known variously as the Roaring Twenties, the Golden Twenties, the Jazz Age and the Flapper Era. It was also the decade of the Wall Street Crash, the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, the first talking pictures and dance crazes like the Charleston and the samba. In many ways it was a period of transition from the pre-First World War order to a more recognisably modern age. Words and Music reflects this change in the novels, poetry, songs and compositions from a century or so ago. There are readings from the fiction of F Scott Fitzgerald, Rosamund Lehman, Richmal Crompton and Virginia Woolf, verse from TS Eliot, Frances Cornford, Thomas Hardy, Edith Sitwell and poets of the Harlem Renaissance while the music ranges from Poulenc and Puccini to Gershwin, Ellington and Bessie Smith, from Ravel and Nadia Boulanger to Weill and Vaughan Williams via Louis Armstrong and Carmen Miranda.

Producer: Harry Parker

From the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Gatsby to the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb.

The 1940s20110403David Haig and Deborah Findlay read poetry and prose inspired by the 1940s, including work by C Day Lewis, John Betjeman, WH Auden, Dannie Abse, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon and Freya Stark, with music by Prokofiev, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Django Reinhardt and Peggy Lee.

Producer: Lisa Davis.

Texts and music inspired by the 1940s, with readings by David Haig and Deborah Findlay.

The Aeneid20230226Virgil's Aeneid traces the epic journey of the Trojan hero from the ruins of his home town through to his arrival in Italy. It is full of incident and pathos as we move from Aeneas's struggles at sea, his tragic love for Dido, his descent into Hades and his battle with the Italian prince Turnus. This Latin epic poem, written between 29 and 19 BC, has been a source of many retellings, including some from the standpoint of female characters who hardly appear at all in the original. Olivia Darnley and John Sackville read from translations of the Aeneid by England's first poet laureate John Dryden (1631-1700), a later holder of that post Cecil Day Lewis (1904-1972) and contemporary translator Sarah Ruden, plus reworkings by Ursula Le Guin and Caroline Lawrence all set alongside music by Purcell, Berlioz and Tangerine Dream.

Producer: Tony Sellors

If you want more discussions relating to classic literature and the arts you might also be interested in a recent Free Thinking discussion about Phaedra and the excavation of Knossos, and a landmark discussion featuring translator Emily Wilson on her version of the Odyssey.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09kqjc0

Works included (timings from the start of the programme itself, after the introduction):

00.00.00: Caroline Lawrence: The Night Raid, read by Olivia Darnley

00:00:20: Handel: Giulio Cesare: Se pieta di me non senti

Sabine Devieilhe (soprano), Pygmalion, Rapha뀀l Pichon (conductor)

00:03:36: Berlioz: The Trojans: Royal Hunt and Storm

London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis (conductor)

00:03:36: Virgil, trans. Allcroft and Mason: The Aeneid, read by John Sackville

00:05:56: Virgil, trans. Dryden: The Aeneid, read by John Sackville and Olivia Darnley

00:08:17: Lutos?awski: Mi-parti

Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, Witold Lutoslawski (conductor)

00:12:05: Mendelssohn: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado (conductor)

00:15:10: Peter Baumann, Edgar Froese, Christophe Franke: Rubycon

00:15:30: Virgil, trans, C. Day Lewis: The Aeneid, read by Olivia Darnley

00:16:12: Virgil trans. Sarah Ruden: The Aeneid, read by Olivia Darnley and John Sackville

00:18:10: Virgil, trans. John Dryden: The Aeneid, read by Olivia Darnley and John Sackville

00:24:13: Purcell: When I am laid in earth (from Dido and Aeneas)

Joyce DiDonato (mezzo), Il pomo d'oro, Maxim Emelyanychev (conductor)

00:28:13: Magnus Lindberg: Graffitti

Finish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo (conductor)

00:28:32: Virgil, trans. Robert Fitzgerald: The Aeneid, read by Olivia Darnley

00:30:47: Shostakovich: Symphony No 4 in C minor

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons (conductor)

Label: DG 4835220

00:31:16: H.V.Morton: A Traveller in Rome, read by John Sackville

00:37:17: Rachmaninov: The Isle of the Dead

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

00:41:44: Purcell, arr. David Rees-Williams: Dido's lament (When I am laid in earth)

David Rees-Williams Trio

00:47:26: Ursula Le Guin: Lavinia, read by Olivia Darnley

00:51:00: Virgil trans. Sarah Ruden: The Aeneid, read by Olivia Darnley and John Sackville

00:51:27: Tippett: King Priam

London Sinfonietta, David Atherton (conductor)

00:52:52: Scriabin: Prometheus, the Poem of Fire

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Martha Argerich, piano, Claudi Abbado, conductor

00:52:53: Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes: Metamorphoses, read by John Sackville and Olivia Darnley

00:53:58: Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64

Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, David Zinman (conductor)

00:58:08: Ravel: Daphnis Et Chlo退 1耀re Partie: 4. Danse G退n退rale

Orchestre National de France, Eliahu Inbal (conductor)

01:00:03: Dutilleux: Symphony No 2

Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot (conductor)

01:01:40: Caroline Lawrence: Queen of the silver arrow, read by John Sackville and Olivia Darnley

01:06:28: Stravinsky: Requiem Canticles: Postludium

SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Symphony Orchestra, Michael Gielen (conductor)

01:08:11: J.S.Bach: Ascension Oratorio, BWV 11: Ach, bleibe doch, mein liebstes Leben

Iestyn Davies (counter tenor), Retrospect Ensemble, Matthew Halls (conductor)

01:08:20: Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes: Metamorphoses, read by John Sackville and Olivia Darnley

Episodes from the story of Aeneas, read by Olivia Darnley and John Sackville.

The Afterlife20100829Sophie Okonedo and Paul Copley read poetry and prose on the theme of the Afterlife, from heaven and hell to paradise and purgatory. Ultimately the question of what lies beyond the grave impacts us all.shall we be reunited with lost loved ones or be able to return to those we've left behind in some ghostly form? Shall we find peace at last, eternal damnation, or worse, oblivion?

Hamlet faces his father's ghost, Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting tells of an encounter between two dead soldiers, and in Paradise Lost Satan considers the advantages of ruling in Hell. Whilst contemporary novelists Julian Barnes and Alice Seebold place their protagonists in very different versions of Heaven.

With a mixture of accompanying music by John McCabe, Charles Ives, Britten, Liszt, Schumann, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Gluck, Keith Jarrett and Johnny Cash.

Texts and music on the theme of the afterlife. Readings by Sophie Okonedo and Paul Copley.

The Anatomy Of Melancholy20070930Writings on melancholy by Robert Burton, Keats and Gray, plus music by Dowland and Purcell
The Ark20090920What does the story of The Ark mean to us today? Is it a Darwinian fable about survival? Is it a prophecy of impending ecological disaster? Or is it a blunt cautionary tale for an ungodly age?However you choose to read it, the tale of Noah and his Ark has proved perennially fascinating.

Blake and Milton jostle for space in the hold of our virtual ark with comic turns from Chaucer, Julian Barnes and Stanley Holloway amongst others, while actors Claire Skinner and Andrew Scott keep things shipshape. The musical animals are of the highest pedigree too - so count on hearing from Britten, Saint Saens, Bruch and Rossini.

As a concession to modernity, you can listen to the programme on your own if you insist but if you're really going to enter into the spirit of the enterprise, you should pair off with someone else - 'two by two' was, after all, the traditional arrangement.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music focusing on the story of Noah and the Ark.

The Art Of Forgetting2017101520180513 (R3)As part of Radio 3's Why Music? The Key to Memory weekend in collaboration with the Wellcome Collection this week's Words and Music is called 'The Art of Forgetting', Actors Claire Benedict (The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency) and David Neilson (Coronation Street) read literary musings on forgetting and forgetfulness. With prose and poetry from Ogden Nash, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip K Dick, Milan Kundera and others. Music includes Debussy, Purcell, Philip Glass, Villa-Lobos and Jacques Brel. The programme starts with humour and gravitates to more serious matters, exploring what an essential human quality it is to forget. The Art of Forgetting embraces the story of 'S', the Russian mnemonist whose memory demonstrated no distinct limits, a lost soul who was simply unable to forget.

Claire Benedict and David Neilson read literary musings on forgetting and forgetfulness.

The Art Of Friendship2010051620110320 (R3)Readers Robert Lindsay and Diana Quick.

An exploration of the art of friendship as celebrated through the ages in poetry, prose and music. For all the thousands of poems on love, there are distinctly fewer on what could be seen as love's neglected cousin, friendship. And yet friendship is as common to the human experience as love, and probably just as necessary.

How should we make friends, keep friends, lose them...? What happens to friendships as we get older? Do men and women see friendship in the same way? What is the true nature of friendship - and is it all it's sometimes cracked up to be?

Words from Plutarch, Sir Francis Bacon, Ogden Nash, Auden, T.S.Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edward Thomas and others, with music to complement the readings.

Texts and music about the art of friendship. Readers are Robert Lindsay and Diana Quick.

The Ascent Of Man2009021520101220 (R3)The idea of the ‘Ascent of Man', triggered by the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, became for me a thrilling passageway to a vast and multi-layered territory. After reading excerpts from his Journals and Autobiography, in particular those relating to his trip to South America -where my own roots are- a clear idea came to mind: to portray in ‘Words and Music' the many different types of journeys he made throughout his life. I mean not only the voyage on board the Beagle, of course, but his other two parallel journeys: the intellectual and spiritual transformations Darwin so bravely went through as he travelled, in body, mind and spirit, in search of the origins of nature.

The texts I've selected here to illustrate this three-fold journey, read by actors Henry Goodman and Jemima Rooper, include excerpts from Darwin himself, but also from some Victorian poets, contemporary of the scientist, eager to reflect the influence his innovative vision brought to their craft.

A crucial and modern contribution to the mix though, comes in the shape of readings by Ruth Padel, a prize-winning poet and herself direct descendant of Darwin, who's written about nature and who contributes here -the way I see it- by putting some of his famous ancestor's concerns into today's context. Her readings include excerpts from her latest book, ‘Darwin: A Life in Poems', just published to coincide with the famous scientist's anniversary.

Now, music becomes another voice in this journey: the taped songs of the biggest sea mammals in Hovahaness ‘And God Created Great Whales', or the ritual dance for the killing of a snake in Revueltas' ‘Sensemayက', or the subliminal message of ‘Koyaanisqatsi' -‘world out of balance'-, Philip Glass' soundtrack inspired in the language of a native American tribe. They all represent nature and the world that so much excited Darwin.

Juan Carlos Jaramillo (producer)

Ruth Padel and Henry Goodman read prose and verse exploring the idea of the Ascent of Man.

The Best Days Of Our Lives2009061420100117 (R3)Sarah Lancashire and Paul Copley read works about the experience of going to school.
The Black Sun2020080920240128 (R3)John Donne's poetry was read and quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Los Alamos laboratory which developed the atomic bomb. With the film version of his story gaining award nominations here's another chance to hear a Words and Music first broadcast to mark the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August 1945. Readers Iain Glen and Kae Alexander (who was born in Kobe in Japan), read work by Japanese writers, including Hiroshima survivors Nakamura On and Sadako Kurihara; poetry by Allen Ginsberg, John Donne, Ukrainian poet and Chernobyl survivor Liubov Sirota and the British writer Susan Wicks. The programme includes extracts from the journalist John Hersey's Hiroshima, first broadcast on The Third Programme in 1948, an unflinching account of some of the survivors Hersey met. There's also an excerpt from John Osbourne's 1956 play Look Back In Anger, capturing the cynicism and sense of dread that reverberated across the world in the years after the Atomic bombings. Musically, Japan is evoked by shakuhachi player Toshimitsu Ishikawa and koto player Kimio Eto, there's also music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Electronic pioneer Isao Tomita. You'll also hear part of Krzysztof Penderecki's harrowing piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and music from Hildur Gudnadottir's award-winning score for the television series Chenobyl – plus songs by country duo The Louvin Brothers, pop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Kate Bush, dealing with the fear and ferment of the Nuclear age.

READINGS:

Ota Yoko, translated by Richard H Minear extract from Hiroshima, City of Doom

Nakamura On, translated Kyoko Selden extract from City in Flames

John Hersey excerpt from Hiroshima

Shoji Tokie translated by Kyoko and Mark Selden Hiroshima is without light a white white city

Allen Ginsberg extract from Plutonian Ode

Seirai Yuicho, translated by Paul Warham extract from Insects

Taruma Yoshikazu translated by Kyoko and Mark Selden Firefly in an orphan's hands

Ed Simon extract from Extract from Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance's Radicalism

Susan Wicks Nuclear

William E Stafford At the Bomb Testing Site

Suga Takashi translated by by Kyoko and Mark Selden In the cathedral in the ruins of boundless expanse

W.H Auden extract from September 1, 1939

Debora Greger Ship Burial

Peter Porter Your Attention Please

Liubov Sirota, translated by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie extract from Radiophobia

John Osbourne extract from Look Back In Anger

Stuart Evers extract from The Blind Light

Sadako Kurihara, translated by Richard Minear Let Us Be Midwives! An untold story of the atomic bombing

Inspired by Robert Oppenheimer's work on the first atomic bomb and the fall-out from that.

Iain Glen and Kae Alexander read extracts from survivors of Hiroshima, John Hersey's journalism, poems by John Donne, with music by Sakamoto, John Adams and Hildur Gudnadottir.

The Black Sun: Marking 75 Years Since The First Atomic Bomb20200809This edition of Words and Music marks 75 years since the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th August 1945, and explores the fallout from that world-defining moment in poetry, prose and music. Readers Iain Glen and Kae Alexander (who was born in Kobe in Japan), read work by Japanese writers, including Hiroshima survivors Nakamura On and Sadako Kurihara; and poetry by Allen Ginsberg, John Donne, Ukrainian poet and Chernobyl survivor Liubov Sirota and the British writer Susan Wicks. The programme includes excerpts from the journalist John Hersey's Hiroshima, first broadcast on The Third Programme in 1948, an unflinching account of some of the survivors Hersey met. There's also an excerpt from John Osbourne's 1956 play Look Back In Anger, capturing the cynicism and sense of dread that reverberated across the world in the years after the Atomic bombings. Musically, Japan is evoked by shakuhachi player Toshimitsu Ishikawa and koto player Kimio Eto, there's also music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Electronic pioneer Isao Tomita. You'll also hear part of Krzysztof Penderecki's harrowing piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and music from Hildur Gudnadottir's award-winning score for the television series Chenobyl - plus songs by country duo The Louvin Brothers, pop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Kate Bush, dealing with the fear and ferment of the Nuclear age.
The Body2020112920220403 (R3)From the tattoos on Queequeg in Moby Dick to the schoolboys in Nicholas Nickleby, the diaries of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison to the experience of excavating an Iron Age tomb, medieval manuscripts to studies of the gut - today's programme reflects research into different aspects of the body undertaken by New Generation Thinkers.

As Radio 3 marks the fact that 100 early career academics have now come through the scheme run in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio - this episode features new non fiction writing by ten New Generation Thinkers read by the actors Deeivya Meir and Ewan Bailey with published authors Sarah Jackson, Sandeep Parmar, Preti Taneja and Peter Mackay reading their own poems and prose.

The musical pieces range from Mahler to the Delta Rhythm Boys via Scriabin and Missy Mazzoli.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

You can find a playlist of discussions, short documentaries and Essays featuring New Generation Thinkers on the Free Thinking programme website.

From tattoos to massage, pregnancy to posture devices, excavations to emotional outbursts.

The Bridge2017012220200913 (R3)An exhilarating leap in the dark and a feat of engineering. Bridges shape our world, whether they're constructions thrown across a raging torrent, or synaptic sparks that help us understand each other converting incomprehension into meaning.

In the year which has seen Tower Bridge across the Thames marking its 125th anniversary this Words and Music features readings by Paapa Essiedu and Alice St Clair.

We travel from west to east on the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, which links Europe to Asia; move to the fateful Tallahatchie Bridge in Mississippi made famous in Bobby Gentry's song; and brood on the rainbow bridge that inspired Wagner. Other musical choices range from George Gershwin and Benjamin Britten, to Sonny Rollins, who practised his saxophone alone on the Williamsburg Bridge to Sally Beamish 'Bridging the Day'. There's a bit of loitering under the arch of a railway bridge while W. H. Auden cocks an ear to a lover's song; Thomas Hood's influential Victorian poem about a suicide on Waterloo Bridge; and a dizzy descent into the mechanical heart of Tower Bridge where Iain Chambers recorded his musique concrete composition - Bascule Chambers.

Readings:

Geert Mak First sight of the Galata Bridge 3 extracts.

W. H. Auden As I walked out one Evening

Thomas Hood The Bridge of Sighs

Seamus Heaney Scaffolding

Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Leonard Cottrell Pont du Carrousel

T. S. Eliot From The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead

William Wordsworth Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

R. S. Thomas Ninetieth Birthday

Octavio Paz translated by Eliot Weinberger The Bridge

Geert Mak From The Bridge (Last sight of the Galata Bridge)

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Readings by Paapa Essiedu and Alice St Clair take us from London to Paris and Istanbul.

The Chessboard2018061720211229 (R3)Adjoa Andoh and Henry Goodman read extracts from Han Kang's The White Book, Shakespeare's Othello, Philip Larkin's Sympathy in White Major and the Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam. Our music ranges from Shostakovich to The Rolling Stones Paint it Black, via the piece by Chopin in G Flat major, Op.10, No.5 which is known as the Black Key etude, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Rokia Traore in a programme that zig zags like a knight, soars like a bishop and plods like a pawn. We take in the subject of race in America, the look of snowfall in Alsace, and the bright white magic of an anchovy shoal glimpsed in the pitch dark and described in Herman Melville's novel about the Great White Whale Moby Dick and our journey from white to black and back starts with the topsy-turvy world of Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Readings from Adjoa Andoh and Henry Goodman. Music from Shostakovich to The Rolling Stones

The Curse Of Narcissus20240317Vanity and self examination inspired this week's selection of readings from literature that mirror the Ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell hopelessly in love with his own reflection.

There's Snow White's wicked step-mother and her magic mirror, Dorian Gray's painting in the attic, and excerpts from 'The Great Gatsby', 'Gone with the Wind', 'Persuasion' and Janet Fitch's 1999 exploration of narcissism - 'White Oleander', alongside poems by Shakespeare, Linda Pastan, Philip Freneau, Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath.

Featured music includes Mozart's 'Don Giovanni', Lully's 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme', and evocations of Narcissus by Mel Bonis, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Karol Szymanowski, James Oswald & Eleanor Alberga, as well as explorations of vanity from Carly Simon and Right Said Fred.

Readers: Nancy Carroll and Matthew Gent

Producer in Salford: Les Pratt

Readings:

Echo & Narcissus [Tales from Ovid] by Ted Hughes

Narcissus by Guy Whetmore Carryl

Narcissus at 60 by Linda Pastan

Among the Narcissi by Sylvia Plath

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Sonnet No.62 by William Shakespeare

On Earth we're briefly gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Snow White by The Brothers Grimm

In Church by Thomas Hardy

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

The Vanity of Existence by Philip Freneau

From Ancient Greek vanities, via Dorian Gray & Jay Gatsby to Janet Fitch's White Oleander

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Nancy Carroll & Matthew Gent read on the subject of vanity, with excerpts from 'Snow White', 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Persuasion' alongside music by Britten, Lully & Carly Simon.

The Dance2021082220221127 (R3)Writers including Zadie Smith, Hilaire Belloc, William Shakespeare, Alonso Cueto, Clive James, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, Christopher Marlowe and Hanif Abdurraqib, depict the feeling and joy of dancing, but also explore dance as a carrier of social and cultural values across times and civilizations. Music comes from, among others, Piazzolla, Monteverdi, Prokofiev, Satie as well as Indian Classical music, Peruvian folk dances, flamenco guitar, and also tap dance and Soul music.

Readers are Dominic Mafham and Sakuntala Ramanee.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

Readings

A Treatise in the Art of Dancing (1762), by Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

Dancer, by Colum McCann

Spanish dancer, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Swing Time, by Zadie Smith

A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, by Hanif Abdurraqib

Yo Soy Maria, from Maria de Buenos Aires, lyrics by Horacio Ferrer

First tango, by Clive James tango

Song for a Banjo Dance, by Langston Hughes

Much Ado About Nothing (Act 2, Sc 1), by William Shakespeare

London 1945, by Maureen Waller

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

Bharatanatyam, by Tahera Mannan

The Blue Hour, by Alonso Cueto

The Passionate Shepherd To His Love, by Christopher Marlowe

Tarantella, by Hilaire Belloc

The Mock Turtle's Song, by Lewis Carroll

From Bharatanatyam to ballroom, tango and tap to the tarantella.

The Detectives2015041920171229 (R3)Readings and pieces inspired by some of fiction's greatest detectives, including Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Inspector Morse

Music includes works by Wagner, Janacek and Rimsky-Korsakov, with songs from Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan and Charles Mingus

Extracts - from noir classics, Charles Dickens and Sara Paretsky - read by Hayley Atwell and Mark Strong.

Readings and music inspired by some of fiction's greatest detectives.

The Doors Of Perception2010040420101222 (R3)The unifying idea behind this edition of Words and Music is that reality is variable and personal. The texts, read by Jim Broadbent and Miranda Richardson, cover the best part of 2000 years from the Bible's Book of Revelation, to last year's 'Late' by Christopher Reid.

It's striking that, despite the various ways of coming to that reality (religion, a refined sensibility, illness, mind-altering drugs), these visions share many similarities. The weird animal hell-on-earth of Revelation is echoed in Thomas De Quincey's opium nightmares; Baudelaire's bedroom (while he's on a high, at least) is as perfect and intoxicating as the heavenly paradise described by the fourth-Century St Ephrem. Coleridge's trippy 'Kubla Khan' features another Oriental paradise with hints of something disturbing but distant; Alice's mushroom has very peculiar effects. The experience of Julian of Norwich, alternating between ecstasy and pain, and the fevered ravings of Sylvia Plath are strangely similar; Blake sees the infinite in the small and apparently insignificant, and after a long marriage Christopher Reid still feels the presence of his dead wife. Funnily enough, it's Aldous Huxley with his rather too well organised mescalin experiment who stays earthbound. The music ranges from Bach to Zappa, by way of (among others) Mahler, Ravel, Debussy, Messiaen, Crumb and Cage.

Producer: David Papp.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music centring on altered states and visions.

The Double2009050320090802 (R3)A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the disturbing world of shadows and ghostly doubles, with readings by Janie Dee and Nicholas Farrell.

With works by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dostoevsky, Heine, Wilde, Robert Lowell and Khalil Ghibran, interspersed with music by Bach, Boulez, Schubert and Steve Reich.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the world of ghostly doubles.

The Ear's Delight20150926Texts and music on the theme of the power of music. With Tamsin Greig and Alex Jennings.
The Emperor's New Clothes20230219Jane Austen's Catherine in Northanger Abbey wonders what she should wear to the ball, while Dickens's Miss Havisham still wears her wedding clothes years after she was ditched. Aldous Huxley considers the folds in his trousers, and Diogenes folds his cloak in two for summer. Jenny Joseph threatens to wear purple when she is old, and the Emperor parades without any clothes at all. And in London Fashion Week we celebrate the wild and wonderful life and work of the late Vivienne Westwood. There's music from Prokofiev's Cinderella, Richard Strauss's Salome, Anoushka Shankar, P J Harvey and JS Bach. Our readers are Julia Winwood and Jonathan Keeble.

Producer in Salford: Nick Holmes

You might be interested in a discussion on Free Thinking about a poetry exhibition inspired by fashion at the National Poetry Library at London's Southbank Centre. Shahidha Bari discusses the display of writing by Gwendolyn Brooks, Stevie Smith, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Audre Lorde with the exhibition organisers Sarah Parker and Gesa Werner.

Music and readings on our relationship with the clothes we wear - or sometimes don't.

The Environment2022100220230604 (R3)From poplar trees felled in 1879 through fires in Australia and the Amazon to the balm of river swimming: at a time when the effects of climate change and global warming are becoming increasingly evident, our relationship with the planet that we live on has never been under such close scrutiny. Inevitably these are issues that find expression in the works of writers, composers and artists and have done for some time. In readings by Chlo뀀 Sommer and Ewan Bailey we find Gerard Manley Hopkins mourning the felling of some beloved poplar trees back in 1879. More recently Les Murray writes of devastating wildfires in Australia 'We have heard that the smoke from this coast was seen far out over/the curve of the earth, on the open Pacific, on islands', while in 'Bottled Macaw' Pascale Petit considers the threat of smuggling endangered species to biodiversity. There's also an extract from Rachel Carson's classic environmental work 'Silent Spring' about pesticides published in 1962 . The music ranges from Luna Pearl Woolf's 'Apr耀s moi, le d退luge', written in response to the catastrophic flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina, to Heitor Villa Lobos's evocation of a forest fire in the Amazon, to Marvin Gaye's 1971 elegy for the environment 'Mercy Mercy Me'. But there is room for hope too. In 'Swims' Elizabeth-Jane Burnett celebrates the literal immersion in nature offered by river-swimming and environmentalist Bill McKibben asks 'What would it mean . . . if we began to truly and viscerally think of ourselves as just one species among many?'. Music suggesting the possibility of a better future includes Re-Greening by Tansy Davies and a piece by electronica duo Orbital that was recorded in a solar-powered studio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Readings & *Music

*John Luther Adams - The Circle of Suns and Moons

Les Murray - The Fire Autumn

*Heitor Villa-Lobos - Floresta do Amazonas: Forest Fire

*Karen Young - Ode to Nature: I. Migrating Monarchs

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring

*Laurie Anderson, Kronos Quartet - All the Extinct Animals

Jeff VanderMeer - Hummingbird Salamander

*Olivier Messiaen - Oiseaux Exotiques

Pascale Petit - Bottled Macaw

*Fazil Say - Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 82 'Mount Ida' - II. Wounded Bird

Elizabeth Jennings - Introduction to a Landscape

*Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 `Pastoral`: IV. Donner - Storm (allegro)

*Sarah Collins - Forest Piece

Adrienne Rich - What Kind of Times Are These

Gerard Manley Hopkins - Binsey Poplars

*The Beach Boys - A Day in the Life of a Tree

*Orbital - The Girl with the Sun in Her Head

Stephanie Burt - Advice from Rock Creek Park

Heather McHugh - Webcam the World

*Stephen Montague - Tsunami

Elizabeth Bishop - The Imaginary Iceberg

*Neets'aii Gwich'in - Caribou Song

*Philip Glass - Cloudscape

Amanda Thompson - Be/Longing

Imbolo Mbue - How Beautiful We Were

*Luna Pearl Woolf - Apr耀s moi, le d退luge: II. Deep in the Water, Too Deep for Tears

Patrick Hamilton - Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse

*George Enescu - Voix de la nature 'Nuages d'automne sur les forꀀts

J. O. Morgan - Then, Again

*Marvin Gaye - Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)

*Joytown - 10 Minutes of Climate Change

David Morley - The Grace of JCBs

*Ularhan Qaharman & Baqytbek - Our Rich Nature (Huo A Lei)

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett - Swims: Preface

*Tansy Davies - Re-Greening

Bill McKibben - The End of Nature

*Peter Gabriel & Robert Fripp - Here Comes The Flood

Reflections on our increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world.

The Eternal City2011082120141230 (R3)Sian Phillips and Peter Marinker with words and music about everyday life in Ancient Rome including texts by Pliny, Juvenal, Dickens, Henry James, Mark Twain, W.H Auden & Kipling. And music by Wagner, Carl Orff, Nino Rota, Stephen Sondheim, John Williams, Respighi, Allegri, Berlioz, Britten and Puccini.

Texts and music about life in ancient Rome. Readers: Sian Phillips and Peter Marinker.

The Exotic2011082820120708 (R3)~Words And Music on the theme of The Exotic. Readings by Greta Scacchi and Simon Woods.

Distant lands full of heat, opulence and mysterious inhabitants; lost civilisations full of entrancing women and god-like warriors have provided vivid inspiration to authors and composers across the centuries. The Exotic has meant different things to different generations: from Shakespeare's visions of a savage island full of unnerving sights and sounds, informed by the era of exploration and brutal empire building in which he lived; to the rich visions of the romantics: Coleridge's Xanadu and Byron's Childe Harolde who wonders in landscapes described with the linguistic lushness of love poetry. Musical and literary experiences of exoticism are often about western artists seduced by a vision of otherness which is little more than a mirage: from Mozart's typically eighteenth century take on a Turkish harem to Kipling's colonial representations of India. Yet from the excitement of imagined faraway lands and people comes the lush beauty of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and the delicate orientalism of Debussy's Pagodes. Gustave Flaubert's entrancing Salammb䀀 and Shakespeare's glittering Cleopatra offer visions of exotic womanhood; the goddess who commands adulation and fear in equal measure - like the distant corners of the earth from which she comes.

Producer: Georgia Mann.

Texts and music on the theme of the exotic. Readings by Greta Scacchi and Simon Woods.

The Faerie World2009051020091224 (R3)A selection of poetry, prose and music on the theme of the fairy tradition, with readings by Stella Gonet and Robert Glenister.

Including works by Keats, Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti and Yeats interspersed with music by Stravinsky, Judith Weir, Schubert, Purcell and Kathryn Tickell.

Poetry and music in the fairy tradition. Readings from Stella Gonet and Robert Glenister.

The Fight Between Carnival And Lent2017050720180218 (R3)Jenny Agutter and Peter Wight with readings and music inspired by the 1559 oil painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The painting depicts the folk traditions surrounding Carnival and Lent in the German lands in the early decades of the Reformation. The selection of music and readings explores the more universal struggle, between the desire to eat, drink, and let lose, embodied in Carnival, and the spirit of restraint and self-control personified in Lent. Including readings from Rabelais, Baudelaire, Donne, and Emily Dickinson, and music from Verdi, Mozart, Bach and Penderecki.

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

First broadcast in May 2017 as part of Radio 3's Breaking Free season of programming exploring the impact of Martin Luther's Revolution.

Texts and music inspired by a 1559 Bruegel painting. Readers: Jenny Agutter, Peter Wight.

The Four Temperaments2011120420140316 (R3)Texts and music about the Four Temperaments. Readings by Joe Dunlop and Joanna Tope.
The Full Montaigne2012061020141019 (R3)Jim Broadbent plays Michel de Montaigne, whose 'Essays' entertainingly ponder sex, marriage, animals, memory, and cruelty in an attempt to answer one question: 'How to live?' With music including Bach, Ligeti, Mendelssohn and Randy Newman.

Montaigne drew on a lifetime of experience and observation, but far from inscrutable musings, the Essays are often earthy and direct - at once scatological and astute, philosophical and witty, playful and profound.

The Essays were first published in 1580 and are positively Shakespearian, both in their range and in their humanism. Montaigne speaks as himself, directly and in clear prose, and says the most extraordinarily heretical things. Some of his arguments include the notion that human beings are on a par with the animals and that they are just a tiny part of Nature, all of which deserves equally to be respected and that death is just the end of life and it is life which is the important thing.

In 1676 the Vatican caught up with Montaigne the best part of a century after his death when the Essays were put on its index of prohibited books, where they stayed until 1854. The Essays have been continuously available for the last four and a half centuries not only because they are engaging and entertaining but also because of the spark of self-revelation they so often generate.

In this programme, seasoned Montaignistes will find themselves recognising an old friend, and those coming to the Essays for the first time will find a new one.

David Papp, producer

First broadcast June 2012.

Jim Broadbent plays Michel de Montaigne. Includes music by Bach, Ligeti and Randy Newman.

The Games That People Play20240107Chess, dominos, cards, roulette, dice, children's playground games and contemporary computer games are the inspiration for today's programme with readings by Glen McCready and Christina Cole from texts including the ancient Indian Mahabharata where a king loses his wife and his kingdom playing dice, George Eliot's Felix Holt which compares life with a board game, and Pushkin bring us revenge in The Queen of Spades. We also hear about other aspects of game play: psychological games - the mind games that humans play on each other - as well as social and political games. There are readings from Dangerous Liaisons; Dickens's Great Expectations, John Fowles' The Magus and from Patrick Hamilton's play Gaslight. And bringing us up right up to date we log on to the imaginative world of computer gaming, referencing the likes of Super Mario, Alan Wake, Final Fantasy, and Portal.

Featured music is provided by composers including Arthur Bliss, Francois Couperin, Michael Nyman and Mozart - including a few rolls of the dice from his Musical Dice Game - as well as Kurtag, Xenakis, Ramin Djawadi, John Willams, Kenny Rogers and Queen.

Producer: Chris Wines

You can find more programmes inspired by game playing in Radio 3's arts and ideas programme Free Thinking (9th January) and the monthly Sound of Gaming (6th January and available now on BBC Sounds)

READINGS:

Cheng'en Wu: The Journey to the West

Lewis Carroll: Alice Through the Looking Glass

George Eliot: Felix Holt, the Radical

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liasions Dangereuses

T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land – II. “A Game of Chess ?

William Shakespeare: The Tempest (Act V)

Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa: The Mahabharata (Book 2 – LXIV)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Gambler

Alexander Pushkin: Queen of Spades

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

John Fowles: The Magus

Patrick Hamilton: Gaslight

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes – ‘The Adventure of the Abbey Grange

Rabindranath Tagore: Playthings

Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game

Grantland Rice: Alumnus Football

Ian M Banks: The Player of Games

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games

Rick Burroughs: Alan Wake

Ken Nesbitt: The Games in My Room

From chess to computer games via dominoes and dice.

Christina Cole and Glen McCready read from novels including George Eliot's Felix Holt, John Fowles' The Magus and Dickens' Great Expectations. Music by Prokofiev, Nyman, Queen.

The Garden2018011420190526 (R3)Sally Phillips and Bertie Carvel read poems and texts encompassing public gardens, secret gardens, magical gardens, and paradise gardens.

Jane Eyre is hiding in one, Peter Rabbit is escaping from one, the collector of plants John Tradescant is tending one, and the gothic novel heroine Rebecca de Winter's has been completely taken over by nature. Whether a place to relax, play, be seen or to hide, the garden serves many purposes in literature, as in life. There are public gardens such as Spring Gardens in Vauxhall, the place to be seen in the mid-18th century, boasting summer concerts and a fine statue of Handel. Oscar Wilde describes Paris's equivalent, the Jardin des Tuileries, a painting of which is included in Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition. Including music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, Rebecca Clarke and Takemitsu.

Producer: Ellie Mant

Readings:

Anon: Genesis from The Bible (King James Version)

James Merrill: A Vision of the Garden

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass

WB Yeats: Down by the Salley Gardens

Elizabeth Jennings: Her Garden

Philippa Gregory: Earthly Joys

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Beloved, thou has brought me many flowers

Sir John Hawkins: A General History of the Science and Practice of Music

Charles Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby

Oscar Wilde: Le Jardin des Tuileries

Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca

Beatrix Potter: Peter Rabbit

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

WH Auden: Their Lonely Betters

Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Garden

John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids

Alfred Tennyson: The Gardener's Daughter

Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden

Sally Phillips and Bertie Carvel read poems and texts on the theme of The Garden.

The Geography Of A Home2008040620090815 (R3)Belinda Lang and David Bamber read poems on the theme of houses and homes. Celebrating the idea of the physical building of a home, and the lives that change within it, poetry comes from WH Auden, Philip Larkin, Robert Service and Ivor Gurney. Music by Sibelius, Chopin, Holst, Copland, Chris Rea and The Beatles.
The Georgians20230423From Jane Austen and Bridgerton to the music of Handel, the Georgian era is constantly on our screens and playlists. Today's programme celebrates the literature and music of the Georgian era - from the reign of George I in the early 18th Century to the death of George IV in 1830. We'll hear an extract from Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III, and from Julia Quinn's Regency-era Bridgerton romances, now a Netflix hit starring our readers today: Kathryn Drysdale (who plays Madame Delacroix in the series) and Luke Thompson (Benedict Bridgerton).

The Georgian public devoured Jane Austen novels and gothic horror like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The poets Wordsworth, Blake, Burns, Shelley and Byron made their names, and we'll also hear celebrity actress and poet Mary Robinson's description of a bustling London morning, and Felicia Hemens's poem in praise of the Homes of England of her time. More recently, stately Georgian houses have inspired singer-songwriter Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy.

Georg Frideric Handel was top maestro in Georgian England for half a century - we'll hear from his Water Music and oratorio Messiah. We'll also hear from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, an operatic adaptation of one of Georgian author Walter Scott's popular romantic novels, Isobel Waller-Bridge's score to the 2020 film version of Austen's Emma, part of Iron Maiden's epic heavy-metal take on Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale in Russian translation set by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.

Producer: Graham Rogers

You can find episodes of Free Thinking exploring the Georgian period hearing about new research from academics, an exhibition opening at the Queen's Gallery in London called Style and Society: Dressing the Georgians, and the TV series Bridgerton and its spin off about Queen Charlotte.

READINGS:

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Mary Robinson: London's Summer Morning

Samuel Richardson: Clarissa

Sally Holloway: The Game of Love in Georgian England

Julia Quinn: An Offer from a Gentleman (Bridgerton book 3)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

William Hazlitt: My First Acquaintance with Poets

Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho

Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey

GK Chesterton: The novels of Jane Austen

Felicia Hemans: The Homes of England

Alan Bennett: The Madness of George III

Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man

Ana Letitia Barbauld: The Rights of Woman

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Percy Shelley: Ozymandias

Music with readings by Kathryn Drysdale and Luke Thompson, currently seen in Bridgerton.

The Gift2018120220231226 (R3)Readers Kenneth Cranham and Nadine Marshall explore the excitement, and occasional disappointment, of giving and receiving. From the beleaguered sisters in Little Women, contemplating Christmas without presents, to the court of the Ottoman emperor in the 16th century, where Elizabeth I's envoys are presenting an extravagant musical gift. The gift of love and sex is explored by Shakespeare, John Donne and Andrew McMillan, and Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole reminds us how important totally useless gifts can be at Christmastime. The mildly festive musical gift wrap for this edition ranges from Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty and Poveri fiori from Francesco Cilèa's opera Adriana Lecouvreur, where the tragic Adriana has just opened a mysterious birthday present containing the wilted remains of the violets she once gave her beloved Maurizio.

Producer: Georgia Mann-Smith

Exploring the excitement, and occasional disappointment, of giving and receiving presents.

Readers Kenneth Cranham and Nadine Marshall explore the excitement, and occasional disappointment, of giving and receiving presents.

Readers Kenneth Cranham and Nadine Marshall explore the excitement (and occasional disappointment) of giving and receiving. From the beleaguered sisters in Little Women, contemplating Christmas without presents, to the court of the Ottoman Emperor in the 16th century, where Elizabeth I's envoys are presenting an extravagant musical gift. The gift of love and sex is explored by Shakespeare, John Donne and Andrew McMillan, and Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole reminds us how important totally useless gifts can be at Christmas time. The mildly festive musical gift wrap for this edition ranges from Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty and Poveri fiori from Francesco Cil耀a's opera Adriana Lecouvreur, where the tragic Adriana has just opened a mysterious birthday present containing the wilted remains of the violets she once gave her beloved Maurizio.

Exploring the excitement (and occasional disappointment) of giving and receiving presents.

The Glory Of The Garden20080831‘The Glory of the Garden

Gardens encapsulate the fundamentals of human existence: birth, reproduction death. The eternal process of renewal we see in a garden offers a wealth of material to poets and composers alike. This Words and Music traces some of the key ways that poets and musicians have been inspired by gardens, opening with Genesis Chapter two alongside the triumphal first chords of Haydn's oratorio The Creation. Milton's opulent portrayal of Eden in Paradise Lost offers a luxuriant vision of man's first garden, but beneath the glittering vistas lies the threat of man's impending fall. Joni Mitchell's call to ‘get ourselves back to the garden' in Woodstock signals a desire to return to our garden state which characterised the mood of her times, and echoes on into the present.

The metaphysics in their typically cerebral way, saw the garden as an ideal metaphysical puzzle, full of rich conceits to aid their exploration of man's relationship with God. George Herbert in ‘The Flower' takes the microcosmic world of the flower and uses it to interrogate man's endless striving upwards to god, and the miracle of god's ability to strike down and raise up.

But gardens have a dark side - they are the scene of death and mysterious, shadowy renewal as well as a place of seduction and subversion. The extract we hear from the Song of Solomon revels in the sensual, lushness of the garden, while Tennyson's desperate plea for Maud to ‘come into the garden' reveals an obsessive sexual pull which goes beyond the sedate Victorian fascination with posies and gardens. In Robert Lowell's bleak poem The Public Garden we see the desolation of a failed relationship reflected in the autumnal dryness of a deserted public space, mirrored by Messiaen's ghostly Jardin du sommeil d'amour from the Turangalila Symphony. Georgia Mann (producer)

Readers: Anton Lesser (AL) & Frances Barber (FB)

Haydn: The Creation, Introduction

English Baroque Soloists / Gardiner

ARCHIV 449217-2

King James Bible, Genesis 2: 8 - 10

John Milton: ‘Paradise Lost' (extract)

Joni Mitchell: Woodstock

REPRISE 9362463262

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (FHB)

Chapter 1, ‘The Robin Who Showed the Way

Turina: Marche from Jardin de ninos, Op. 63

Jordi Maso, piano

NAXOS 8.570026

Delius: In a Summer Garden

Halle / Handley

EMI 724357531528

W.H Auden: Their Lonely Betters

Debussy: Jardins sous la pluie

Alexis Weissenberg (piano)

DG 415510-2

Ch'u Ch'uang: Evening in the Garden, Clear after Rain

Translator, Kenneth Rexroth

Ketelby: In a Chinese Temple Garden

London Promenade Orchestra / Faris

PHILIPS 400011-2

Lockman/Boyce, arr Franklin: The Pleasures of Vauxhall Spring Gardens Catherine Bott, soprano

David Owen Norris, piano

HYPERION CDA67457

Extract: A letter from Alexander Pope to Lord Edward Blount in 1719

The Secret Garden by FHB,

Chapter 2 ‘The Key of the Garden

Nyman: The garden is becoming a robe room, from The Draughtsman's Contract

Michael Nyman Band

VENTURE DVEBN55

Antoine Brumel: Sicut Lilium

The Orlando Consort

HARMONIA MUNDI HMU907398

Extract from The Song of Solomon (verses 2:1 - 5; 4:12 - 5; 1; 7:11 - 13),

S. Levi arr. E. Bouskela: El Ginat Egoz

Ensemble Kol Aviv

ARION 2348735

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Maud (extract)

De Falla: En el Generalife from Nights in the Gardens of Spain

Philadelphia Orchestra / Ormandy

CBS MPK46449

Fats Waller: Honeysuckle Rose

From: Ain't Misbehaving

ASV CDAJA5174

Chapter 9 ‘The Strangest House Any One Ever Lived In

Faure: La Roses d'Ispahan

Felicity Lott, soprano

Graham Johnson, piano

HYPERION CDA66937

Juan Vasquez: En la Fuente del Rosel

HARMONIA MUNDI HMU907938

Tallis: O Sacrum Convivum

Rose Consort of Viols

DEUX-ELLESDXL1129

George Herbert: The Flower

The Secret Garden, by FHB

Chapter 13, ‘I Am Colin

Haydn: Sonata No. 60 in C major, Hob 16/50

Ronald Brautigam, fortepiano

BIS-CD-994

Byron: To a Lady Who Presented To The Author a Lock of Hair Braided With His Own, And Appointed At a Night In December To Meet Him In The Garden

(From Hours of Idleness - 1807)

Grainger: Counrty Gardens

RNCM Wind Orchestra / Reynish

CHANDOS CHAN9549

Delius: Walk to the Paradise Garden

Halle Orchestra / Handley

Chapter 20 ‘I Shall Live Forever

The Public Garden by Robert Lowell

Messiaen: Jardin du sommeil d'amour

Berlin Philharmonic / Nagano

TELDEC 573820432

Strauss: September

Karita Mattila, soprano

Berlin Philharmonic / Abbado

DG 445182-2

The Glory of the Garden by Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936)

Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

LPO / Boult

EMI CDC7472132

Readings of works by Milton and Auden interspersed with music by Delius and Messiaen.

The Gothic2011052220120122 (R3)This week Words and Music takes you into the darkened, turreted recesses of The Gothic. From the surreal, macabre beginnings of the genre in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to the tortured wanderings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; the gothic literary world is one of dark passions and ominous thrills. Work by Coleridge and Keats shows the romantic impulse which was extended and darkened by later gothic writing, arriving in the late nineteenth century at Oscar Wilde's haunting Picture of Dorian Gray. Musically, we venture back to the 12th century with the work of P退rotin who composed amidst the gothic splendour of Notre Dame cathedral, as well as pieces by Bach, Berlioz, Paganini and Rachmaninov.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of the gothic.

The Great Escape2017091020190102 (R3)Adrian Dunbar and Jade Anouka with readings which look at escaping life, love, war and family. From the terror of a monstrous battle in Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, to the thrilling Prisoner of War break-out in Paul Brickhill's novel The Great Escape. There's also the more existential desire to escape one's gender or relationship, dealt with by the likes of Christina Rossetti and Sylvia Plath. Then there's the escape we find in sleep and eventually death, explored by Shakespeare and Yeats. Mirroring the mood of our escapees is a soundtrack which features everything from Dowland to Ligeti, Elena Kaats-Chernin to Vaughan Williams.

Producer: Georgia Mann-Smith

From holidays to prison breaks, sleep and death, with Adrian Dunbar and Jade Anouka.

The Great God Pan20150503An invitation to Arcadia to celebrate the god Pan in poetry and music. Haydn Gwynne and Anton Lesser read work by Shelley, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter de la Mare, Kenneth Grahame and Ted Hughes. Debussy, Ravel, Dvorak, Carl Nielsen, Alberto Ginastera, Lionel Monkton and Pink Floyd provide music.

Producer: Philippa Ritchie.

Texts and music inspired by the god Pan, with readings by Haydn Gwynne and Anton Lesser.

The Haunting2012031120120825 (R3)Emilia Fox and Jamie Glover read a selection of poetry and prose exploring some of literature's most chilling supernatural hauntings - but also the idea of being haunted by a lover, the past or a place. Berlioz's 'Dies irae' from his 'Symphonie Fantastique' opens the programme - a piece haunted by the composer's vision of female perfection - followed by arguably the most famous haunted character in literary history, Shakespeare's Hamlet, reflecting on the appearance of his father's spirit. Thomas Hardy's 'The Haunter' and D.H Lawrence's 'Silence' capture the melancholy of being haunted by the memory of a loved one, while Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House' and Edgar Allan's Poe's 'The Haunted Palace' provide unsettling examples of haunted house literature. In Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice', his anti-hero Aschenbach wanders the labyrinthine Venetian streets, haunted by an obsessive sexual impulse; we hear Benjamin Britten's otherworldly musical imagining of the tale. And in Tennyson's poem 'A Spirit Haunts the Year's Last Hours' and Sir Arnold Bax's 'Into the Twilight', we glimpse nature in its haunted state: with the fading autumnal moments of the year, the spectral approach of winter and the growing shadows of the evening.

First broadcast in March 2012.

Texts and music on the theme of haunting, with readings by Emilia Fox and Jamie Glover.

The Idea Of West20120212Olivia Williams and Sean Arnold with poetry, prose and music on the idea of west, and the West - powerful concepts in many cultures.

In English and Irish thought the west is associated with happiness, the 'land of lost content', the Celtic land of eternal youth. The sun sets in the west, and our western edge is a seemingly endless ocean.

But what if we follow the sun? In America the west was certainly still the promised land for several centuries, though today the mythology is (to say the least) questioned.

From Russia and the Middle East, the West - and Western attitudes - look rather different.

And there's another recurring association of the west in Western thought... death. But a fascinatingly positive view of death.

Texts, music on the idea of west and the West. Readers: Olivia Williams and Sean Arnold.

The Kiss2014072020151224 (R3)Pippa Nixon and Jonathan Cullen read poems and prose about kisses, from Shakespeare's famous scene in Romeo and Juliet to Fleur Adcock's poem on 'Kissing', and from Herrick's romantic kisses to Sylvia Plath's warning, 'Never try to trick me with a kiss'. There are many types of kisses: the innocent first kisses of a baby, kisses of affection, the first romantic kiss, ritual kisses and the kisses of betrayal.

Music includes Stravinsky's 'The Fairy's Kiss' and Irving Berlin's 'Kiss me Honey'.

Texts and music about kisses, with readings by Pippa Nixon and Jonathan Cullen.

The Ledbury Poets2022070320230528 (R3)Actors Adrian Scarborough and Skye Hallam read prose and verse from Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds inspired by the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which runs in early July, set alongside a range of music. We hear work by poets who were born there or lived and worked in the region, like John Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Langland, and WH Auden. We also feature contemporary poets, who've taken part in the Ledbury festival, reading their own poems, like Jade Cuttle, Anthony Anaxagorou and Victoria Adukwei Bulley.

As for the music, we hear settings of some of these poems by the likes of John Ireland and Ivor Gurney, as well as pieces from composers associated broadly with the region, like Edward Elgar.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

TEXTS

Cotswold Love, by John Drinkwater (read by the poet)

Edward Thomas (excerpt), by Eleanor Farjeon

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, by William Wordsworth

Bright Clouds, by Edward Thomas

An ecology of words: four seasons - after Roland Barthes, by Jade Cuttle (read by the poet)

Prose excerpt on living in Gloucestershire, by Lascelles Abercrombie

The Voices of a Dream, by Lascelles Abercrombie

Reflections on arriving at Ledbury, by Katrina Porteous

Prologue (excerpt) from Piers Plowman, by William Langland (trans. by Peter Sutton)

Ode to the Medieval Poets, by WH Auden

Saying, by Anthony Anaxagorou (read by the poet)

Floating Island, by Dorothy Wordsworth

Sea Fever, by John Masefield (read by the poet)

On Malvern Hill, by John Masefield

Excerpt from letter, by Edward Thomas

The Dead, by Rupert Brooke

Under Storm's Wing (excerpt), by Helen Thomas

The Preparative, by Thomas Traherne

How Do I Love Thee?, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Trumpet, by Edward Thomas

This poem, by Victoria Adukwei Bulley (read by the poet)

A Musical Instrument, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In Pursuit of Spring (excerpt), by Edward Thomas

Prose and verse from Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds inspired by Ledbury Poetry Festival

The Long And Winding Road2018041520221229 (R3)Roads join the here and the there, the past and the present, the known and the unknown. They provide that important interim stage when change lies ahead. With readers Claire Rushbrooke and Paul Higgins, we'll go wandering down all sorts of roads, from the Road of the Wanderer to the Road of Paradise, with a selection of poetry and prose by Robert Frost, Nelson Mandela, Jospehine Peabody and Christina Rossetti among others. The musical accompaniment to our ramble comes courtesy of Vaughan Williams, Janacek, Haydn and The Hollies.

Producer: Dominic Wells

READINGS:

Thomas Hardy The Wanderer

Robert Morris Tarrying in the Shade

George Edward Woodberry 30

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

Rachel Hadas The Road

Josephine Peabody Road Songs

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Robert Frost The Road not Taken

John Gay The Art of Walking the Streets of London

Henry Clarence Kendall To Damascus

Minna Irving Marching Still

Aubrey Thomas De Vere The Meeting on Calvary

Gaius Valerius Catullus A Home-Coming

Christina Rosetti Saints and Angels

Music and writing on roads from Hardy to Nelson Mandela, Christina Rossetti to Catullus.

The Low Countries2013092220150712 (R3)Maxine Peake and Samuel West embark on a journey through dream and nightmare in the Low Countries. Treading the shifting boundary between land and sea, between memory and experience they navigate a course through a landscape which accommodates Erasmus as well as Louis Aragon, Louis Andriessen as well as Cesar Franck; a terrain that's home to nameless beasts as well as Flanders lilacs and a place where, though the light of reason shines brightly, the shadows cast are long and dark.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of the Low Countries. Readers: Maxine Peake and Samuel West.

The Messenger2017031220191224 (R3)From the message of the Angel Gabriel to the Go-Between and Juliet's nurse in Shakespeare's play - today's programme looks at the bringing of news, of assignations, birth and death and defeat on battlefields. With music from Gustav Holst and Carl Orff to John Adams, and poems and prose from Robert Browning and Anne Bronte to Vera Brittain. The readers are Ewan Bailey and Clare Perkins.

Readings

The Go-Between - LP Hartley

Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare

The Burial at Thebes - Seamus Heaney

Mary and Gabriel - Rupert Brooke

Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain

The Messenger - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Gabriel - Adrienne Rich

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bront뀀

Understanding Media - Marshal McLuhan

How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent - Robert Browning

The Electric Michaelangelo - Sarah Hall

Producer: Robyn Read.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music, with readings by Ewan Bailey and Clare Perkins.

The Metaphysical Soul2009112920100717 (R3)Anna Massey and Derek Jacobi read selections of poems by Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Carew and Andrew Marvell interspersed with the five sections of Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets by TS Eliot.

Including music by Mahler, Takemitsu, Britten, Byrd and Beethoven.

A selection of poems by metaphysical poets including Donne, George Herbert and Marvell.

The Metaphysicals20150809Works by 'metaphysical' poets, such as John Donne, George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet, read by Greta Scacchi and Christopher Eccleston. Music is by composers including Walton, Bernstein and Tavener

Some of the finest, most searching poetry of the seventeenth century came from a group of writers loosely known as 'the metaphysical poets'. Seeking to go beyond the literal meaning of words, to evoke feelings and conjure images hitherto unexplored, be they expressions of romantic love, religious devotion or awe of beauty.

Works by some of the metaphysical poets. Readers: Greta Scacchi and Christopher Eccleston.

The Mighty Oak2018062420231022 (R3)From Pooh Bear to John Clare - if you go down to the woods today you will hear readings by Sian Phillips and Joseph Mydell and music by Berlioz, Beethoven and Butterworth. We begin with Verdi and Smetana's operatic versions of Macbeth and a description of an American staging of Macbeth described in the novel by Richard Powers, The Overstory, which won him the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Winnie-the-Pooh comes unstuck looking for honey in an oak tree, while Aesop's fable contrasts the unbending oak with the more flexible reeds. Rhapsodic oak-themed poems come from Emily Dickinson, Lord Tennyson and Joseph Enright, and one tinged with wistful sadness from John Clare. We hear about oak wood furniture described in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, about coffins in a poem by W. Harrison Ainsworth and a passage from Samantha Harvey's novel set in the 15th century called The Western Wind where a man is woken from his sleep in an oak confession booth by news of a dead body. And as a metaphor for the end of things, the Scottish poet William Soutar's bleak vision of the cruel death of an oak under the axeman's gleam was set to music by Benjamin Britten in his song cycle for tenor and piano Who Are These Children? and ends our programme.

READINGS:

Shakespeare: Macbeth

Richard Powers: The Overstory

Anne Enright: The Acorn

James Frazer: The Golden Bough

Aesop: The Oak and the Reeds

Emily Dickinson: I Robbed the Woods

Alfred Tennyson: The Oak

AA Milne: Winnie the Pooh

John Clare: The Road Oak

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the French Revolution

Samantha Harvey: The Western Wind

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

W Harrison Ainsworth: The Old Oak Coffin

Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution

Readings by Sian Phillips and Joseph Mydell. Music by Verdi, Smetana and Britten.

Readings by Sian Phillips and Joseph Mydell. Music from Wuthering Heights, Bernard Herrmann's only opera, Butterworth's English Idyll No 1, and The Teddy Bears' Picnic.

From Pooh Bear to John Clare - if you go down to the woods today you will hear readings by Sian Phillips and Joseph Mydell and music by Berlioz, Beethoven and Butterworth. We begin with Verdi and Smetana's operatic versions of Macbeth and a description of an American staging of Macbeth described in the novel by Richard Powers, The Overstory, which won him the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Winnie-the-Pooh comes unstuck looking for honey in an oak tree, while Aesop's fable contrasts the unbending oak with the more flexible reeds. Rhapsodic oak-themed poems come from Emily Dickinson, Lord Tennyson and Joseph Enright, and one tinged with wistful sadness from John Clare. We hear about oak wood furniture described in Emily Bront뀀's Wuthering Heights, about coffins in a poem by W. Harrison Ainsworth and a passage from Samantha Harvey's novel set in the 15th century called The Western Wind where a man is woken from his sleep in an oak confession booth by news of a dead body. And as a metaphor for the end of things, the Scottish poet William Soutar's bleak vision of the cruel death of an oak under the axeman's gleam was set to music by Benjamin Britten in his song cycle for tenor and piano Who Are These Children? and ends our programme.

Emily Bront뀀: Wuthering Heights

The Moon2017123120190714 (R3)What would Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata sound like if it was played by the Moon? Tune in to this evening's edition of Words and Music and you can hear for yourself, thanks to a piece conceived by the sound artist Katie Paterson. Katie's piece, Earth-Moon-Earth, is part of a programme which celebrates the Moon - whether metaphorical green cheese or cruel, silvery goddess.

The Moon has always dazzled and puzzled us. Composers such as Beethoven, Chopin and Schoenberg and writers such as Larkin, Auden and Emily Dickinson have all fallen under her spell, and tonight's programme, featuring the actors Fenella Woolgar and Patrick O'Kane, is an invitation to succumb once more to her enchantment.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Readings:

Nocturne - James Attlee

This Lunar Beauty - W.H. Auden

With how sad steps - Sir Philip Sidney

Sad Steps - Philip Larkin

I watched the Moon around the house - Emily Dickinson

Drinking Alone - Li Po (trans Arthur Waley)

The Moon and the Yew Tree - Sylvia Plath

Preface to Frankenstein -Mary Shelley

Strange fits of Passion - William Wordsworth

Autumn - T.E. Hulme

Moon Landing - W.H. Auden

Icaromenippus - Lucian (trans Thomas Francklin)

The silvery goddess loved by poets and composers including music actually sent to the Moon

The News2018071520210523 (R3)From early morning radio bulletins and a daily paper, to TV and social media, The News is at the centre of our lives. It shapes conversations. It affects our mood. This edition travels from the 19th century, when newspapers were seen as noble messengers, to the 21st, with 24-hour rolling news on every screen.

Comical newshounds in novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Trollope, populate the first half of the programme, and poets Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope point a cynical finger at the tabloid press. Then the mood darkens as Siegfried Sassoon's WWI soldier humours a nave war reporter, and Joan Barton poignantly recalls watching the outbreak of WWII on a cinema newsreel. John Adams wrote his opera Nixon in China, inspired by the president's 1972 visit and the mythology surrounding it. Meanwhile the gut instincts and determination of investigative reporters Bernstein and Woodward were eventually to bring Nixon down.

Music, poetry and archive clips reflect key moments in history, such as Paul Simon's moving Seven O'Clock News/Silent Night, as Dr Martin Luther King visits Atlanta and America anticipates five more years of war in Vietnam, and Roger Woddis's outcry against the UK race riots in 1981. 20 years later, Andrew Marr watches the 9/11 terrorist attacks unfold in real time on a 24-hour rolling news service.

We hear themes used for news programmes by Malcolm Arnold, John Williams and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and incidental music for plays and films, such as Samuel Barber's School for Scandal and Bernard Herrmann's score for Citizen Kane.

Newsreader Kathy Clugston and Miles Jupp, host of BBC Radio 4's The News Quiz, are the readers for a special edition of Words and Music exploring the evolution of how we get our news.

Producer Helen Garrison.

Poetry, prose and music about the news media, with readers Miles Jupp and Kathy Clugston.

The Old Refrain20100808This edition of Words and Music is all about refrain. Whether it appears in a poem such as Easter, 1916 by Yeats or in the idée fixe of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique; whether its anguished as in Villanelle by William Empson or wonderfully ingenious as in Dana Gioia's double triolet - The Country Wife.

Why are we fascinated by the idea of repetition? Rhythm is meaningless without it. It gives shape and subtlety to music and poetry and by its modulated insistence often unlocks the door to our most complex feelings and thoughts. We use past experience as a tool to understand what's happening to us in the present and what might happen to us in the future.

The actors Samuel West and Nancy Carroll read the poems and count on a supporting musical cast that includes Brahms, Tavener and Ravel.

Poems and music about refrain and repetition. Readings by Samuel West and Nancy Carroll.

The Opium Of The People2011021320120415 (R3)Texts and music about faith and atheism, with readings by John Sessions and Claire Harry.
The Outsider20120129Lesley Manville and Tom Goodman-Hill read poetry and prose on the theme of outsiders, from those who seek to escape society's constraints, to those who long to conform. With words by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Clare, Mary Shelley, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Maya Angelou and Jeanette Winterson, and music by Gesualdo, Strauss, Berg and Feldman.

Texts and music about oustsiders, with readings by Lesley Manville and Tom Goodman-Hill.

The Parish Priest2011101620120728 (R3)Music, poetry and prose about the day to day life of the parish priest, with actors Celia Imrie and Michael Kitchen. Priests appear in major and minor roles in literature from Biblical times to the present day and frequently play a pivotal or catalyst part in the dramatic plot twists. Think of Mr Collins in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, or Obadiah Slope in Trollope's Barchester novels. Many priests have themselves been poets, such as R.S. Thomas and John Donne, whose work is featured along with the view points of long suffering vicars' wives, often the power behind the parish throne. Priests are often portrayed in novels and poetry as distinctive characters who are either malevolent, self absorbed, objects of desire or saintly. Rarely are they ordinary, frequently they are comical. Music surrounds the life of the church and the programme features works by Handel, J.S. Bach, William Harris, James MacMillan and Saint-Saens , and includes poetry and prose by, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, John Pritchard (Bishop of Oxford) and Thomas Hardy.

Producer Helen Garrison.

Music and readings on the life of the parish priest, with Celia Imrie and Michael Kitchen.

The Photograph2011081420140119 (R3)Geraldine James and Robert Powell read poetry and prose inspired by photographs and photography - real and imagined - from the time of the earliest Victorian pioneers to the photojournalists and artists of today. Texts include extracts from the writings of British pioneer Fox Talbot and American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Paul Auster, and poetry spanning 150 years from Thomas Hardy and Walt Whitman to Leonard Cohen and Carol Ann Duffy. Music includes orchestral works by Charles Ives and Leos Janacek, an electronic fragment from Tod Dockstader and a pictorial song from Tom Waits, plus environmental sound recordings by Chris Watson and Peter Cusack.

Sequence of texts and music inspired by photographs and photography.

The Plastic Tide2018092320210110 (R3)Fiona Shaw and Robert Glenister perform readings where anxiety meets beauty as we mark a year that will see COP26 - the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties taking place in Glasgow in November. It's unknown how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean but research at the University of Georgia estimates between 5.3 and 14 million tons just on coastal regions. In this programme we appreciate nature through the poems of John Clare and Edward Thomas and the music of Oliver Messiaen and John Luther Adams. Our fear at the dangers facing the environment come in Lavinia Greenlaw's The Recital of Lost Cities, Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi and Alan Hovhaness's And God Created Great Whales. Our love of plastics is captured in an extract from Richard Yates' novel, Revolutionary Road, in which his characters drive candy and ice cream coloured automobiles, ('a long bright valley of coloured plastic and plate glass and stainless steel'). And a possible outcome of our abuse of our environment comes in Byron's prophetic Darkness, written in 1816 after a volcano eruption cast enough sulphur into the atmosphere to reduce global temperatures and cause abnormal weather across much of north-east America and northern Europe.

The producer is Fiona McLean.

Readings:

James Honeyborne and Mark Brownlow - from The Blue Planet

Ira Levin - from The Stepford Wives

Denise Levertov - It Should be Visible

Iain Hamilton Finlay - Estuary

Luke Kennard - The Persistence of Rubbish

Jane Commane - Circa

Richard Yates - from Revolutionary Road

Lord Byron - from Darkness

Anna Kavan - from Ice

Simon Armitage - The Last Snowman

Lavinia Greenlaw - The Recital of Lost Cities

Sonali Deraniyagala - from Wave

Edward Thomas - First Known when Lost

John Clare - All Nature has a Feeling

Alice Oswald - A Short History of Falling

Henry David Thoreau - from Walden

Rachel Carson - from Silent Spring

You can find this playlist of discussions about Green Thinking on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking website which includes an exploration of Rachel Carson's influential book The Silent Spring https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2

If you feel inspired and would like to find out more about the actions you can take to help make a difference - go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/453T5Gp3FP6kmMrJBRS09d/resources

Poetry and music inspired by the environment. With Fiona Shaw and Robert Glenister.

The Play's The Thing20160424The Play's the thing': actors Rory Kinnear and Adjoa Andoh join baritone Roderick Williams, pianist Iain Burnside and lute player Elizabeth Kenny with poems, songs, readings and music, celebrating Shakespeare's legacy in theatre and the art of acting. Live from the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Other Place Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of Radio 3's Sounds of Shakespeare weekend.

BBC Radio 3 is marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare with a season celebrating the four centuries of music and performance that his plays and sonnets have inspired. Over the anniversary weekend, from Friday 22nd to Sunday 24th April, Radio 3 will broadcast live from a pop-up studio at the RSC's The Other Place Theatre and other historic venues across Stratford-upon-Avon.

Poems, songs, readings and music celebrating Shakespeare's legacy in theatre and acting.

The Power Of Alchemy2014051820161223 (R3)Texts and music on the theme of alchemy. Readers: Sian Phillips and Donald Sumpter.
The Power Of Music20200719As the 2020 BBC Proms gets under way Words and Music explores The Power of Music in a special programme featuring recordings by all the BBC-affiliated performing groups. Readers Clarke Peters and Maggie Service read poetry and prose exploring the unique place music has in our lives, from the 'thousand twangling instruments' which magically fill the air in Shakespeare's The Tempest, to the 'mute glorious Storyvilles' that Philip Larkin imagines when he hears Sidney Bechet play. We'll feel the jealousy and awe that Mozart inspired in Salieri in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus, and the erotic urgency of Langston Hughes' Harlem Night Club. In this special edition of Words and Music the BBC orchestras play a starring role. There are special remote recordings from members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic and BBC Singers, and Rachel Weld, a viola player from the BBC Philharmonic, has recorded a series of postcards reflecting on life as an orchestral musician, and what the enforced distance from her fellow players has been like during lockdown.

All the music in this special edition is recorded by BBC performing groups and affiliated orchestras and ranges from the BBC Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales playing Shostakovich, to the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing with Lianne La Havas. There's also Britten played in a special remote recording by BBC Symphony Orchestra harpist Louise Martin, Haydn from a BBC Philharmonic Orchestra quartet and Cole Porter's Night and Day sung by members of The BBC Singers.

READINGS

Saturday - Ian McEwan

I Am In Need of Music - Elizabeth Bishop

The Tempest - Shakespeare

If Bach had been a beekeeper - Charles Tomlinson

For Sidney Bechet - Philip Larkin

My Last Dance - Julia Ward Howe

The Harlem Dancer - Claude McKay

Amadeus - Peter Schaffer

An Equal Music - Vikram Seth

Harlem Night Club - Langston Hughes

Grace Notes - Bernard MacLaverty

Siege and Symphony - Brian Moynhan

Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Music when Soft Voices Die - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Everyone Sang - Siegfried Sassoon

Howard's End - EM Forster

Readings by Clarke Peters and Maggie Service plus a musician's lockdown diary.

The Pre-raphaelites2019012020191226 (R3)`They meant revolt, and produced revolution`: that's how one critic described the group of late 19th-century artists, poets and writers who came to be known as the Pre-Raphaelites. Actors Jamie Glover and Skye Hallam read words by the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, alongside the sources and subject matter that so fascinated them. Our journey through their artistic universe takes us from Malory's Arthurian legends and the love poetry of Dante Alighieri in the 13th century, to the sometimes coruscating reviews of Victorian contemporaries like Charles Dickens.

Pre-Raphaelite art is full of woeful maidens with flowing hair, and many suggest that the real women who posed for the likes of Rossetti and Millais were exploited. We'll hear the death of Ophelia described by Shakespeare's Gertrude alongside poetry by Elizabeth Siddal, the celebrated muse who posed for Millais' painting Ophelia, spending days on end fully clothed in a bath full of freezing water.

Musically, we start with Gilbert and Sullivan's Overture to Patience, an operetta that included a character satirising the ever-so-slightly pompous Pre-Raphaelites. There's also the glistening sound of Debussy's cantata La Damoiselle 退lue (The Blessed Damozel), based on Rossetti's poem of the same name, and a song from modern-day Pre-Raphaelite Florence Welch.

We finish with words by the only female member of the Pre-Raphaelite clan, Christina Rossetti, musing on how a painter's gaze always renders `One face` looking `out from all his canvases`. That's set against Martha Wainwright's heart breaking song Proserpina, bringing to mind Rossetti's famous painting of Proserpine - a captive goddess looking out of the Pre-Raphaelite canvas.

An exhibition called Pre-Raphaelite Sisters runs at the National Portrait Gallery until January 26th.

Readings:

William Michael Rossetti: Extract from Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art

The Times, 1851: Extract from The Times May 7th 1851

Malory: Extract from Le Morte D'Arthur, King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table

Tennyson: Extract from The Lady of Shalott

Christina Rossetti: Extract from The Convent Threshold

Keats: La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

Dante Alighieri translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Extract from La Vita Nuova

Charles Dickens: Extract from a review in Household Words of Millais? Painting ?Christ in the House of his Parents?

Sappho translated by Stanley Lombardo: Fragment 16

Algernon Charles Swinburne: Extract from Sapphics

Robert Buchanen: Extract from The Fleshly School of Poetry

Christina Rossetti: Extract from Goblin Market

Jeanette Winterson: Extract from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Shakespeare: Extract from Shakespeare?s Hamlet Act 4 Scene 7

John Updike: Extract from Gertrude And Claudius

Elizabeth Siddal: The Lust of the Eyes

Christina Rossetti: In an Artist's Studio

Producer: Georgia Mann

A sonic painting inspired by the late 19th-century artistic revolutionaries.

The Prodigy20100801A selection of poems and music by prodigies, read by actors Jack Laskey and Ellie Kendrick, including the early, sometimes very early work of great artists.

All the music is composed by or performed by teenagers, from Purcell and Mozart to Benjamin Britten and Thomas Ades.There are early recordings of pianists Daniel Barenboim and Evgeny Kissin made when they were twelve, and ten year old violin prodigy Sarah Chang dazzles with a Paganini Caprice.

Rimbaud, Byron, Robert Graves and Paul Muldoon all published poetry in their teens. Daisy Ashford was barely nine when she wrote her satirical novella The Young Visiters. Anne Frank wrote the final entry to her remarkable diary on this day, 1 August, in 1944, age fifteen.

Poetry also comes from a young Keats, who dedicated Endymion to another teenage poet Thomas Chatterton, whose early death was immortalised in pre-Raphaelite art. Plus contemporary poets Sarah Howe, Liz Berry, Matthew Gregory and Adam O'Riordan.

The relevant ages of the composers, performers and poets are given on the running order below.

Producer: Tim Prosser.

Poems and music by prodigies and the early work of great artists.

The Rebel20100425David Bamber and Gillian Bevan (readers)

Every Sunday evening Radio 3 brings you a sequence of music, poetry and prose: this week's theme is the Rebel.

From the Paris Commune to the American teenage rebellion of the 1950s, from home life to public life, David Bamber and Gillian Bevan explore the defiance of personal rebellion and collective uprising in a series of readings, including work by WB Yeats, Philip Larkin, Maya Angelou, Germaine Greer and Brian Moore; and music by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Arnold Bax, Aaron Copland and Leonard Cohen.

~Words And Music about rebels, featuring readings by David Bamber and Gillian Bevan.

The Rhyming And The Chiming2011122520141225 (R3)~Words And Music on the theme of bells. Readers Sylvestra Le Touzel and David Troughton.

This is the season for bells, joyful Christmas bells and clamorous New Year peals - and they will feature in this edition of the programme. But there will also be rhyming and chiming from other seasons of life, taking Edgar Allan Poe's onomatopoeic poem as its centrepiece. There are bells from childhood, from marriage, from the ordinary round of life as nostalgically remembered in both city and countryside by Betjeman. The sinister side of the sound of bells is brought to life by Dickens in his atmospheric story 'The Chimes', and in the famous scene from 'The Nine Tailors' by Dorothy L. Sayers in which Lord Peter Wimsey finds himself in the belltower as the cacophony carries on about him. There are alarums from the battlefield and the gallows humour of the bells of hell going ting-a-ling-a-ling... But this is Christmas and so Longfellow and Tennyson's 'Wild Bells' will see us out on a note of celebration and hope for the future.

Music from Liszt, Henze, Loesser, Philip Feeney, Grieg and Elizabeth Poston among others.

Texts and music on the theme of bells. Reading by Sylvestra le Touzel and David Troughton.

The Ring Cycle20080824Most of us have opinions about marriage. Gandhi claimed that he first learned the concepts of non-violence from his and Katharine Hepburn maintained that marriage was the way to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of just one.

You don't have to have been a wife or a husband of course. We've all been children and we've seen our parents or other adults experimenting day to day with the notion that two individual squares can and should be turned into a single, smooth, gilded circle of domestic bliss.

This edition of Words and Music traces that impulse from the spark of desire to its flaring in the conjugal hearth; from its collapse into ash and embers to its occasional, miraculous re-kindling.

So forget Das Rheingold and think instead about the double dream of matrimony. You'll be in good company, the actors Jane Lapotaire and Ralf Little will be lending their voices to Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Carson amongst others to conjure up this vision and the music will be provided by the Words and Music jukebox - a machine that can produce Mozart's sounds and sweet airs, the slinkiness of Billie Holiday, Anouar Brahem's feline oud playing and the cybernetic funk of Grace Jones. What else would you expect from an attempt to describe `the triumph of hope over experience`?

Zahid Warley - Producer.

Philharmonia Orchestra and chorus - Herbert von Karajan

Overture from Cosi van tutte

EMI CMS5670642

CD 1 Track 1

Tango VI

From The Beauty of the Husband

Reader: Ralf Little

Leopoldo Federico y Orquesta

Sueno de Tango

Leopoldo Federico and Nicolas Ledesma

Caf退 de Los Maestros

WRASS 226

Track on CD: CD2 Track 1

Jane Austen

Opening chapter of Pride and Prejudice

Reader: Jane Lapotaire

Rudolf Barshai and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

The Waters in Winter -Second Ritual Dance from The Midsummer Marriage

Tippett

Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage

EMI 5865872

Track 16

Andre Breton

Free Union

New Faber Book of 20th Century French Poems

Translator: Stephen Romer

Abdullah Ibrahim

The Wedding

Water from an Ancient Well

TIP 8888122

Track 6

Carol Ann Duffy

White Writing

Feminine Gospels

The Hilliard Ensemble

De souspirant cuer

Guillaume de Machaut

Motets

ECM 4724022

David Harsent

We are naked

Marriage - section III

Conte de l'incroyable amour

ECM 1457 511959-2

Track 5

It's marvellous

The New Faber Book of Love Poems

Kocani Orkestar

Siki, Siki Baba

Nestor Cok Rakia

From Alone At My Wedding

CRAW 25 EFA 80271 3075192 WAG 330

Going In

Marriage section XII

Body and Soul

Heyman - Sour-Eyton - Green

Billie Holiday 1939-40

CLASSICS 601

Douglas Dunn

Thirteen Steps and the Thirteenth of March

Elegies

Anne Sofie von Otter and Monteverdi Choir - John Eliot Gardiner

J'ai perdu mon Eurydice

Gluck

Orphee et Eurydice

EMI 7243 5 568872 9

CD 2, Track 14

Sylvia Plath

Morning Song

Penguin's Poems for Life

Gabrieli Quartet

String Quartet Number 1

Janacek and Smetana Quartets

DECCA 430 295 -2

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina

Private Life

Chrissie Hynde

Grace Jones Private Life: Compass Point Years

ISLAND 5245012

Tracks 1 and 2

Katherine Mansfield

Marriage a la Mode

The Garden Party

Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg cond. Gerd Albrecht

Prelude to Act 3 Der Konig Kandaules

Zemlinsky

Symphonische Gesange. Drei Balletstucke. Der Konig Kandaules

CAPRICCIO 10448

Track 11

Opening Chapter of Herzog

Helen Jahren

Six Metamorphoses after Ovid - Narcissus

Benjamin Britten

Oboe Music by Britten , Dorati and Krenek

BIS CD737

Joseph Brodsky

Six Years Later

A Part of Speech

Translator: Richard Wilbur

Kronos Quartet

Lyric Suite - Adagio Appassionato

Alban Berg

NONESUCH 7559796962

Track 4

Margaret Atwood

Extract from The Penelopiad

Jeanne Moreau

Le Tourbillon

Georges Delerue to words by Bassiak

La Nouvelle Vague

MILAN 887825

Andrew Sean Greer

The Story of a Marriage

Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus cond. Karl Bohm

Fortunato l'uom che prende from Cosi fan tutte

EMI CDM 769332 2

~Words And Music relating to marriage, with readings by Jane Lapotaire and Ralf Little.

The Ringing Grooves Of Change20071230A selection of words and music on the theme of revolution and change.
The Ringing Grooves Of Change20081012The starting point for this week's Words and Music is a quotation from Tennyson's ‘Locksley Hall', the poem read by Judi Dench in BBC TV's adaptation of Cranford recently. By ‘the ringing grooves of change' Tennyson was referring to the pressure imposed on people by change, in his experience the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

Revolutions - and periods of change - during history have always inspired poets and composers. Sometimes they've written in direct response to events and sometimes more obliquely. During the French Revolution poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley responded very quickly to what was happening as did composers like Lefevre and Gossec: in the programme you'll hear Lefevre's ‘Hymne a l'Agriculture' and Gossec's ‘March Symphonie Militaire' as well as extracts from Wordsworth's ‘The Prelude'.

The Spanish Civil War too inspired writers like George Orwell and Stephen Spender and composers like Samuel Barber who wrote a choral setting of Spender's ‘A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map' in response to the conflict in Spain. In Russia Shostakovich lived through the October Revolution, the Civil War and two World Wars as well as the horrors of Stalinism. And, although he remained loyal to the ideals of the October Revolution he, along with other poets and composers, detested Stalin. This is all expressed in his music including the piece in the programme, ‘In the Deserted Village' from ‘The Fall of Berlin'. Although the piece expresses the horror of war it was written for a film which was presented to Stalin as a present on his seventieth birthday, an indication of the difficulties faced by artists during this period of Russian history. Poets like Alexander Blok had a complex response to what was happening in Russia, moving from idealism to disgust at the aftermath of revolution in poems like ‘On the Field of Kulicovo'. The programme though ends on a note of optimism and hope with Arthur Hugh Clough's ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth' and Beethoven's ‘Egmont Overture'.

Fiona McLean - producer.

Tracklist.

ARTUR VINCENT LOURIE

Prelude - Suite

Christian Ockert - double bass

Leipziger Streichquartett

MDG 307 1192-2

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Adrian Lukis (reader)

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Etude in C Minor, opus 10

Vladimir Horowitz - piano

SONY CLASSICAL SMK90428

Penny Downie (reader)

The Wallace Collection

John Wallace - conductor

NIMBUS NI5175

LORD BYRON

from Don Juan

JANE AUSTEN

from Pride and Prejudice

Symphonie Militaire - Larghetto

TRADITIONAL

Song on Liberty

Music of the American Revolution

Sherrill Milnes - baritone

Jon Spong - harpsichord

NEW WORLD 802762

LOUIS SPOHR

Quartet no 34 in E Flat Major - Larghetto con moto

Moscow Philharmonic 'Concertino' String Quartet

MARCO POLO 8225307

from Homage to Catalonia

Neville Jason (reader)

PAUL ROBESON

The Four Insurgent Generals

'Songs for Free Men'

PEARL GEMMCD9264

ALEKSANDR BLOK

ALEXANDER MOSOLOV

Oh, You Russians, Good Warriors

String Quartet no 2 'On Patriotic Themes of 1812

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble

TRITON 17004

W.B. YEATS

The Second Coming

Cambridge University Chamber Choir

GAMUT CLASSICS GAMCD535

ANNA AKHMATOVA

Prologue and Epilogue

DMITRY SHOSTAKOVICH

In the Devastated Village

Moscow Symphony Orchestra

Adriano - conductor

NAXOS 8570238

HANNS EISLER

In die Stadte kam ich

Hollywood Songbook

Dietrich Fischer Dieskau - baritone

Aribert Reimann - piano

TELDEC 4509974592

ROBINSON JEFFERS

Shine, Republic

KATHLEEN RAINE

JONI MITCHELL

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Night Ride Home

GEFFEN 9243022

PHILIP LARKIN

Homage to a Government

Egmont Overture op 84

Berliner Philharmoniker

Herbert von Karajan - conductor

DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 4155062

from The Bothie

A sequence of classical music, interspersed with poems and prose.

The Rose2012011520120617 (R3)Poems, prose and music on the theme of the Rose. Ruby petals, emerald stems: the rose speaks love. Its language is beauty, tenderness and eternity; its colour is passion. But the rose also speaks a less familiar language, that of peace, nationalism and revolution, the strangeness of mysticism and the finality of death. This hymn plucks rare and wild roses for its verses with music by Britten, Delius and Wagner and words by Charles Tomlinson, Dorothy Parker and HD, read by Lindsay Duncan and Iwan Rheon.

Texts and music on the theme of roses with readings by Lindsay Duncan and Iwan Rheon.

The Servant Problem2014030220151223 (R3)Adrian Scarborough and Sophie Thompson read prose and poetry on the often uneasy relationship between domestic servants and their employers. From St Zita, patron saint of servants, to Mrs Danvers and Jeeves, the put-upon 'odd man', the awkwardly placed governess, and the exhausted servants to the Bennets at Longbourn, it's a story of hard work, a battle of wills, and a striving to make sense of status. Music includes Haydn's 'Farewell Symphony', written to make a point to his employer, Richard Strauss's affectionate portrayal of knight and servant in Don Quixote, and Johnny Mercer's party with The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid.

Producer: Elizabeth Funning.

Texts and music about domestic service. Readers: Adrian Scarborough and Sophie Thompson.

The Seven Ages Of Woman2015030820170305 (R3)To mark International Women's Day a special edition exploring the lives of women from birth to death in poetry, prose and music. The readers are Fiona Shaw and Ellie Kendrick. With words by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Chopin, Muriel Spark, Kathleen Jamie, Emily Dickinson and Mrs Gaskell and music by Sofia Gubaidulina, Sally Beamish, Joan Baez, Judith Weir, Elisabeth Maconchy, Tineke Postma and Louise Farrenc.

Producer: Fiona McLean.

Poetry, prose and music exploring the lives of women from birth to death.

The Seven Deadly Sins2017121020181227 (R3)Adjoa Andoh and Rory Kinnear visit the sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth with poetry and prose by Milton, Carol Ann Duffy, Spenser, Shakespeare, Stevie Smith, Emily Dickinson and Christopher Marlowe and music by Kurt Weill, Mahler, Takemitsu, Verdi and Shostakovich. Rory and Adjoa explore the misery of sin experienced by Hamlet, Iago and Lady Macbeth alongside the idle enjoyment felt by Huckleberry Finn, the exhilaration on discovering that Einstein was a fellow Scot and the thrill of a feast in Dickens' ‘A Christmas Carol'.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Adjoa Andoh and Rory Kinnear with poetry and music exploring human sins.

The Silver Swan2017020520191225 (R3)Graceful swans, magical swans, migrating swans; swans loyal and, on occasion, cynical; swans living and dying. A miscellany of poetry and prose by WB Yeats, Hans Christian Andersen, Louise Glück, Gillian Clarke, Rilke, Tennyson and 'Banjo' Paterson floats above music that includes works by Saint-Sa뀀ns, Villa-Lobos, Tchaikovsky, Rautavaara (complete with the sounds of arctic swans) and Sibelius, whose 5th Symphony was inspired by the sight of sixteen swans - 'One of the great experiences of my life!' he wrote, ' God, how beautiful.

The readers are Anthony Calf and Louise Jameson.

Readings:

W B Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole

Gillian Clarke: Migrations

Hans Christian Anderson trans. M R James: The Ugly Duckling

Trad: The Children of Lir

Lawrence Durrell: Swans

Humbert Wolfe: Love is a Keeper of Swans

Rainer Maria Rilke trans Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland: The Swan

Keats: To Charles Cowden Clarke

Aesop trans Willliam Ellery Leonard: The Swan and the Goose

Louise Glück: Parable of the Swans

Randall Jarrell: The Black Swan

Tennyson: The Dying Swan

Edna St Vincent Millay: Wild Swans

A.B. ‘Banjo' Peterson: Black Swans

Edward Plunkett (Lord Dunsany): The Return of Song

Producer: Elizabeth Funning

Texts and music on the theme of swans, with readers Anthony Calf and Louise Jameson.

The Singer And The Song2016031320210101 (R3)Jessie Buckley and Julian Ovenden, both actors who sing themselves, with words and music that celebrate classical and traditional singing. You'll hear descriptions of the arrogant opera singer in Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary', Thomas Hardy's poem about a Ballad Singer and Marge Piercy's admiration of opera, James Joyce's reflections on the tenor Caruso and evocations of wartime concert parties to an amateur choral society's rendition of 'Messiah'. With vocal music including mezzo Anne Sophie Von Otter with an evening hymn from Purcell, Janet Baker with Edward Elgar's Sea Slumber Song and Elkie Brooks performing her hit Pearl's a Singer.

Jessie Buckley was recently seen in Charlie Kaufman's film I'm Thinking of Ending Things and the TV series Fargo and Chernobyl. She's also in an upcoming TV film of Romeo and Juliet shot by the National Theatre.

Julian Ovenden has starred on Broadway, in the West End, and at the Proms. He was in Ivo van Hove's All About Eve at the National Theatre and on TV he was in Bridgerton and Adult Material.

Producer : Elizabeth Funning

Readings:

Richard Llewellyn - How Green Was My Valley

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan

Robert Louis Stevenson - Bright is the Ring of Words

Andrew Marvell - The Fair Singer

John Clare - Ploughman Singing

Thomas Hardy - The Ballad Singer

Marge Piercy - One Reason I Like Opera

Flaubert - Madam Bovary

James Joyce - The Dead

Dylan Thomas - Quite Early One Morning

Siegfried Sassoon - Concert Party (Egyptian Base Camp)

Charlotte Bronte - Shirley

Thomas Hardy - Under the Greenwood Tree

Mark Doty - Messiah (Christmas Portions)

D. H. Lawrence - Piano

Conrad Aiken - Evensong

Jessie Buckley and Julian Ovenden with words and music on the theme of singing.

The Sky Smiles Down2008060820100911 (R3)Fiona Shaw and Robert Glenister read poetry and prose on the theme of summer - from John Clare's 'Shepherd's Calendar', the misery of having to go to school on a Scottish summer morning, Walt Whitman's 'mad, naked summer night' and Jay Gatsby's party with music from George Gershwin, Dvorak, Joan Baez, Mendelssohn and Toru Takemitsu.

Poems and music with a summer theme, with readings by Fiona Shaw and Robert Glenister.

The Soft Machine2008060120090712 (R3)Poems read by Anna Maxwell Martin and John Rowe plus music, all on the theme of the body.
The South Country2010032820110703 (R3)Inspired by the recent republication of Edward Thomas's essay collection The South Country, the weekly sequence of music, poetry and prose celebrates the landscape of southern England, in particular three counties in which the poet loved to walk: Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire.

Tamsin Greig and Neil Pearson read prose by fellow observer-wanderers Gilbert White, William Cobbett and Richard Jefferies, and poetry by such lovers of the south as Flora Thompson, Andrew Young, Hilaire Belloc, Molly Holden and, of course, Edward Thomas himself. The music includes orchestral music and songs by John Ireland, Michael Tippett, The Copper Family and the English Acoustic Collective among others.

A sequence of music, poetry and prose celebrating the landscape of southern England.

The Spirit World20080427Dominic West and Samantha Morton read poetry on the theme of the spirit world.
The Sticking Place2014040620160807 (R3)The Sticking Place: words and music exploring risk and failure; with poems by Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton and TS Eliot.

When Macbeth says to Lady Macbeth, 'If we should fail', she responds 'We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking place and we'll not fail.

This edition is about daring to take the plunge, doing and building the impossible, Icarus's flight, Byron's swim, the Tower of Babel, the fear of failure and the loss of it all. Poems by Samuel Beckett, Tennyson and Philip Larkin are read by Sylvestra Le Touzel and Peter Marinker. Music includes work by Leos Janacek, Frederick Delius, Ivor Gurney and Igor Stravinsky.

Texts and music about risk and failure. Readers: Sylvestra Le Touzel and Peter Marinker.

The Sun2016091820191227 (R3)Anne-Marie Duff and Greg Wise read poetry and prose on the theme of the sun. As a giver of life, a force of nature and an inspiration for worship, poetry and music, the sun has special significance in many cultures. We'll hear Shelley and Stravinsky's depiction of Apollo and Egyptian King Akhnaten's Hymn to the Sun set to music by Philip Glass. Romeo describes his beloved Juliet as the sun, and Louis XIV chose it as his emblem, declaring himself the Sun King. The sun also has its dangers, as discovered by Icarus and Ted Hughes' Crow. Real life aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery crash-lands in the unforgiving heat of the Sahara Desert, and Mark Twain describes the terror of a solar eclipse. The effects of global warming are debated by Ian McEwan's characters in his novel Solar, while an unusually hot summer exacerbates the problems for schoolboy Leo in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between. Includes music by Haydn, Lili Boulanger, Ravel and Schoenberg.

Readings:

Genesis from The Bible (King James Version)

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Hymn of Apollo

Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies

L.P. Hartley: The Go-Between

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 33

Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

John Donne: The sun rising

Wilfred Owen: Futility

Josephine Preston Peabody: Old Greek Folk Stories told anew

Thomas Hardy: The sun on the letter

Ted Hughes: Crow's Fall

Ian McEwan: Solar

Antonia Fraser: Love and Louis XIV

William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, trans Lewis Galantiere Picador: Wind, Sand and Stars

Molly Fisk: Winter sun

Lord Mifflin: Helios

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A sunset

Producer - Ellie Mant

The Thrill Of The Chase20100307From the dawn of mankind, humans have been bound up in the pursuit of prey, while at the same time avoiding being hunted themselves. We are now usually the hunters, rather than the hunted, but from the exhilaration of hunting for sport, to the disgust at hunting for pleasure, emotions evoked by the chase are never mild.

This week's Words and Music explores this music and poetry inspired by hunting. Deborah Findlay and Nicholas Farrell read Adrienne Rich's 'Abnegation', and extracts from Moby Dick and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the full spectrum of opinion is here, with music by Harrison Birtwistle, Clement Janequin and Franz Schubert.

But although hunting brings to mind the thunder of horses' hooves, it also describes a very human ritual - the lover's chase. With readings from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and poetry by Sir Thomas Wyatt, this programme will touch on a very different sort of chase, and the desire for love, not death.

~Words And Music about hunting and chasing. Readings by Nicholas Farrell, Deborah Finlay.

The Trumpet2021042520220213 (R3)Poetry and prose about the trumpet, with readings by Madeleine Potter and Joseph Ayre.

The trumpet occupies a special place in the collective consciousness, a sonic presence throughout centuries of celebrations, ceremonies, wars and visions. Here is an instrument that brought down the walls of the city of Jericho, and whose `loud clangour excites us to arms' in the words of John Dryden (encountered in this programme in a setting by George Frideric Handel). We hear a scene from Louis MacNiece's BBC drama, The Dark Tower (first broadcast in 1946), a parable play on the `ancient theme of the Quest` in which the protagonist is a young trumpeter, practising his fanfare as he prepares to meet his fate.

But the instrument has many lives beyond the battlefield: for Walt Whitman, it takes on the role of otherworldly messenger, inviting him into a mystical experience; it appears as a metaphor in Alice Oswald's celebratory love sonnet, Wedding; contemporary jazz musician Ambrose Akinmusire explores its tender and fragile possibilities; and Langston Hughes reads Trumpet Player at the BBC in 1962, his poetic ode to the instrument's place in the history of African-American expression and memory.

Whether in the hands of apocalyptic angels, enthusiastic amateurs, mourners, or virtuosic improvisers, it seems that the trumpet is something of a summoner, calling us away from the everyday, towards another reality...

Readings:

Kim Moore - Teaching The Trumpet

John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday

Louis MacNiece - The Dark Tower

Victor Hugo (trans Toru Dutt) - The Trumpets Of The Mind

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Blow, Bugle, Blow

Walt Whitman - The Mystic Trumpeter, 1 - 3

Alice Oswald - Wedding

Walt Whitman - The Mystic Trumpeter, 5

Langston Hughes - Trumpet Player

Jackie Kay - Trumpet

The King James Bible - Book of Revelation, Chapter 8, Verses 7 - 13

Walt Whitman - The Mystic Trumpeter, 7 - 8

Eudora Welty - The Winds

Edward Thomas - The Trumpet

Produced by Phil Smith

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

The Tudors2021071820220522 (R3)From Shakespeare to Hilary Mantel - the Tudors is a period rich in literature, with a king who is said to have composed Greensleeves for his future Queen Anne Boleyn. Today's Words and Music is inspired by the Tudor dynasty who ruled England from Henry VII's reign in 1485 until the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Theirs was an era of turbulence, from the Wars of the Roses, to the seismic break with Rome under Henry VIII, and the bloody era of protestant executions under Mary I. There is poetry by the key players in the Tudor drama: Thomas Wyatt (who was accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn), Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I herself. And we feature extracts from one of the most compelling modern-day takes on the Tudors: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. Musically, we'll hear from the star of this week's series of Essays, William Byrd; and Thomas Tallis, who walked a dangerous line as a Catholic composer in Elizabeth I's Protestant court, and we'll also hear Tudor inspired music by Donizetti and Benjamin Britten. Our readers are Anton Lesser and Josette Simon.

Producer: Georgia Mann

You can hear three Free Thinking Discussions about the Tudors being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tues 24th, Weds 25th and Thurs 25th May and available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts.

READINGS:

Pasqualigo Contemporary description of Henry VIII by Venetian diplomat Pasqualigo, written 1515

Shakespeare Extract from Richard II

Miranda Kaufmann Extract from John Blanke: the most famous African in Tudor England, published in BBC History Revealed

Robert Bolt Extract from A Man for all Seasons

Shakespeare Extract from Henry VIII

Hilary Mantel Extract from Wolf Hall

Christopher Marlow The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Thomas Wyatt Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind

John Donne The Good-morrow

Sylvia Barbara Soberton Extract from: Medical Downfall of the Tudors: Sex, Reproduction and Succession

Thomas Nash From In Time of Plague Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss

Hilary Mantel Extract from The Mirror and the Light

Elizabeth I Extract from Elizabeth I's 'Golden' final speech to parliament, November 30th 1601

Elizabeth I From The Doubt of Future Foes

Kate Williams Extract from Rival Queens: The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary, Queen of Scots Sonnet written at Fotheringay Castle

Fr William Weston Description by Jesuit Fr William Weston of a meeting and mass to celebrate the arrival in England of the Jesuit missionaries Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell

William Byrd Extract from Care for Thy Soul as Thing of Greatest Price

Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex Essex's Last Voyage to the Haven of Happiness

From Shakespeare to Hilary Mantel, Byrd and Tallis to Britten.

The Uncanny2018050620211031 (R3)A programme exploring both the familiar and the eerie in music and readings, which are performed by actors Morfydd Clark and Arinz退 Kene. The idea of the uncanny is associated with a sense of being unsettled and Freud published an essay in 1919 - Das Unheimliche - in which he looked at horror, disgust and idea of hidden and repressed experiences and emotions. This selection of words and music takes listeners on a path through stories, poems and sounds by Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin Britten, Miles Davis and Stevie Smith among others.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Morfydd Clark and Arinze Kene with both the familiar and the eerie in music and readings.

The Wanderer20080622Rufus Sewell and Indira Varma read a selection of texts by authors including Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, Bruce Chatwin as well as the Old English poem: The Wanderer and the Indian epic The Mahabarata. With music including Schubert's Der Wanderer, Gawain's journey by Harrison Birtwistle, as well as the gypsy sounds of Django Reinhardt and Maurice Ravel.

Rufus Sewell and Indira Varma read texts by Hardy and Masefield. With music by Birtwistle.

The Wedding20110717This week's Words and Music leads you up the aisle with a series of poetry, prose and music around the theme of the wedding. From the bridal marches of Wagner and Mendelssohn - the soundtracks to countless walks up the aisle - to Saint-Sa뀀ns' confection of piano and strings in the Wedding Cake Valse-Caprice, the joyful ritual of the wedding ceremony has inspired some timeless music. Anna Maxwell Martin and Jamie Glover read work which explores the enduring romance of wedded bliss and the darker moments of married life. Poetry by Shakespeare and Keats meditates on the nature of love and takes us to a sumptuous Grecian wedding feast; while Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice returns us to a time of marriage as an aid to social mobility and Dickens' Great Expectations introduces us to one of literature's most haunting brides: the jilted Miss Haversham, who resides in her faded wedding dress alongside the clock which stopped at twenty to nine on her wedding day, the moment she discovered her heart had been broken.

Texts and music related to weddings. Readings by Anna Maxwell Martin and Jamie Glover.

The Wedding20180520On the day after Prince Harry ties the knot with Meghan Markle, Words and Music leads you up the aisle with a series of poetry, prose and music on the theme of the wedding. From the bridal marches of Wagner and Mendelssohn, to Saint-Sa뀀ns' confection of piano and strings in the Wedding Cake Valse-Caprice, the joyful ritual of the wedding ceremony has inspired some timeless music. Anna Maxwell Martin and Jamie Glover read work which explores the enduring romance of wedded bliss and the darker moments of married life. Poetry by Shakespeare and Keats meditates on the nature of love and takes us to a sumptuous Grecian wedding feast; while Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice returns us to a time of marriage as an aid to social mobility. Dickens' Great Expectations introduces us to one of literature's most haunting brides: the jilted Miss Haversham, who resides in her faded wedding dress alongside the clock which stopped at twenty to nine on her wedding day, the moment she discovered her heart had been broken.

Producer: Georgia Mann.

Anna Maxwell Martin and Jamie Glover read poetry and prose on the theme of 'The Wedding'.

The Window2019100620210411 (R3)From David Bowie's Breaking Glass to Mozart's serenade from his opera Don Juan, from the religious inspiration behind Respighi's Church Windows to the diner scene conjured by Suzanne Vega - today's Words and Music weaves together music and poetry which takes us both sides of the glass as we look at literal and metaphorical windows with readings from Adjoa Andoh and John Rowe. They squint, stare and dream glassy-eyed with Baudelaire, who was born 200 years ago this week; glance over their shoulders with Robert Frost, muse on escaping a mother's rage in the poem by Mary Jean Chan and today's programme contains one piece of strong language in a Philip Larkin poem. We look at the idea of our eyes as windows, our souls as windows, the words of a poem framing a view of the world and get a sense of windows opening and closing with some of the musical tracks being more transparent than others.

READINGS:

Baudelaire: Les Fenꀀtres translated by Arthur Symons, read by John Rowe in four extracts.

Emily Dickinson: The Wind Tapped Like a Tired Man

Marcel Proust: The Way by Swann translated by Lydia Davis

George Herbert: The Windows

J. L. Carr: A Month in the Country

Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Robert Frost: After Apple Picking

Seamus Heaney: Glanmore Sonnet IX from Field Work

Howard Nemerov: Storm Windows

Philip Larkin: High Windows

Mary Jean Chan: The Window

RP Lister: Defenestration

Producer: Zahid Warley

Adjoa Andoh and John Rowe are the readers as we move from Messiaen to Mary Jean Chan

The Word Girl2011100920130707 (R3)From Mary to Matilda, Lydia to Laura, and Oriana all the way to a boy named Sue, the weekly sequence of music and verse makes play with the words we use to name the female sex. Readings include verse by Petrarch, Lorca, DH Lawrence, John Clare and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning - plus the odd limerick.

First broadcast in October 2011.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of The Word Girl.

The Worst Form Of Government2012093020191027 (R3)This week's Words and Music explores the theme of democracy. Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Winston Churchill's now famous quote underpins today's edition. Democracy is hailed as a force for good - promoting freedom, equality and self-governance - but has been used and misused for personal gain and political oppression. Nelson Mandela describes his astonishment in his memoir Long Walk to Freedom, on meeting Inuits from Northern Europe, that people from 'the top of the world' should have any knowledge of his political struggle at the southern tip of Africa. Television, he writes, had become a force for promoting democracy.

Throughout the programme, we hear the voices of colonised and marginalised peoples as they struggle for their right to be heard, their right to vote, and their right to live a free life.

With music from Copland & Shostakovich to Somalian poet and rapper K'naan, and readings performed by Lisa Dillon and Ray Fearon.

Producer: Gavin Heard

Aeschines: Democracy

Langston Hughes: Democracy

Emma Lazarus: The New Colossus

Walt Whitman: Election Day November 1884

Dorianne Laux: Democracy

John Adams: Letter

Arthur Rimbaud: Democracy

Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Mahmoud Darwish: The Girl/The Scream

William Shakespeare: Caesar

George Szirtes: Unter den Linden

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Songs for the People

Poetry and music on the theme of democracy with readings by Lisa Dillon and Ray Fearon.

The Year20090104This edition of Words and Music explores the changing seasons for the first programme of the New year. Andrew Lincoln and Emma Fielding read a selection of poetry interspersed with seasonal music.

I chose Ted Hughes' Seasons Songs as a thread for the programme. These fine poems are full of sharp observation and the feeling of natural forces of destruction and renewal. Alongside Ted Hughes, I chose a range of poetry which picked up on these themes from Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost and William Blake among others.

I selected some music directly linked to seasons - from Piazzolla's atmospheric tangos from Kremerata Baltica, to Cage's studies in sound for his Seasons and the legendary recording of Gershwin's Summertime from Sarah Vaughan. At other times, there's abstract music which seemed to match the mood of the readings. Fretwork's recording of Byrd leads to Robert Grave's A Prayer for Spring; Steve Reich's Music for mallet instruments, voices and organ matches picks up on the 'famous express' of Hughes' Deceptions leading to Gerald Manley Hopkins's poem about the cuckoo where 'the whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound'.

A centre point for the programme is Samuel Barber's Summer Music in a vibrant recording by the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet which leads to the playful poem 'Hay' by Ted Hughes.

The programme draws to a close with DH Lawrence's elegy for winter, and Ligeti's sparse Atmospheres. I end with Tennyson's poem, Death of the Old Year which beautifully depicts the feeling of loss at the end of the year, and tentative hope as a new year begins.

Jessica Isaacs (producer)

Readers: Emma Fielding (EF) and Andrew Lincoln (AL)

00:00:00

Sir Michael Tippett: New Year space ship landing

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by

R. Hickox

Chandos CHAN 9299 Tk 5

00:00:05

Ted Hughes: New Year Song (EF)

00:01:40

Let an anthem praise

Parley of instruments and Peter Holman

Hyperion CDA66924 Tk 2

00:04:15

Thomas Hardy At the entering of the New Year (AL & EF)

00:05:45

Byrd: Te lucis a 4 no 2, verse 2

Virgin classics VC5450312 Tk 21

00:07:00

Robert Frost 'A Prayer in Spring' (EF)

00:08:30

Mahler arr Berio: Fruhlingsmorgen

Andreas Schmidt (baritone)

Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin

conducted by C. Garben

RCA 09026611842 Tk 12

00:10:00

Ted Hughes: March morning unlike others (AL)

00:11:30

Piazzolla: Primavera portena

Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica

Nonesuch 7559795682 Tk 16

00:13:20

Chaucer: General Prologue from Canterbury Tales

read in Middle English by Trevor Eaton

Pearl GEM0160

00:14:20

In the merry month of May

Deller Consort/Alfred Deller

Vanguard 08503971 Tk 23

00:16:00

Wordsworth: Lines written in Early Spring (AL)

00:17:00

Richard Rodgers June is burstin out all over (from Carousel)

Claramae Turner, Barbara Ruick and mixed chorus

Capitol CDP7466352 Tk 6

00:21:00

Reich: Music for mallet instruments, voices and organ

Amiata ARNR0393 Tk 1

00:21:20

Ted Hughes: Deceptions (AL & EF)

00:22:20

Gerald Manley Hopkins: Repeat that, repeat (AL)

00:25:20

Barber: Summer Music

BIS CD952BIS Tk 1

00:36:30

Ted Hughes: Hay (EF)

00:37:30

Sumer is a-comin in

The Dufay Collective

Chandos Chan 9396 Tk 20

00:42:00

Piazzolla: Verano porteno

Gidon Kremer and Kremer Baltica

Nonesuch 7559795682 Tk 4

00:43:40

William Blake: The schoolboy (AL)

00:44:40

Cage: Seasons

Margaret Leng Tan: prepared piano, toy piano

American Composers Orchestra

conducted by D. Russell Davies

ECM 4651402 Tk 4

00:46:00

Mercury 83069922

00:49:00

Ted Hughes: The Harvest moon (EF)

00:50:00

El-Khoury: Autumn leaves

Orchestre Colonne conducted by P. Dervaux

Naxos 8557692 Tk 7

00:53:00

Rossetti: Autumn Song (AL)

00:53:30

Ted Hughes: Leaves (EF & AL)

00:54:20

Ligeti: Autumn at Varsovie

Toros Can (piano)

Empreinte Digitale Ed 13125 Tk 6

00:56:15

Ted Hughes: The Seven Sorrows (EF)

00:57:45

Vivaldi: Concerto in F major, Op 8 no 3

Adagio molto

Gidon Kremer & Kremerata Baltica Tk 10

01:00:30

Thomas Hardy: Darkling Thrush (AL)

01:01:36

Cage: The Seasons

conducted by D. Russell Davies ECM 4651402

01:03:00

Ted Hughes: Warrior of Winter (EF)

01:04:00

DH Lawrence: A Winter's Tale (AL)

01:05:00

Ligeti: Atmospheres

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

conducted by C. Abbado

DG 4292602 Tk 2

01:07:00

Ted Hughes: Warm and Cold (EF)

01:08:00

Lux Hodie

The Boston Camerata

Nonesuch 71315

Tk 9

01:09:00

Tennyson: Death of the Old Year (EF)

01:12:00

Byrd: Miserere a 4

Tk 22

Andrew Lincoln and Emma Fielding with a selection of poetry on the changing seasons.

Theatre20210321As part of the BBC Lights Up festival of theatre which brings a series of dramas to radio and television, today's Words and Music takes us both backstage and into the experiences of performers in front of the footlights: from Shakespeare's Hamlet deciding to use a play to catch out his villainous uncle, to the playwright Michael Frayn describing the agony of a cigarette lighter failing to function on stage. Actors Rory Kinnear and Indira Varma read from a range of plays and prose exploring the pleasures and pitfalls of theatrical life. You'll also hear the voice of perhaps the most legendary figure in modern British theatre: Sir Laurence Olivier, discussing the newly founded National Theatre Company in 1963. There's a moment from Bernadine Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other, where a playwright reflects on her move from theatrical radical to member of the mainstream; and that's followed up with a true visionary of the theatre: Kurt Weill singing a wonderfully Germanic-sounding version of Speak Low. The theatrical soundtrack also stars Henry Purcell, Ethel Merman and Frankie Howard (in a toga) and a seventeenth century wind machine.

Readings:

As You Like It - Shakespeare

Hamlet/Bernhardt - Theresa Rebeck

Collected Columns - Michael Frayn

Actress - Anne Enright

Girl, Woman. Other - Bernadine Everisto

Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

The Early Diaries - Simon Gray

The Seagull - Chekhov Trans. Stoppard

Stop the Show!: A History of Insane Incidents and Absurd Accidents in the Theatre - Brad Schreiber

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Dramatic Exchanges: Letters of the National Theatre - Edited by Daniel Rosenthal

Swing Time - Zadie Smith

An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge

Wise Children - Angela Carter

Morality Play - Barry Unsworth

The Tempest - Shakespeare

Producer: Georgia Mann

Rory Kinnear and Indira Varma lift the curtains on a celebration of acting.

Them And Us20121104In this special edition of Words and Music recorded at The Free Thinking Festival in St Mary's Heritage Centre, opposite The Sage, Gateshead, Sian Thomas and Ron Cook read poetry and prose on the theme of this year's festival: Them and Us. Music is provided by The Aronowitz Ensemble, soprano Sarah-Jane Lewis and The NASUWT Riverside Band, with conductor Ray Farr.

The programme opens with an extract from Arthur C. Clarke's' sci-fi classic Childhood's End. We hear poetry by Fleur Adcock, Hilaire Belloc and Wilfred Owen and prose from Jane Austen and George Orwell. Our musical accompaniment includes Mars from Holst's The Planets, Thomas Ades' Darknesse Visible and Poulenc's Voyage a Paris.

Producer: Georgia Mann-Smith.

From 2012's Free Thinking Festival, a special live recording on the theme of 'them and us

There Will Be Blood2013081120170402 (R3)The theme is blood and the anticipation of it being spilled: whether in war, sacrifice or murder.

Indira Varma and Rory Kinnear read poems and prose by John Webster, Bram Stoker, Carol Ann Duffy and Seamus Heaney. Music is by Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Gluck, Bart k, Barber, Alessandro Scarlatti, Gavin Bryars and Harrison Birtwistle.

Texts and music on the theme of blood, with readings by Indira Varma and Rory Kinnear.

Things Fall Apart20171001Emma Fielding and Robert Glenister with readings on decay and decadence.
This Haunted Land20201025From Emily Bronte's wild moors; the ghosts in stories by M R JAMES & Benjamin Britten's opera Turn of the Screw, Schubert's lamenting song cycle Winterreise to film music for The Shining & The Wicker Man: Tim McInnerny & Ayesha Antoine are the readers in a Halloween episode.

A soundtrack is provided by a range of classical composers including Ligeti, Mozart, Beethoven, Purcell, and a harking back to the 1970s TV series Children of the Stones which was once called 'the scariest programme ever made for children' and film soundtracks including Mica Levi's compositions for Under the Skin; Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind for The Shining and Paul Giovanni for The Wicker Man.

The readings include the thoughts of philosopher Mark Fisher from his book Ghosts of My Life; a ghost story from the BBC Domesday project, an evocation of mosquitos in the poem Horns by Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes, The Terrors of the Night in the Elizabethan pamphlet written by Thomas Nashe and in Mary Karr's poem Field of Skulls which imagines fears which come 'drinking gin after the I Love Lucy reruns have gone off'.

Producer Luke Mulhall

READINGS:

Archive of Ghost Story from the BBC Domesday project read by Mabel Barber

James Hogg: The Mysterious Bride

Mark Fisher: Ghosts of My Life

Algernon Blackwood: The Haunted House

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

M R JAMES: Oh, whistle and I'll come to you

John Masefield: On the Downs

Edward Thomas: Aspens

Claire Gradidge: I will haunt you in small change

Thomas Hardy: At Castle Boterel

Cynthia Huntington: Ghost

Thomas Nashe: The Terrors of the Night

Kwame Dawes: Horns

John Clare: Written in Northampton County Asylum

John Donne: Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day

Mary Karr: Field of Skulls

Readings from Donne, M R JAMES, Mary Karr. Music includes The Wicker Man, Britten, Bartok

This Is New York2008021720100807 (R3)William Hope and Laurel Lefkow read poems and prose on the theme of New York with work by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Federico Garcia Lorca, Emma Lazarus (the author of the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty), Allen Ginsberg and E.B. White with music by John Adams, Charles Ives, Steve Reich, Tom Waits, Dvorak, Rodgers and Hart and Bernstein.

A reading of poetry accompanied by the music of Dvorak, Adams, Bernstein and others.

Three2013061620200426 (R3)The power of trios, trinities and triangles. Hattie Morahan and Jonathan Slinger read words by Wordsworth, Donne and Christina Rossetti with music by Prokofiev, Janacek and Bach.

Producer: Natalie Steed

Readings

Macbeth - William Shakespeare

The Three Ravens - Anon

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of 'Three Blind Mice' - Billy Collins

Beattie is Three - Adrian Mitchell

Three Years She Grew - William Wordsworth

My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close - Emily Dickinson

Break, Break, Break - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Eumenides - Aeschylus, translated by Richard Latimer

Holy Sonnet IXV - John Donne

A Triad - Christina Rossetti

Three Violins Are Trying Their Hearts - Carl Sandburg

In Defence of Adultery - Julia Copus

The Inferno, Canto V - Dante Alighieri, translated by Paul Batchelor

The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy, translated by Benjamin Tucker

A sequence of words and music about all things 3 with Hattie Morahan and Jonathan Slinger

Through The Looking Glass2009011120100711 (R3)This edition takes the theme of mirrors and reflections with readings by Sir Derek Jacobi and Lesley Manville.

The poetry and prose I have chosen show the mirror as a symbol of vanity, self-examination and the limits of human understanding.

I started with the object of the mirror with Amy Lowell's poem and Arvo Part's haunting Spiegel im Spiegel. There are several readings from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there. Lesley Manville, played Alice at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith during the 80s. Derek Jacobi brings Alice's topsy-turvy world to life in his reading of the poem Jabberwocky.

A darker vein runs through Ted Hughes' re-telling of Ovid's myth of Narcissus where his fate is sealed when he becomes entranced by his own reflection in a pool, leading to Szymanowski's seductive myths and Brain Eno's plateaux of mirror. Ann Sexton's poem about Snow White gives a modern twist to the 'Mirror, mirror on the wall' and leads to the modern jazz improvisation of Dave Douglas.

Darker still with Walt Whitman's A Handmirror with the radiophonic piece Veils and Mirrors, Sylvia Plath's bleak poem Mirror and Jorge Luis Borges's fear of mirrors.

I end with a mirror fugue from Bach's Art of Fugue and the passage from 1 Corinthians about self-knowledge 'For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face:

Producer: Jessica Isaacs.

Derek Jacobi and Lesley Manville with readings about mirrors and reflections.

Time2013042120140921 (R3)Gemma Arterton and Rufus Sewell read extracts on the subject of Time, a theme which has always been popular with authors, poets and composers. From the mourning of the passing of time in poems by Shakespeare, DH Lawrence and John Milton, to the writers who play with the very concept of time. Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter has bargained with Time for it to always be teatime, while in Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadore, moments in the past and future are as permanent as in the present. Martin Amis takes the idea to the extreme by writing the narrative of his novel Time's Arrow backwards! There's also time travel, from Scrooge's nocturnal visit to his past, to H G WELLS's Time Machine disappearing into the future. Many composers from the classical, jazz and pop worlds have experimented with unusual or constantly changing time signatures. Guillaume de Machaut and Conlon Nancarrow go further by writing music in which music retraces its steps and goes backwards. The programme also includes music by Haydn, Messiaen, Ligeti and Pink Floyd.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Texts and music on the subject of time, with readings by Gemma Arterton and Rufus Sewell.

To Byzantium20080914This edition takes as a starting point Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium for a meditation on immortality and the journey of the soul. The calls of 'phos'/light in John Tavener's Ikon of Light hint of the world to come suggested in Yeats' poem. Charles Causley's poem I am the song and the reading of Traherne are a meditation on mans' existence matched with Biber's extraordinary Mystery sonatas in the vibrant recording by Monica Huggett. It is Pierre Boulez' electroacoustic piece Repons, that takes the listener deep into the impenetrable tomb in Anthony Thwaite's Monologue in the Valley of the Kings. The mysteries of life and death lead to Beethoven's monumental Appassionata sonata in a new recording by Paul Lewis.

There are also lighter moments to life's journey with Adrian Mitchell's affectionate poem Elephant Eternity and the nobel prize winner, Wislawa Szymborska's wry poem Utopia accompanied by the shimmering strings of Stanley Black and his orchestra. But, there is also a sinister tone in TS Eliot's Whispers of immortality followed by the brooding darkness of Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. The journey from life to death is distilled in Emily Dickinson's poem Chariot with the pulsating rhythms of Reich's Music for mallet instruments, voice and organ and in Don Paterson's new translation of Rilke's poem Parting. The programmes ends with Yeats' Byzantium written three years after Sailing to Byzantium and exploring perfection of the human soul in a city of eternal art.

Jessica Isaacs, Producer

Readers: Deborah Findlay (DF) and Andrew Lincoln (AL)

Playlist

00:00:00

Tavener Ikon of Light Fos 1

Tallis Scholars

Gimmell CDGIM005 Tr 1

00:00:40

Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium (DF)

00:04:38

Auden: Orpheus (DF)

00:05:04

Messiaen: Vingt Regards Regard de la Croix

Stephen Osborne (piano)

HYPERION CDA673512 Tr 7

00:09:24

Music of Ancient Greece Plainte de Tecmessa

Atrium Musicae de Madrid & Gregorio Paniagua

HMA 1951015 Tr 4

00:09:36

Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn (AL)

00:12:54

Biber: The Joyful Mysteries. The Annunciation

Monica Huggett & Sonnerie

Gaudeamus CD GAU 350 Tr 1

00:13:00

Charles Causley: I am the song (DF)

00:13:36

Traherne: extract from Centuries of Meditations (AL)

00:18:15

Finzi: Intimations of Immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting

Corydon Singers & Orchestra / Matthew Best

Hyperion CDA66876 Tr 13

00:22:00

Boulez: Repons

Ensemble Intercontemporain / Pierre Boulez

DG 4576052 Tr 12

00:23:00

Anthony Thwaite: Monologue in the Valley of the Kings (AL)

00:27:00

Beethoven: Sonata no 23 'Appassionata' in F minor (2nd and 3rd movements)

Paul Lewis (piano)

Harmonia Mundi 901906.08

00:41:24

Longfellow: I am poor and blind (AL)

00:43:30

John Masefield: Troy Town is covered in Weeds (DF)

00:47:00

Orlando Gibbons: What is our life?

Concordia with Rachel Elliott (soprano) / Mark Levy

Metronome METCD 1039 Tr 4

00:51:15

Karger/Wells: From here to Eternity

Guild GLCD5104 Tr 21

00:51:40

Adrian Mitchell: Elephant Eternity

read by Andrew Lincoln

00:52:05

Wislawa Szymborska trans Adam Czerniawski: Utopia (DL)

00:54:40

Ravel: Miroirs Noctuelles

Cecile Ousset, piano

EMI CDC7499422 Tr 15

00:59:40

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Reflections (AL)

01:00:30

Gibbons: Silver Swan

The Hilliard Ensemble / Paul Hillier

EMICDC7491972 Tr 12

01:02:20

Stockhausen: Stimmung

Singcircle

Hyperion CDA66115 Tr 37

01:03:50

TS Eliot: Whispers of Immortality (DF)

01:05:30

Britten: Sinfonia da Requiem - Lachrymosa

London Symphony Orchestra / Andre Previn

EMI 7243 5 72658 2 CD 2 Tr 2

01:14:30

Elizabeth Jennings: Answers (DF)

01:15:21

JS Bach: Wir Mussen durch viel Trubsal

English Baroque Soloists / John Eliot Gardiner

SDG 50G107 Tr 14

01:22:50

Crumb: Black Angels (God music)

Kronos Quartet

Nonesuch 9 79394-2 Tr 7

01:25:45

Steve Reich: Music for mallet instruments, voices and organ

Amadinda Percussion Group

AMIATA ARNR0293 Tr 1

01:28:25

Emily Dickinson: The Chariot (DF)

01:29:45

Gesualdo: Io Parto e non piu dissi

Collegium Vocale Koln

Maestro CBS M2YK46467

01:31:30

Rilke/Patterson: Parting (DF)

01:32:45

Messiaen: Vingt Regards - Regard du silence

Steven Osborne (piano)

HYPERION CDA673512 Tr 17

01:36:50

Yeats: Byzantium (AL)

01:38:50

Tavener Ikon of Light: Epiphania

Gimmell CDGIM005 Tr 7

A theme about the journey of man and the vision of eternal life.

To Infinity And Beyond2011061220150301 (R3)This Words and Music explores the idea of Infinity, from numbers to space, metaphysics to love, and time to artistic expressions of what is boundless.

Saskia Reeves and David Annen read poetry and prose from Herrick to Douglas Adams and Browning to the Zohar, with music by Beethoven, Dutilleux and Skempton.

Texts and music exploring the idea of infinity. Readings by Saskia Reeves and David Annen.

To Music20071216Diana Rigg and Samuel West read a selection of poetry on the theme of music. Including Elizabeth Jennings's First Music, Andrew Marvell's The Empire of Music, DH Lawrence's Piano and TS Eliot's Four Quartets, and WB Yeats reading his poem The Fiddler of Donney.

Music includes Webern's arrangement of Bach's A Musical Offering, songs by Dowland and Schubert, and Seamus Heaney's reading of The Given Note accompanied by piper Liam O'Flynn.

To Strive, To Seek, To Find And Not To Yield2009080920091223 (R3)In a programme celebrating the work of Tennyson, Beth Goddard and Michael Pennington read poetry from Tennyson himself and others on the theme of destiny, alongside with music inspired by, and reflecting the texts. The poet is represented by excerpts from favourites such as The Lady of Shalott and Ulysses.

With works by Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Andrew Marvell, Dylan Thomas and TS Eliot, as well as music from Vaughan Williams, Britten, Hubert Parry, Richard Strauss and Arthus Bliss among others.

In a celebration of the work of Tennyson, readings and music on the theme of destiny.

Town And Country2016061220181225 (R3)Julian Rhind-Tutt and Lia Williams in an exploration from Roman times to the present day.
Translation2021092620221113 (R3)Miscommunication, the multiple meanings of words and what it means to translate emotion into music are explored in today's programme. Our readers Jonathan Keeble and Emily Pithon bring us Humpty Dumpty's wonderfully pugnacious encounter with Alice, in which he states 'When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less', we hear Nabokov's commentary on words within Eugene Onegin, underscored by the musical version of Pushkin's novel in verse, composed by Tchaikovsky. A recent work from poet laureate Simon Armitage is a modern retelling of the medieval poem The Owl and the Nightingale. Another excerpt comes from TS Eliot's The Wasteland in which he quotes, in German, from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. And New Generation Thinker Islam Issa has picked out an Arabic translation by Professor Mohamed Enani of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee.

Producer: Nick Holmes

In the Free Thinking archives you can find a series of episodes looking at language asking what language did Columbus speak?, exploring dead languages including Oscan and decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics and uncovering writing in Black Country dialect.

Readings:

Lewis Carroll Alice Through the Looking-Glass

William Shakespeare, trans. Prof. Mohamed Enani Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day (Sonnet 18) read by Islam Issa

T S Eliot The Waste Land; The Burial of the Dead

Ezra Pound The Seafarer

Reginald Shepherd A Few Thoughts about Translation

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Dany Laferri耀re, trans. David Homel I am a Japanese Writer

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Diane Thiel Love Letters

Mireille Gansel, trans. Ros Schwartz Translation as Transhumance

Vladimir Mayakovsky trans. into Scots by Edwin Morgan War Declarit read by Michael Rossi

Sasha Dugdale Translator's Note to Our Sweet Companions Sharing your Bunk and your Bed by Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva trans. Sasha Dugdale Our Sweet Companions Sharing your Bunk and your Bed

Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad

Simon Armitage The Owl and the Nightingale

Vladimir Nabokov translation of Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

You can find a dramatisation of Simon Armitage's The Owl and the Nightingale available now on BBC Sounds

From the idea of the interpreter and language differences to translating emotions in music

Trapped20160515Today's Words and Music explores the feeling of being trapped, both physically and emotionally. Moll Flanders, Casanova and Alan Bennett's Lady of Letters are all incarcerated in prison. Others, such as Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male and Julia and Winston in Orwell's 1984, are almost as constricted by their circumstances. And for some the entrapment is emotional; Emma Bovary and Mr Rochester are both miserable in their marriages, and desperate to be with the person they really love. Includes music by Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Queen. Extracts are read by Kate Phillips and Tobias Menzies.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

Texts and music about being trapped. Readers: Kate Phillips and Tobias Menzies.

Travellers' Tales2011011620111113 (R3)In this edition of Words and Music, the readers Stella Gonet and Nicholas Farrell set sail on a sea of tall tales told by travellers.

Since the ancient Greek poet Homer hailed the exploits of Odysseus there has been an appetite for the true, almost true and downright fabricated stories of travellers: their adventures, the strange sights they saw and the creatures they sometimes loved and left behind. These tales are reflected in from Debussy, Telemann, Rimsky-Korsakov and the Tiger Lillies with words by Sir John Mandeville, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Margaret Attwood.

Producer: Natalie Steed.

Texts and music about travellers, with readings by Stella Gonet and Nicholas Farrell.

Travelling Fairs And Circuses2014113020200517 (R3)The weekly sequence of music, poetry and prose takes time out to visit the world of excitement, bargains, colour, debauchery and petty crime that is the fair, with words by Hardy, Evelyn, Bunyan, Wordsworth, Dickens and Lorca, and music by Debussy, Stravinsky and Richard Rodgers, June Tabor and The Beatles among others. Joanne Froggatt and James Bolam are the readers.

Music, poetry and prose on the subject of travelling fairs and circuses

Treason And Plot2016110620191103 (R3)It would seem ideas about treason and plot are always with us. Art Malik and Frances Barber evoke the French Revolution in Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, conspiracies in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Othello and the world of spies conjured by both John le Carr退 and Hilary Mantel; whilst the musical selections move us from Bonfire Night and fireworks via Stravinsky and Berlioz through to John Tavener's requiem for Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet who commemorated the struggles of the Russian people against the Soviet regime; and Nick Cave's Red Right Hand, which quotes a line from Milton's Paradise Lost referring to the vengeful hand of God, and has been newly popularised by the TV series Peaky Blinders.

Producer: Georgia Mann Smith.

Readings:

Trad: The Fifth of November

Milton: Paradise Lost

Shakespeare: Othello Act I Scene III

Shakespeare: Macbeth Act I Scene V

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall

John le Carr退: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

Anna Akhmatova: Requiem

Shakespeare: Julius Ceasar Act III, Scene 2

Shelley: The Mask of Anarchy

Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

Wordsworth: The Prelude

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Concord Hymn

Readers Art Malik and Frances Barber range from Shakespeare and le Carre to Hilary Mantel.

Tricksters2012040820150208 (R3)Tricksters and Hoaxers. Katherine Parkinson and Jim Norton side-step the banana skins and refuse the exploding cigars in a celebration of the devilish works of pathological pranksters and perennial manipulators including Robin Goodfellow, Brer Rabbit, Till Eulenspiegel, Renard the Fox and Scapino. Words come from Skakespeare, WS Gilbert, Ogden Nash and Chaucer, and music from Mozart, Mendelssohn, Kreisler and Strauss among others.

Producer: Lindsay Kemp.

Texts, music about pranksters and manipulators. Readers: Katherine Parkinson, Jim Norton.

Truth2019092220230102 (R3)The truth is rarely pure and never simple' Morfydd Clark and Neil Dudgeon with a selection of prose and poems mixed with music on a theme inspired by National Poetry Day 2019, which is crowd-sourcing poems that tell the truth about something that matters to you, or deliver a home truth.

National Poetry Day is on October 3rd.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Readings:

Emily Dickinson - Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant

John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn

Stephen Crane - XXVIII [Truth, said a traveller]

Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Hans Christian Andersen - The Emperor's New Clothes

WB Yeats - To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing

Selima Hill - Why I Left You

Vernon Scannell - Where Shall We Go?

Hilaire Belloc - Matilda

Philip Gross - Severn Song

Charles Bukowski - Confession

Meena Alexander - Diagnosis

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.' Readings by Morfydd Clark and Neil Dudgeon.

Ts Eliot20150104Music and poetry read by Simon Russell Beale on the 50th anniversary of TS Eliot's death.
Tucked Up, By Mum And Dad2013012020141223 (R3)Parents of all sorts feature in this edition of Words and Music, from their own and their children's perspective. So we hear about dysfunctional families from ancient Greece and Philip Larkin; the joys of parenthood from Anna Laetitia Barbauld and a dewy-eyed Coleridge - and its dark side from Abraham and Rachel Cusk. Michael Rosen grieves for his son, while Alan Bennett and Elizabeth Jennings describe relationships with elderly parents. Plus (in case you're confused) parenting advice from Erasmus and Dr Benjamin Spock. Readings by Harriet Walter and James Garnon and music from Ligeti, Bach and Tom Lehrer, among others.

Contains some strong language.

David Papp (producer).

Texts and music about parents, with readings by Harriet Walter and James Garnon.

Turning Points2011060520111219 (R3)In this edition of Words & Music Helena Bonham Carter and Hugh Bonneville explore Turning Points, from life-changing and epoch-making, to funny and insignificant.

Love is the pivot for many of the programme's turning points. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, artist Marc Chagall, and Coleridge fall in it; Dorothea (in George Eliot's 'Middlemarch') and Carol Ann Duffy's Eurydice fall out of it; Alan Bennett movingly describes his mother's final days.

Revolutions provide other turning points: the Industrial one provokes opposing reactions from Erasmus Darwin and William Blake; Igor Stravinsky self-consciously remembers his musical one, and Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst recalls her part in an episode in the fight for Women's Suffrage.

The lives of Hilaire Belloc's Matilda and the Bible's Saul are changed forever by versions of the truth, and there's a culinary miracle when eggs and oil emulsify into a mayonnaise, according to Julia Child's instructions.

Music is by Bach, Beethoven, Janacek, Rachmaninov, Vaughan Williams and Erma Franklin, among others.

Sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring some of life's turning points.

Twelve2021022820221211 (R3)Twelve tone music, bar blues, signs of the zodiac, numbers on a clock, eggs in a dozen, members of a jury, Norse gods and goddesses, in a 13th-century French poem: Barbara Flynn and Caleb Obediah read from authors including Joanne Harris, Langston Hughes and William Shakespeare with music by Richard Strauss, Shostakovich and Sun Ra as we explore different takes on the number twelve in this, the twelfth month.

We encounter Merlin, creator of the Round Table for King Arthur and his 12 knights; Find Loki at the sharp end of two dozen swords in Asgard and attempt to steal a dozen eggs for a Russian Colonel. We hear a couple trying to work out what to do with 13 children and Schoenberg's thoughts on the difficulties of composing 12 tone music.

In Chinese mythology the Monkey King had 12 names. Just as he is freed from being imprisoned under a mountain we find ourselves with Solomon Northup as he recounts his entrapment into slavery.

In the Beaufort Scale, Force 12 is a hurricane and we hear two Artists from either side of the Atlantic describe their experiences of them.

A moment of levity comes next as we hear Langston Hughes' evocative poem Dream Boogie Variation accompanied by Bert Weedon on the 12 string guitar before we return to the post-storm scene of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Olivia seeks news of her brother following a shipwreck.

Finally, the evening draws to a close 'Round Midnight with Sun Ra.

Readings:

Michael Drayton: Poly-Olbion

Joanne Harris: The Gospel of Loki

David Benioff: City of Thieves

H.H. Munro: The Baker's Dozen

Arnold Schoenberg: Style and Idea

Arthur Waley: The Adventures of Monkey

Solomon Northup: Twelve Years a Slave

Francis Beaufort: Beaufort Wind Force Scale

Grace Nichols: Hurricane Hits England (read by the author)

Langston Hughes: Dream Boogie Variation

William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night

Alistair Walker: Rhymes of the Zodiac - Virgo

Produced by Barnaby Gordon.

The photo for this edition of Words and Music is of some of the remaining Twelve Apostles rocks in Australia, just off the Great Ocean Road.

Twelve jury members, Norse gods, eggs, tone composition, bar blues and Force 12.

Twilight20130818Texts and music on the theme of twilight, with readings by Paul McGann and Hermione Norris
Twilight2021102420231029 (R3)Clare Perkins and Neal Pearson take us into the literary twilight, where this mysterious crossover between day and night provides rich metaphors of downfall and decline; so we'll hear Ryszard Kapuscinki on the fall of Haile Selassie's empire and the Norse gods being consumed by flames at the end of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. Twilight can also be a spooky, fearful time of day – bats appear unexpectedly in a poem by DH Lawrence, while death creeps over the fields in Philip Larkin's Going and something sinister approaches in Realm of Dusk by The Fall. This week's twilit soundtrack also includes Richard and Linda Thompson, Sally Beamish and Mark Anthony Turnage. You can find episodes of Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas programme exploring twilight, and sleeplessness and if you want soundtracks as the clocks change and evenings set in earlier, Radio 3's mixtapes, Night Tracks, Late Junction and Unclassified are all available on BBC Sounds.

Photo: Jasper Goodall

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Readings and *Music:

*Bernard Herrmann: The Twilight Zone

Philip Gross - Betweenland X

Sean Hewitt - Psalm

*Robin Pharo - Crepuscule

Christine Da Luca - Fireworks Over Bressay Sound

*Mark-Anthony Turnage - Evening Songs: II. In the half-light

Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day

*Frank Bridge - When You Are Old

Adrienne Rich - Darklight

*Lydia Kabadse - Cantus Planus : III. Vespers

Oliver Goldsmith - The Deserted Village

*Richard and Linda Thompson - The Dimming of the Day

Ryszard Kapuscinski - The Emperor

*Richard Wagner - Gotterdammerung: Finale

Peter Porter - Ghosts

*Joanna Marsh - Arabesques: III. Fading

DH Lawrence - Bats

*Sally Beamish - Yeats Interlude

Philip Larkin - Going

*The Fall - R.O.D.

*Breaks Co-op - Twilight (instrumental)

Thomas Hardy - The Return of the Native

Ann Radcliffe - The Mysteries of Udolpho

*Pawel Lukaszewsksi - Daylight Declines

Afanasy Fet (trans. Gordon Pirie) - 'Evening. I'll go to meet them...

* Julie London - November Twilight

TS Eliot - The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

*Aaron Parker - easquela: suspended, spacious in a dusky half-light

*Simon Holt - Shadow Realm

James Joyce - Finnegans Wake

*James Lynam Molloy - Love's Old Sweet Song

With music by Bernard Herrman, Frank Bridge, Simon Holt and Sally Beamish.

The dimming of the day reflected in writing by Adrienne Rich, James Joyce and Peter Porter, read by Clare Perkins and Neil Pearson, plus music from Wagner to Lydia Kabadse.

Clare Perkins and Neal Pearson take us into the literary twilight, where this mysterious crossover between day and night provides rich metaphors of downfall and decline; so we'll hear Ryszard Kapuscinki on the fall of Haile Selassie's empire and the Norse gods being consumed by flames at the end of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. Twilight can also be a spooky, fearful time of day - bats appear unexpectedly in a poem by DH Lawrence, while death creeps over the fields in Philip Larkin's Going and something sinister approaches in Realm of Dusk by The Fall. This week's twilit soundtrack also includes Richard and Linda Thompson, Sally Beamish and Mark Anthony Turnage. You can find episodes of Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas programme exploring twilight, and sleeplessness and if you want soundtracks as the clocks change and evenings set in earlier, Radio 3's mixtapes, Night Tracks, Late Junction and Unclassified are all available on BBC Sounds.

Twins And Doppelgangers20230910The involuntary double-take occasioned by seeing two people who look exactly alike or, imagine this, of coming face to face with your own likeness. This edition of Words and Music focuses on twins and doppelgangers. Lewis Carroll's Tweedledum and Tweedledee rub shoulders with Carol Ann Duffy's Kray Sisters, while Romulus and Remus are brought to life by the European Saxophone Ensemble, and the Ashvins, twin gods from Hindu mythology, sing to each other in Ravi Shankar's opera Sukanya. The doppelganger appears in Schubert's chilling and tragic song of the same name, while Imtiaz Dharker reveals our doubles who lurk in the pages of fiction. The likeness that that is always near at hand - our shadow - is sung about by Judy Garland and comes alarmingly to life in a story by Hans Christian Andersen. Another pair of twins - the twin cities of Cork and Coventry - are celebrated in verse by Raef Boylan and musically by Seကn Ӏ Riada and Benjamin Britten respectively. The readers are Tracy-Ann Oberman and Don Gilet.

Readings and *Music

*Harold Budd - Twins

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Homer's Hymn To Castor And Pollux

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Prometheus Unbound

*Maciej Ma?ecki - Europa: Romulus and Remus

Lewis Carroll - Alice Through the Looking-Glass

*Otis Spann & Muddy Waters - Look Like Twins

Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickelby

*Fr退d退ric Devreese - Gemini, Suite for Double Orchestra : Dance of the Twins

Carol Ann Duffy - The Kray Sisters

*Miklos Rozsa - Twins

Hans Christian Andersen - The Shadow

*Judy Garland - Me and My Shadow

Elizabeth Jennings - The Child and the Shadow

*Seကn Ӏ Riada - Port na bPúca퀀

Raef Boylan - Be Rightly Proud

*Benjamin Britten - War Requiem, Op. 66: I. (a) Requiem aeternam. 'Requiem aeternam

*William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops III - dlp 4.3

Grace Schulman - Because

*Richard Rijnvos - Manhattan Square Dances (for two identical orchestras): Washington Square Dance

John Burnside - The man who was answered by his own self

*Franz Schubert - Schwanengesang, D. 957: XIII. Der Doppelg䀀nger

Imtiaz Dharker - Double

*Jaco Pastorius - Twins

Ted Hughes - Gaudete

*Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto for 2 Cellos in G Minor, RV 531 (Arr. M. Prooijen for Cello, Double Bass & Chamber Ensemble): I. Allegro

Sarah Crossan - One

*Ravi Shankar - Sukanya, Act 1: I. Prelude. Aswini Twins Song to Love

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

*Black Box Recorder - The Deverell Twins

Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet

*Howard Shore - Dead Ringers: Closing Credits

Don Gilet and Tracy-Ann Oberman with readings twinned with music from Schubert to Shankar.

Two20220220Actors Paterson Joseph and Jenna Augen explore the power of number 2. From the nursery rhyme pair Tweedledum and Tweedledee, to Romeo and Juliet, the star crossed couple of lovers; from the mirror image imagined by Thomas Hardy, to the mythological figures of Romulus and Remus, as seen by Percy Shelley; from the Cholmodeley Ladies, whose portrait, hanging at Tate Britain, inspires Jean Sprackland's verses, to the famous 19th-Century twins Chang and Eng, imagined by Cathy Park Hong; and famous double-acts like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in Cervantes' evergreen masterpiece, to the scary symbiosis of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in Stevenson's novella; and more. Some of the music featured comes from duets, vocal or instrumental; or from pieces for two instruments as concert soloists, and some of the music is performed by famous sibling players like pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque; string players Renaud and Gautier Capucon, or the multi-instrumentalists Kanneh-Mason siblings, among others...

Producers: Juan Carlos Jaramillo and Harry Parker

Readings:

King James Bible Verses from Genesis

William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet

John Donne A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Mary Jo Bang Two Nudes

Thomas Hardy Moments of Vision

Victor Hernကndez Cruz Two Guitars

Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote

Cathy Park Hong Ontology of Chang and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins

Henry S Leigh The Twins

Arundathi Subramaniam Shoe Zen

Rudyard Kipling Romulus and Remus

Lewis Carroll Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Through the Looking Glass

R L Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

A E Stallings Two Violins

Sarah Jackson Into the Horse

Jean Sprackland The Cholmondeley Ladies

Dannie Abse Two Photographs

Famous couples and pairs, present in nature and in cultures, inspired by the number two.

Two Americas20080420William Hope and Yolanda Vasquez read poetry and prose on the theme of Two Americas.
Two-tone2021061320220424 (R3)Jade Anouka and Rhys Bevan with a range of readings set alongside music in a programme inspired by Coventry's history. As the New Music Biennial comes to Coventry this weekend as part of its City of Culture programme, this episode takes its inspiration from the musical fusion in the city in the 1970s that produced the two-tone pop sound. But our canvass takes the black and white iconography of that musical moment as a starting point for a programme featuring the sounds of the piano keyboard, with its stark juxtaposition of ebony and ivory, in music from classical to jazz, from the mix of styles that burst out in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance, examples of cross cultural relationships from Othello to novels by Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy, the reflections of poet Hannah Lowe on her Jamaican father's love of the blues, and an excerpt from musician Pauline Black's memoirs about the birth of two-tone band The Selecter in Coventry in the late 1970s.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Radio 3 is recording and broadcasting music from the New Music Biennial starting in next weekend's New Music Show.

Inspired by the musical fusion in 70s Coventry, we celebrate the mix of black and white.

Under The Baobab Tree2013031020160522 (R3)The baobab tree is one of the most recognisable species in Africa. In many places, the enduring giant trees are a symbol of community, a place of gathering, and a location to exchange stories. Storytelling has played a fundamental role in communities across Africa for centuries, with the oral traditions of myths and legends handed down through generations. In modern times poets and writers have often focussed on the effects of colonialism, recent conflicts, and questions of identity. Combining these demonstrates the richness of African literature and the issues facing different nations today. Including music from Africa and beyond.

With Nikki Amuka-Bird and Richie Campbell.

Poetry, prose and music focusing on Africa. Readers: Nikki Amuka-Bird and Richie Campbell.

Under The Microscope2018080520210207 (R3)With Rachael Stirling and Paul Bentall. Poetry, prose and music on the world opened up by microscopy, from fleas to micro-organisms. A full list of the readings and music can be found on the Words and Music programme website.

Microscopes are devices for looking beyond immediate appearances to find the truth. So a programme about microscopes could include material exploring how truth is elusive, non-obvious, problematic. The most obvious examples of explorations of this theme here come from John Donne and Emily Dickinson, and also from Democritus, who opens the programme. His words are accompanied by a piece of 'music' devised by scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, who've written an algorithm that converts results obtained by the Collider into musical notes.

More immediately, there is some great writing from the 17th century that captures the thrill of discovery that surrounded the first systematic use of microscopes - represented here by Francis Bacon, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, and Henry Power. The sense that a new world was being opened up is so palpable in these writings that the use of music from Haydn's operetta The World on the Moon, and Gorecki's Copernicus Symphony, seemed quite appropriate. The microcosm and the macrocosm are internally related, after all, and this is an idea explored in some of the more recent poets sampled here: Ruth Padel and Miroslav Holub both see the wider universe when they look through a microscope.

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Untitled2013060920160101 (R3)It often seems that we live in a world where nothing exists unless it has a title of some kind. And yet there are experiences that we can't easily name... unique emotions that defy all categories. Our struggle to find a name sometimes expresses itself as poetry, sometimes as music... even if the attempt ends in failure. Of course attaching the word 'untitled' to anything doesn't really help as this can serve as just another sort of title. That's the nature of things... or maybe just human nature.

In Words and Music this evening the actors Andrew Scott and Amelia Lowdell venture into the weightless world where experiences and what we call them have been allowed to float free... the realm of the untitled. Catullus, Wordsworth, Samuel Menashe and Emily Dickinson are swirling around with them out there as well as Benjamin Britten, Morton Feldman, Schumann and Conlon Nancarrow. There'll be others too although they may be hard to distinguish to begin with, having escaped their usual moorings. Should we revel in this buoyancy or prepare for a nasty fall? That's up to you.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of the untitled. Readers: Andrew Scott and Amelia Lowdell.

Utopia2016021420161227 (R3)Nancy Carroll and Philip Franks read poetry and prose inspired by Utopia as part of Radio 3's focus on the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's book with music by Gluck, Richard Strauss, Parry, Dittersdorf, Shostakovich, Gilbert and Sullivan and Annie Lennox. The programme has been curated by New Generation Thinker Professor Nandini Das from The University of Liverpool.

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and Curator's and Producer's Notes.

You can also hear a Free Thinking debate on Utopia: Anne McElvoy chairs a discussion at LSE in which Professor Justin Champion, Dr John Guy, Politicians Kwasi Kwarteng and Gisela Stuart discuss Is politics about building a better world, or simply the art of the possible? This will be broadcast at 10pm Thursday 18th February.

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and the Producer's Notes.

Producer: Philippa Ritchie

Main image: Land of Cockaigne, 1567, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525 - 1569), oil on panel (credit Dea Picture Library)

Music and poetry inspired by utopia, marking the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's book.

Verdi 200: Verdi, Conflict And Liberty20131006Verdi 200: texts read by David Sibley and Jemma Redgrave.

Verdi's life seems to have been marked, both on and off stage, by two words: conflict and liberty, both of which constitute the backbone of this Words and Music.

When you examine the composer's artistic life soon you see the image of a man fighting against old ways of making opera: rigid musical structures dominated by singers as well as opera houses subject to censorship. Only his sheer talent and determination saw Verdi succeed to the point of breaking free and creating at will. This particular personal, perilous journey is followed through letters of the man himself and his wife Giuseppina Strepponi.

The drama on stage referred to, which expresses a fight against political oppression or invisible social constraints, is provided here by some of the original sources, texts by Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Dumas and Schiller which inspired Verdi to write some of his most memorable masterpieces, among them La Traviata, Rigoletto, Don Carlos and Otello.

Finally, to paint a full picture of Verdi and his time, the so-called Risorgimento, the fight of Italy for its independence and its true identity, and to see also the stature of the composer as a leading figure in the new-born country, this programme combines texts from national idols like Mazzini, with poems by other of his contemporaries, like Giusti, Tasca or Maffei - the later saying: 'You are the Apex of Glory. The words Verdi and Victory ring out together'.

Exploring the themes of Verdi, conflict and liberty. Readers: Jemma Redgrave, David Sibley

Vikings2022032020230129 (R3)The Edda, Noggin, Wagner, Neil Gaiman - today's programme journeys into the realms of Norse gods and mythology, and the seafaring Scandinavian warrior people who conjured them - the Vikings. The name 'Viking' is an Old Norse term meaning a pirate raid, and their invasions sent terror into the hearts of many but new archaeological finds are changing our understanding of this civilisation. Our readers are Leo Suter, star of the new Netflix TV series Vikings: Valhalla, and Natalie Simpson, and our readings include extracts from novels by Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams. In his poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow conjures a Viking skeleton to life in full gothic horror, and P.G. Wodehouse muses on the Viking notion of going 'Berserk'. And in the beginning was the Edda - the ancient Scandinavian poetry that first recorded the myths of the gods such as Odin, Thor, Loki and Angrboda.

The music includes classics such as Grieg's Peer Gynt and Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries into Valhalla (the realm of the Viking gods), Jon Leif's choral epic inspired by the Edda, contemporary Scandinavian composers including Ola Gjeilo and Rebecca Karijord, and Moondog, the New York-based 'Viking of 6th Avenue'.

Producer: Graham Rogers

Readings:

Old Norse - The Poetic Edda (translated by Carolyne Larrington) (excerpt)

Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin - Noggin the Nog (excerpt)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Skeleton in Armor (excerpt)

Alcuin - Letter to the king of Northumbria (excerpt)

Cat Jarman - River Kings (excerpt)

Douglas Adams - The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (excerpt)

Genevieve Gornichec - The Witch's Heart (excerpt)

Helen E. Wieand - The Viking-Maid

P.G. Wodehouse - Summer Lightning (excerpt)

Anon. 19th Century - God bless the Lifeboat and its crew

Neil Gaiman - American Gods (excerpt)

Neil Price - The Children of Ash and Elm (excerpt)

Neil Oliver - Wisdom of the Ancients (excerpt)

Old Norse - Havamal (translated by Carolyne Larrington) (excerpt)

The seafaring Norse warriors and their gods and mythology.

Village Minstrel2013110320160131 (R3)Village Minstrel. John Clare won fame in his own lifetime as the 'peasant poet', but has long been appreciated in his own right as one of the most important poetic voices of the 19th century. Karl Johnson and David Annen are the readers in a selection of Clare's own poems and writings by John Steinbeck, Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies and others chosen to reflect his life as a farm labourer, his intense ability to observe the natural world, and his eventual mental deterioration. With folk music from Paddy Tunney and Fred Jordan, singer-songwriters Vikki Clayton and Chris Wood, fiddler Giles Lewin and The Imagined Village, plus works by Britten, Haydn, Tippett, Thomas Linley and others.

Part of Radio 3's Folk Connections weekend, celebrating folk music and the influence of folk on classical music.

Texts and music inspired by John Clare's poetry. Readers: Karl Johnson and David Annen.

Villains20070916Villainy is reflected in music by Mozart and Bartok, and poems by Oscar Wilde and Shelley.
Violins2016101620190104 (R3)Tara Fitzgerald and Giles Terera read poems about violins, including Yeats and Whitman.
Walkers, Wanderers And Wayfarers2009101820100718 (R3)Walking is the subject of this week's edition of the award-winning programme mixing music, poetry and prose. Clare Higgins and Ian McDiarmid read poems and prose extracts by Henry David Thoreau, Edward Thomas, WH Davies, William Wordsworth and Alfred Wainwright among others, while the music includes contributions from Mussorgsky, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams and Lou Reed. From the age-old beneficial effects of sauntering to the exhilaration of climbing a mountain, and from a lover's evening stroll to the inconvenience of Manchester street-puddles, this seemingly everyday subject gradually takes us further and further from home...

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of walking.

Walks In Two Worlds2017111920181228 (R3)Theseus went into the maze, Orpheus into the dark of Hades. Heroes that they were, both emerged again to the light of the day. Alexandra Gilbreath and Neil Pearson are our guides to worlds galore, of magic and myth, and of love... for two people may share the same space but their thoughts? Who knows? How many worlds do we each inhabit as memory bends time back on itself?

So the familiar becomes the strange, with poetry from an Anglo-Saxon riddle, John Burnside, Vahni Capildeo, Ciaron Carson, Cecil Day-Lewis, Robert Devereux Earl of Essex, Thom Gunn, W S Graham, Selima Hill, Mervyn Peake, Warsan Shire, and prose from Paul Kingsnorth and Michael Ondaatje; with the music of Satie and Mussorgsky walking us through from one world to the next, plus Birtwistle, Britten, Chopin, Klami, George Lewis, James MacMillan and Jean Redpath.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

An exploration of different worlds in text and music including Coleridge, Chopin and Satie

Walter Scott2021081520221227 (R3)Walter Scott (1771-1832) was so renowned that a vast monument built to his memory still towers over Princes Street in Edinburgh, a full 30 feet taller than Nelson's Column in London. A pioneer of the historical novel and of the gothic, Scott's output of poetry and prose was colossal with works including Waverley, the Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy and Ivanhoe. But he also found time to more or else invent the modern idea of Scottishness, when he devised an elaborate pageant to welcome George IV to Scotland in 1822. Sophia McLean and Denis Lawson read extracts not only from Scott's work, but also from other Scottish authors and poets whose writing reflects some of his sensibilities, including Margaret Oliphant, Iain Banks, Jean Guthrie Smith and Robin Jenkins. The music includes Rossini's La Donna del Lago, one of many operas adapted from a Scott novel and Haydn's arrangement of Lizae Baillie - the kind of traditional ballad that Scott drew inspiration from. There are also offerings from Hector Berlioz, Thea Musgrave, Tiny Grimes, Eddi Reader and Simon Thoumire.

READINGS:

Sir Walter Scott - The Lay of the Last Minstrel - Canto II - Melrose Abbey

Sir Walter Scott - The Lay of the Last Minstrel - Canto I - Introduction

Sir Walter Scott - Ivanhoe

Charles W Chessnut - The House Behind the Cedars

Margaret Oliphant - The Library Window

Robin Jenkins - The Cone Gatherers

Jean Guthrie Smith - The Black Belt

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

JG Lockhart - Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott - My Aunt Margaret's Mirror

Sir Walter Scott - Lochinvar

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A Free Thinking episode exploring the writing of Walter Scott's novel Waverley is available now on BBC Sounds and as an Arts and Ideas podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04dr39q

From gothic novels and history to music by Rossini, Thea Musgrave, Schubert and Berlioz.

War And Peace20081109William Blake's starkly terse poem The Poison Tree sets the scene, describing, with Biblical overtones, how human hatred and animosity lead to war. Blake and Beethoven both died in 1827, and the two men also shared a defiant, revolutionary spirit, hints of which can be heard within the elegant framework of a `Menuetto`

Emily Dickinson's poem `It feels a shame to be alive` describes with prophetic vision the cost of human life in terms of a stack of dollars. Dickinson lived through the American Civil War and, just as Blake and Beethoven were united in their death, she died in the same year that Franz Liszt passed away, 1886. The American and Hungarian were in many respects poles apart: Dickinson was reclusive, she never travelled, never married and enjoyed no fame in her lifetime, while Liszt was a cosmopolitan romantic, a dazzling pianist and celebrated performer, though he became devoutly religious in his late years. It was Liszt, whilst travelling with his lover Marie d'Agoult in Italy, who set Petrarch's sonnet 'Pace non trovo': 'I find no peace, nor do I wish for war, I fear and hope and burn and am full of ice'.

The poetry produced by those who lived, fought and died during the Great War is often strikingly at odds with much of the music of the period. So, while in 1918 Charlotte Mew poignantly reflects on the waste of young life, popular songs cheer the troops and rouse jingoistic sentiments. Similarly, as Wilfred Owen describes with chilling vividness the horrific scenes of men dying from exposure on the Front in the ballad 'In Summertime on Breedon'.

The wistful intimacy of Marin Marais's Chaconne and its hypnotic rhythm over a repeated ground bass serve to pre-echo the mesmeric rhythm of Edith Sitwell's celebrated poem 'Still falls the rain' which describes the bombing of London during the Blitz in 1940. A year earlier, 1939, Bela Bartok wrote his 6th String Quartet, at once a personal lament on the death of his mother and an elegy for the loss of peace in Europe.

Ezra Pound's elliptical poem 'An image of Lethe' uses a highly distilled language to describe Hell's river Lethe, the Elysian fields and an image of Actaeon, the huntsman who stumbled across the beautiful Artemis bathing naked in the woods. She transformed him into a mute stag and he met a horrific end, ripped to pieces by his own dogs. Pound creates a sense of time suspended, an idyllic moment before the violence to come. Throughout his writing, he constantly draws inspiration from the Italian trecento poets, above all Dante but also Petrarch, and I have followed this verse from the Cantos with Monteverdi's setting of Petrarch's Hor che'l ciel from the Madrigals of Love and War. As the poet describes how the intensity of his love has brought him to a state of war, the stillness of the opening music is brilliantly offset with the stile agitato ('agitated style') that follows.

Just as George Herbert finds peace through his faith in the final reading of the sequence, in a similar way death and union with God represented the ultimate peace for two of the composers whose music we hear - Purcell, whose serene 'Evening Hymn' takes the theme of night as a metaphor for death, and Bach's Cantata 170 'Contented rest, beloved soul's desire' is a divinely sublime acceptance of death. Here, beyond 'repugnant life' lies the only true peace.

Kate Bolton, producer

Joanna David: JD

Paul McGann: PM

PLAYLIST:

CHRISTOPHER TYE

Crye

Concordia

METCD 1020

A Poison Tree (PM)

Piano Trio in C minor Op.1 No.3: Menuetto

Beaux Arts Trio

PHILIPS 438 9482

It feels a shame to be alive (JD)

Sonetto 47 del Petrarca ('Pace non trovo')

Barenboim

DG 435 591-2

JOHN MILTON

From Paradise Lost Book 1: 'What though the field be lost' (PM)

LAWES

Fantasy

LONG, SCOTT

Oh, it's a lovely War!

Jolly Old Fellows

PEARL CD9355

Exposure (PM)

PEEL, HOUSMAN

In Summertime on Bredon

Gervase Elwe

Rec. 1916, Columbia 1101

The Cenotaph (JD)

Gerard Lesne, Il Seminario Musicale

ASTREE 8882

WALT WHITMAN

Bivouac on a Mountain Side (PM)

MAHLER

Symphony No.5: Adagietto

NY Philharmonic / Bernstein

SONY GBS10985

After a hundred years (JD)

Chaconne from Suite in G major

Paolo Pandolfo

GLOSSA GCD 920406

Still Falls the Rain. The raids, 1940. Night and Dawn (JD)

String Quartet no.6: Mesto-Burletta

Takacs Quartet

HUNGAROTON 12502/04-2

An image of Lethe (PM)

Hor che'l ciel e la terra

Concerto Vocale

HMC 90173637

Peace (JD)

J.S. BACH

Vergnugte Ruh, Beliebte Seelenlust BWV 170

Andreas Scholl, Collegium Vocale

HMC 901644

The struggle between conflict and concord, with poems by John Milton and Wilfred Owen.

Warmth20230115Warmth - with the cold weather with us we are all too aware of the need for warm. For some it simply requires the flick of a switch, a thicker sweater,or the kind words of a friend or neighbour. However, as writers throughout the ages and across the world recall, for others, it is not so immeadiate or straight forward. In this selection of music and readings, actors Amanda Hale and Oliver Alvin-Wilson chart a course through our varied and various perceptions of warmth. The desire for comfort and cosiness. The warmth of affection, of friendship and of love. The attraction of warmer climes or the `warmth of other suns`. The anxiety of global warming. George Orwell is ‘down and out' in a London winter; Alexander Pushkin counters a frozen Russian landscape with the passion of young love; Johann von Goethe bids us find warmth in the land where 'citron-apples bloom'; Paul Kerschen ponders the thoughts of John Keats, recuperating in the Italian sunshine; Haruki Murakami rediscovers the warmth of a certain phrase of music; while Zadie Smith, looking up at the sky, suggests `everyone knows it shouldn't be this hot!`. Other featured authors include John Donne, Charles Dickens, Johann Von Goethe, Isabel Wilkerson, DH Lawrence, Emile Zola, Emily Dickinson, Richard Wright and Bai Juyi. Complementary strains of music are given to us by - among others - David Lang, Robert Schumann, Giacomo Puccini, Piotr Tchaikovsky, Georges Bizet, Johnny Dankworth, Tori Amos, Georgy Sviridov, William Grant Still and with the comforting familiarity of ‘Trad'.

Producer: Chris Wines

From Orwell to Goethe, Zadie Smith to Donne, with music from Puccini, Bizet and Tori Amos.

Warriors20090906An exploration of the warrior in poetry and music, from classical heroes to more contemporary soldiers. These are fighting men and women, in their own words to their troops, in their quiet moments alone, and in the eyes of those who love them and sometimes lose them.

There is loss as well as triumph, but the only political protest is Bob Dylan's Masters of War. Queen Elizabeth I makes an appearance rousing her troops to repel the Spanish Armada. Hector of Troy leads his men into battle against the Greeks and is mourned later by his father. George Orwell shares his experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and Ivor Gurney's In Flanders aches for the hills of home. Tennyson's King Arthur is the elderly king at the end of his life.

Works also include Shakespeare, Christopher Logue, Michael Longley and UA Fanthorpe, with music from Beethoven, Purcell, June Tabor, Bob Dylan, Tchaikovsky and Berlioz.

Readings are by Deborah Findlay and Don Warrington.

Don Warrington and Deborah Findlay read poetry and prose on the theme of the warrior.

Way Out West20151227Join the actors Kerry Shale and Amelia Lowdell for an adventure way out west with outlaws, lawmen and a soundtrack featuring Copland, yodelling cowboys and The Doors.

Producer: Zahid Warley

(Image: Cattle Skull in Monument Valley, Arizona, America)

Scroll down the webpage for more information about the music used, and the Producer's Notes.

From cowboys to Copland with Kerry Shale and Amelia Lowdell way out west.

We Must Love One Another Or Die2008041320090201 (R3)With readings from MacNeice, Steinbeck and Orwell, and music by Britten, Barber and Bartok
Weary With Toil20081005Another chance to hear Harriet Walter and Robert Glenister read poetry and prose on a theme of work and toil by Shakespeare, Kathleen Jamie, Simon Armitage, John Clare and Carol Rumens. With music by Beethoven, Handel, Elvis Costello and Shostakovich.

Readers: Harriet Walker and Robert Glenister

Producer's Note

I've chosen poetry on the theme of work in all its aspects: love of work, despair at the loss of work, the monotony of work, work in the fields and work on the shop floor.

The programme starts with Simon Armitage's poem 'The White-Liners' and includes Ruth Padel's 'Builders' and Jo Shapcott's 'Work in the City'. Factory life and industry is heard in Christopher Logue's 'I've worked here all my life', Fred Voss' 'All the Way' and Carol Rumens' 'Jarrow'.

Some of the music in the programme reflects this -Iron Foundry, Mosolov's socialist realist depiction of life in a Soviet factory, Elvis Costello's lament for the death of shipbuilding and Handel's slave song from his oratorio 'Theodora'.

The political is touched on in Paul Robeson's 'Joe Hill', a song about the death of a labour activist. Rural life is heard in John Clare's 'Labour's Leisure' and in Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper' with music from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and George Butterworth's beautiful setting of A.E. Housman's 'Is my Team Ploughing?

The sequence ends with a Raymond Carver poem, written at the very end of his life, reflecting his love of work and Handel's 'The Harmonious Blacksmith'.

Fiona McLean (producer)

Playlist

CHARLES-VALENTIN ALKAN

Le staccatissimo

12 Etudes Dans Les Tons Mineurs, Op 39

Jack Gibbons, Piano

ASV CDDCS227

Robert Glenister (reader)

GEORGE ANTHEIL

Ballet Mecanique

Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra

Conductor - Daniel Spalding

NAXOS 8559060

Fred Voss (reader)

EWAN MACCOLL

My Old Man

Black and White

COOKCD 038

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Conductor - Riccardo Chailly

DECCA 436 640-2

Harriet Walter (reader)

The Best of Elvis Costello

COLUMBIA CK 40101

The Golden Age

Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra

RD CD 10 009

CV

STEVE REICH

Piano Phase

Phase Patterns, Pendulum Music, Piano Phase, Four Organs

Ensemble Avantgarde

WERGO WER 6630-2

Barcarolle

Flower Sellers, Budapest

Songs of Free Men

SONY MHK 63223

GRACE NICHOLS

Water Pot

Gabrieli Consort and Players

Conductor - Paul McCreesh

ARCIV PRODUKTION 469 061-2

Labours Leisure

Pastoral Symphony (final movement)

Berliner Philharmoniker

Conductor - Herbert von Karajan

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

SCHUBERT

At Evening after Work

Die Schone Mullerin

Gerald Moore, piano

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone

DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 415 186-2

Sonnet 27

GYORGY LIGETI

Clocks and Clouds

The Ligeti Project III

TELDEC 8573876312

AUGUST KLEINZAHLER

Staying Home from Work

EILEAN NI CHUILLEANAIN

Swineherd

JUNE TABOR

The Cloud Factory

At the Wood's Heart

TOPIC TSCD557

ROSEMARY DOBSON

Folding the Sheets

Six Songs from 'A Shropshire Lad

The Vagabond

Bryn Terfel, baritone

Malcolm Martineau, piano

DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 4459462

STEPHEN ROMER

Air and Variations, The Harmonious Blacksmith

Trevor Pinnock, Harpsichord

ARCHIV 413912

Harriet Walter and Robert Glenister read words on a theme of work and toil, set to music.

Welcome To Heartbreak20200209There cannot be a phenomenon in all the world that inspires poets and composers more than heartbreak. It is a universal experience, and yet at the same time feels utterly unique.

With Valentine's Day approaching, why not indulge yourself in expressions of exquisite pain from the likes of Audre Lorde, Alice Meynell, Don Paterson and Derek Walcott, whose words take you through the stages of despair, denial, regret, acceptance and so on. All of it accompanied, of course, by lovelorn, lovesick music courtesy of Leoncavallo, Puccini, Tchaikovsky and Tom Waits.

Living through the operatic emotions of a broken heart alongside you are readers Zubin Varla and Katie West.

Readings:

Derek Walcott - The Fist

Walt Whitman - Sometimes with One I Love

Elizabeth Smart - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Sean Bonney - In Fear of Memory (after Pasolini)

Alice Meynell - Renouncement

Percey Bysshe Shelley - When the Lamp is Broken

Anon - Donal Og (translated by Lady Augusta Gregory)

Don Paterson - A Vow

Pablo Neruda - Sonnet LXV (translated by Stephen Tapscott)

Lynn Emanuel - Frying Trout While Drunk from ‘The Nerve Of It: Poems Selected and New' (2015). Aired by permission of University Of Pittsburgh Press.

Ernest Dowson - Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Ovid - Remedia Amoris (translated by Rolfe Humphries)

Kahlil Gibran - On Pain

Edna St. Vincent Millay - Time does not bring relief

Frank Bidart - Catullus: Excrucior

Frank Bidart - Catullus: Odi et Amo

Frank Bidart - Catullus: Id faciam

Kit Wright - My Version

Christina Rossetti - Mirage

Audre Lorde - Movement Song

Derek Walcott - Love After Love

Louis MacNeice - Autumn Journal: Canto XIX

Produced by Jack Howson.

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3.

Zubin Varla and Katie West guide you through the operatic emotions of a broken heart.

West Country Dreaming2019081120211228 (R3)Sarah Parish and John Nettles celebrate the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset.

And citizens dream of the south and west' writes Hardy in his much-loved poem 'Weathers', and who indeed can resist the lure of the westerning sky? West-country memories and images in this week's programme range from family holidays to romantic medieval legend, and from the warmth of Betjeman's Dawlish to the unfriendly air of Hardy's Egdon Heath. Water is always near, whether beating the Cornish cliffs, flushing the boat of Brutus, son of Aeneas, up the River Dart (local legend says he came that way to found Britain), or flooding the fields of Glastonbury. And the West Country's own local talents are celebrated in poems by Charles Causley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the music of The Fishermen's Friends (Cornwall), The Yetties (Dorset), and Bristol bands Spiro and Portishead.

Producer: Lindsay Kemp

John Nettles is a Cornish actor who starred in the TV series Bergerac and Midsomer Murders, and more recently in Poldark as Ray Penvenen.

Sarah Parish was born in Yeovil, Somerset, and her most recent work has included W1A, Bancroft, and Series 3 of Broadchurch.

Readings:

Weathers (excerpt) - Thomas Hardy

The Seasons - Charles Causley

Beeny Cliff - Thomas Hardy

Idylls of the King (excerpt) - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In Search of England (excerpt) - H.V. Morton

Dart (excerpt) - Alice Oswald

The Return of the Native (excerpt) - Thomas Hardy

Dawlish - John Betjeman

Five on a Treasure Island (excerpt) - Enid Blyton

Lines composed while climbing the left ascent of Brockley Coombe, May 1795 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Grassing (excerpt) - Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Letter - Sylvia Plath

The Land's End (excerpt) - W.H. Hudson

Grave by the Sea - Charles Causley

Sarah Parish and John Nettles with westward-looking readings by Betjeman, Hardy and others

What Is Modern Art?2019102020200405 (R3)From scoffing critics to celebrations of invention - prose, poetry and music inspired by art with readings by Peter Wight and Indra Ov退.

READINGS and TV clips

Jeremy Paxman interviews Damien Hirst on Newsnight 2012

Albert Wolff: Review of an 1876 Impressionist Exhibition

Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation

Andy Rooney asks When Did This Become Art?

Wallace Stevens: The Man With the Blue Guitar

Plato: The Republic Book 10 translated by Robin Waterfield

Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting published 1450 translated by John R Spencer

Elizabeth Jennings: Caravaggio's Narcissus in Rome

John Donne: Witchcraft by a Picture

Bruno Alfieri: Review of Jackson Pollock quoted in a Time magazine article 'Chaos, Damn It!' 1950

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Marcel Proust: The Guermantes Way translated by Mark Treharne

Yasmina Reza: Art translated by Christopher Hampton

John Rothenstein on Bridget Riley: Modern Painters Volume III

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts: Harlem is Nowhere

Frank O'Hara: To Larry Rivers

Robert Hughes from his TV series The Shock of the New 1980

Producer: Luke Mulhall

We hear from TV presenter Jeremy Paxman questioning Damien Hirst, the Director of the Tate 1938-64 John Rothenstein's analysis of Bridget Riley's art of optical illusion and predictions about the future of art from the influential Australian Robert Hughes - presenter and author of the Shock of the New 1980 documentary television series.

Readings include Christina Rosetti's poem In an Artist's Studio, extracts from Plato on what making art is; the American critic Susan Sontag's argument for a new erotics of art; John Donne's poem Witchcraft by a Picture; a speech from the hit play Art, written by Yasmina Reza and translated by Christopher Hampton, which depicted the response of his friends to a man buying a completely white painting and the views of residents in Harlem to photographs of their streets in an essay from Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.

Claude Debussy scorned the term Impressionism but it didn't stop critics using it to describe his compositions and the music choices in this programme include Debussy's La Mer performed by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Don McLean's Vincent inspired by Van Gogh's painting of Starry Nights, Clarence 'Pinetop' Smith's Boogie Woogie and Four Organs by composer Steve Reich, one of the people sharing their view of an art work from the collection of MOMA, in New York in the new podcast and Essay series The Way I See It - which you can find on BBC Sounds and available to download.

You might also be interested in the Free Thinking programme collection of discussions of visual art and debates about running a museum recorded with Frieze London Art Fair https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

From scoffing critics to celebrations of invention-prose, poetry and music inspired by art

What's In A Name?20230806A rose by any other name may smell as sweet but how does my own name define me? In this edition of Words and Music we explore the importance of names with readings from Pippa Bennett-Warner and Aidan McArdle of the writings of Pushkin, Margaret Atwood, Henry Reed, Toluwanimi Obiwole and Shakespeare, and with music by Shostakovich, Arvo Part, Nkeiru Okoye and Ravel.

Producer in Salford: Barnaby Gordon

Who Has Seen The Wind?20160501Who Has Seen the Wind? Poets, writers and composers have sought its company many times. Today Cheryl Campbell and Neil Pearson read from Christina Rossetti and Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, George Macdonald and Theodore Roethke with music from Mozart and Debussy and Bach, The Chieftains and Nina Simone. The wind roars, breezes and just occasionally holds its breath in a story of tempestuous emotion involving a drunk and a cat, rooftop-rides and madness at sea. Wild, strange, maddening and exhilarating - the winds are passing by.

Reader: Cheryl Campbell

Reader: Neil Pearson

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

Texts and music on the theme of the wind. Readings by Cheryl Campbell and Neil Pearson.

Wide Open Spaces20150830Alexandra Gilbreath and Steve Toussaint read poetry and prose which explores our feelings about wide open spaces, the yen to explore but also the fear of what we'll find. From meadows to mountain tops, down rivers and out to sea, across city roof tops and down harrowing migrant trails and the final frontier, what may lie deep inside our imagination? With readings from Emily Bronte to Eduardo Galeano, from Langston Hughes to Jackie Kay and Robert Louis Stevenson and the music of Hadyn, Herbie Hancock, Sibelius and Tallis.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

Texts and music about open spaces, with readers Alexandra Gilbreath and Steve Toussaint.

Wild Isles20230312Otters, wild swans, roe deer, starlings and hares in the mountains, valleys, rivers and fens of these, our Wild Isles. Today's programme takes us on safari all over the British Isles, celebrating its unique landscapes, flora and fauna.

The poet Elizabeth Sears Bates asks what we would see from an owl's perspective; Robert Burns converses with a wee sleekit, cowerin', timorous beastie as he accidentally disturbs it from it's comfy nest, and we'll hear an archive recording of Noel Coward's masterful reading of Clemence Dane's poem `The Welcoming Land`. There are also Wild Swans from poet WB Yeats and composer Elena Kats-Chernin and a glorious murmuration of starlings by Peter Tallis.

Our wild Isles soundtrack also includes Schubert's Trout Quintet, Janacek's `Cunning Little Vixen`, Orcadian sea birds from Erland Cooper and a Bonny Moorhen from Steeleye Span. Two recent winners of the National Centre for Early Music Young Composers Award also feature today: Jacob Fitzgerald's 2021 piece `Murmuration` for the Palisander recorder ensemble, as well as a poem by the 2022 winner Christopher Churcher, who celebrates the strutting, boisterous capercaillie.

Oh, and Captain Beaky and his Band wander through the woodland singing songs and righting wrongs.

Part of Radio 3's programming to go alongside a BBC documentary series Wild Isles, presented by David Attenborough and filmed over the last 3 years, which is available on the iPlayer.

Producer: Les Pratt

Readings:

Melissa Harrison - Rain (excerpt)

William Cowper - The Squirrel

Thomas Hardy - The Woodlanders (excerpt)

Zaffar Kunial - The Hedge

Claire Ratinon - Unearthed (excerpt)

Clemence Dane - The Welcoming Land (read by Noel Coward)

Henry Williamson - Tarka the Otter (excerpt)

William Shakespeare - Venus & Adonis (excerpt)

Elizabeth Sears Bates - What sees the Owl?

Jini Reddy - Wanderland (excerpt)

Jim Carruth - Roe

Robert Burns - To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785

Peter Tallis - Murmuration

W.B. Yeats - The Wild Swans at Coole

Christopher Churcher - Capercaillie

Katherine Rundell - The Hare (excerpt)

The birds, animals and landscapes of the British Isles from owls to oak, fenlands to foxes

Wild Wood20081019What could be more unsettling than the darkness seeping like sump oil from beneath the branches of a pine forest? What's more likely to give imagination wings than a big wind catching at the green sails of a huge chestnut grove? The Wild Wood bewitches as it bewilders. This was the starting point when I began to think about this evening's edition of Words and Music. I wanted to give a sense of both. I also wanted to suggest how the wild wood is with us from the very beginning, from the time when we listen, rapt, to a bed time story such as Wind in the Willows to that moment in anxious adulthood when, like Dante, we look back and wonder how we came to be lost in the dark wood of our lives. The programme is a kind of journey, beginning with Mole's first encounter with untamed nature and ending with his rescue. The way in which his youthful confidence gives way to speculation and inquiry is reflected in the path the programme takes - where and how did the woods come into being, what gives them their power.

Zahid Warley - producer

Readers: John Rowe (JR) and Emma Fielding (EF)

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Le Sacre de Printemps

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle

EMI CDC7496362

KENNETH GRAHAME

JR(reader)

WENDELL BERRY

How Long Does It Take To Make The Woods

EF (reader)

STEVE REICH

The Four Sections - Section 2

Steve Reich and musicians

Elektra Nonesuch 7559792202

ROBERT MACFARLANE

The Wild Places

Granta

EF(reader)

WAGNER

Forest Murmurs from 'Siegried

Philharmonia Orchestra

Francesco D'Avalos

ASV CDDCA995

SORLEY MACLEAN

The Woods of Raasay

Carcanet

FAIRPORT CONVENTION

Liege and Lief

Reynardine

IMCD 291/586 929-2

BORIS PASTERNAK

Pine Trees

Selected poems

Penguin

ENGLEBERT HUMPERDINCK

Hansel and Gretel

Philharmonia Orchestra and New London children's Choir

Sir Charles Mackerras

Chandos CHAN31432

DON PATERSON

Landing Light

The Forest of the Suicides

Inferno, Canto XIII

RADIOHEAD

Pyramid Song

Parlophone CDFHEIT45102

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Travels with a Donkey

OLIVIER MESSIAEN

Catalogue d'Oiseaux

Roger Muraro

La Chouette hulotte

ACCORD 4657682

HENRY THOREAU

Walden

GYORGY KURTAG

Marta and Gyorgy Kurtag

Jatekok

Track 1

ECM 4535112

SYLVIA PLATH

Mushrooms

BBC Archive

Sylvia Plath (reader)

OLIVER KNUSSEN

Where the Wild Things Are

The Wild Rumpus

London Sinfonietta

Deutsche Grammophon 4695562

CAROL ANN DUFFY

Little Red Cap

The World's Wife

JOHN COLTRANE

The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings

Greensleeves

Disc 3

Track 2

IMPD4 -232

A.A. MILNE

Winnie the Pooh

Alan Bennet (reader)

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

Sir John in Love

Herne the Hunter

The Sinfonia Chorus

Northern Sinfonia

Richard Hetherington

Richard Hickox

CHANDOS CHAN9928

JR (reader)

The beguiling and bewildering forest, found in readings and music by Wagner and Schubert.

Windrush: Some Kind Of Homecoming2018101420190623 (R3)Seven decades after the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury, Lenny Henry and Josette Simon explore the experience and emotions of the Windrush generation through its poetry and prose, set against music from calypso to classical: Lord Kitchener to Ligeti, Beethoven to Bob Marley and gospel to Errollyn Wallen.

In Sam Selvon's 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, the hungry Galahad furtively filches a park pigeon for his lunch; Grace Nichols' and Merle Collins' evocative poems express the heartache of long-delayed, never-achieved returns to Caribbean warmth; John Agard and Benjamin Zephaniah are angry and frustrated in the face of cultural appropriation and racism; Floella Benjamin's shock at the cold of her first British winter turns to delight with her first sight of snow. And woven through the programme are the dual threads of John Berry's Lucy who writes home with bewilderment and affection for her adopted home and, from the BBC Caribbean Service, advice to would-be West Indian migrants on what to expect and how to behave in the UK, from appropriate winter clothing to dealing with a dodgy village squire umpire at the local cricket club.

Readings:

Archive from The Colony (1964 BBC TV documentary directed by Philip Donnellan)

Going to Britain? Labour Exchange - A BBC Caribbean Service pamphlet

To Sir With Love - ER Braithwaite

Lucy's Letter - James Berry

Going to Britain? Climate - A BBC Caribbean Service pamphlet

Coming to England - Floella Benjamin

Like a Beacon - Grace Nichols

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon

In Praise of Love and Children - Beryl Gilroy

Going to Britain? Church - BBC Caribbean Service pamphlet

From Lucy - James Berry

To Bo - Marsha Prescod

Checking Out Me History - John Agard

Colonisation in Reverse - Louise Bennett

Going to Britain? Cricket - BBC Caribbean Service pamphlet

Beyond a Boundary - CLR James

The Race Industry - Benjamin Zephaniah

Seduction - Merle Collins

Two Old Black Men on a Leicester Square Park Bench - Grace Nichols

Producer: David Papp

Lenny Henry and Josette Simon explore the experience of the Windrush generation.

Wine20161225Texts and music on the theme of wine, with readings by Tamsin Greig and Tom Hollander.
Winter2008113020100101 (R3)This week ??s Words and Music is devoted to the season Emily Dickinson described as the time when the sky is low and the clouds are mean: winter. Winter in the countryside is celebrated in Wordsworth ??s  ??The Prelude ?? when, as a child, he and his friends skated along the ice, flying through the cold in the darkness. With this you ??ll hear Peter Maxwell Davies ??  ??At the lochan ?? from his  ??Seven Songs Home ??, the series of songs which tell the story of children in the Orkneys making their way home from school on a winter ??s afternoon. Mark Doty ??s walk with his dogs as the sun sets is heard alongside the Finnish composer Rautavaara ??s concerto for birds and orchestra,  ??Cantus Arcticus ??. The memory of winter past is heard in David Hartnett ??s  ??Two winters ?? in which a man, now a parent himself, remembers his father shovelling snow outside his childhood home, a time in which he dreamed that the snow fell for years  ??and the ray of stars like birds ?? feet flecked the white ??. Winters in California and Tangiers are evoked by the poets Karl Shapiro and Sarah Maguire  ?? in one the pink camellias line the paths, in the other  ??hibiscus blooms burn, scarlet, cerise, tangerine ??. The programme ends with Robert Frost ??s  ??Stopping by woods on a snowy evening ?? and Wayne Barlow ??s rhapsody for oboe and strings inspired by Appalachian folk songs,  ??Winter ??s Passed ??.

Fiona McLean - Producer.

Playlist.

ALEKSANDER GLAZUNOV

The Seasons  ?? Winter

Yevgeny Svetlanov  ?? conductor

Philharmonia Orchestra

EMI CDC7478472

Cheryl Campbell (reader)

EINAR ENGLUND

The Reindeer Race

Northern Pictures

Kuopio Symphony Orchestra

Shuntaro Sato  ?? conductor

FINLANDIA 8573855732

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

from The Prelude

Struan Rodger (reader)

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Children ??s Corner - The Snow is Dancing

Children ??s Weekend

Pascal Roge  ?? piano

DECCA 4216262

Seven Songs Home  ?? At the Lochan

The Choir of St Mary ??s Music School

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies  ?? conductor

UNICORN DKPCD9070

In the Same Space

EINOJUHANI RAUTAVAARA

Richard Stoltzman  ?? clarinet

Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra

Leif Segerstam  ?? conductor

ONDINE ODE10412

ALICE OSWALD

Sonnet

TCHAIKOVSKY

Symphony no 1 - Winter Dreams

Berliner Philharmoniker

Herbert von Karajan  ?? conductor

DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 4191762

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Winter Trees

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Winter Words  ?? At Close of Day in November

Song Cycles

Robert Tear  ?? tenor

Sir Philip Ledger  ?? piano

EMI CZS5739952

Winter in California

MAMAS AND THE PAPAS

California Dreamin ??

Complete Anthology

MCA 982 168 0

Wintering in Tangier

OLIVER MESSIAEN

Catalogue d ??oiseaux - Robin

Hakan Austbo  ?? piano

NAXOS 855353234

THOMAS CAMPION

Now winter nights enlarge

ANTONIO VIVALDI

The Seasons  ?? Winter in F Minor

Nigel Kennedy  ?? violin

EMI 5576660

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The Cold Earth Slept Below

Chery Campbell (reader)

JEAN SIBELIUS

Arioso

Soile Isokoski  ?? soprano

ONDINE ODE10805

JEAN REDPATH

Snow Goose

Leaving the Land

GREENTRAX CDTRAX039

FREDERICK DELIUS

North Country Sketches  ?? Winter Landscape

Works for Piano Four Hands

Noriko Ogawa and Kathryn Stott  ?? piano

BIS BISCD 1347

Winter is Good

FRANK BRIDGE

Christmas Dance  ??Sir Roger de Coverley ??

English Seasons

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

Sir Neville Marriner  ?? conductor

PHILIPS 454442

WALLACE STEVENS

The Snow Man

FRANCIS POULENC

Un soir de neige

Figure Humaine and other Secular Choral Music

New London Chamber Choir

James Wood  ?? conductor

HELIOS CDH55179

EMILY BRONTE

The night is darker

The Winter ??s Past

Music for Quiet Listening

Eastman Philharmonia

Howard Hanson  ?? conductor

MERCURY 4343472

Music and poems on the theme of winter read by Struan Rodger and Cheryl Campbell.

Witches And Sorcerers2010103120161029 (R3)As Halloween approaches Words and Music takes a suitably dark turn, with a programme built around the theme of witches and sorcerers; those sinister beings who have captured the imagination and chilled the blood of poets, dramatists and composers for centuries. This edition also brings together a critically-acclaimed theatrical duo: Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman.

From Shakespeare's cauldron-stirring hags to Christopher Marlowe's tortured Dr Faustus, this is an exploration of some of literature's most iconic witches and wizards. Music ranges from Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain to Nina Simone's classic Put a Spell on You; from Dukas's much loved The Sorcerer's Apprentice to Thomas Ades's The Tempest.

On the night associated with creatures of darkness, Words and Music takes you to the land of Oz, home of the Wicked Witch of the West; sweeps you into Goethe's account of the sorcerer's misguided apprentice; and transports you to Prospero's isle, as the wizard-ruler struggles to abandon his magical powers.

Texts and music about witches and sorcerers. Readings by Juliet Stevenson, Henry Goodman.

Within Limits20190609Anthony Howell and Amaka Okafor with readings exploring ideas of constraint in art and life, including poems from Fulke Greville, Wallace Stevens, and Christina Rossetti, and music ranging from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, to the Velvet Underground.

The title ‘within limits' is taken in the widest possible sense. There are readings and music in here which reflect upon the limits of human experience, on what we can and can't do with language, and plenty in which writers and composers have worked within specific limits they've set for themselves: music composed at random within a set of defined parameters, a novel written without any words containing the letter ‘e', the same insignificant incident retold again and again in different styles, a few experiments with the sonnet form.

There are also a few pieces of music that are supposedly test the limits of performers by being notoriously difficult to perform.

Readings:

Pens退es - Pascal (tr. C. Kegan Paul 1885)

Proslogion - St Anselm

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges (tr Andrew Hurley)

Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau - 4 excerpts (tr Barbara Wright)

Sonnet 100 - Sir Fulke Greville

Peace - Gerald Manley Hopkins

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - Ludwig Wittgenstein (tr. Pears & McGuinness)

The Unnameable - Samuel Beckett

Trying To Learn - Lydia Davis Collected Short Stories:

A Void - Georges Perec (tr Gilbert Adair)

The Idea of Order at Key West - Wallace Stevens

Sonnet - Elizabeth Bishop

Of Circumnavigation - Matthew Francis

No, Thank You, John - Christina Rossetti

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Anthony Howell and Amaka Okafor explore ideas of constraint in art and life.

Women And Music20230305From Grace Jones to Ethel Smyth's March of the Women, Ivor Cutler's cry for liberation 'Women of the world, take over!' to readings of Jane Austen and Dame Nelly Melba. Today's programme explores the deep relationship women have with music: not just as passive, unattainable muse but as composers, performers and instigators. The tender poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Jackie Kay sit alongside EM Forster's spirited Lucy, Shakespeare's longing, Delia Derbyshire's tape loops, William Blake's lullaby, the cold horror of a lost Stradivarius, and Hildegard of Bingen's divine inspiration. With music including Beethoven, Brahms, Nina Simone and punk pioneers The Slits. Shobna Gulati and Sue Johnston are the readers.

Producer: Ewa Norman

You can find a whole collection of discussions exploring Women in the World on the Free Thinking programme website - everything from discussions about sisters, Lady Macbeth, Audrey Hepburn, Arabian queens, Landladies, the Wife of Bath. And there's plenty more music by women for International Women's Day being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and available on BBC Sounds.

Readings:

Charlotte Bront뀀: Jane Eyre

EM Forster: A Room with a View

Warsan Shire: Bless Grace Jones (from Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head)

Sophocles: Music (from Antigone)

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 128: How Oft, When Thou, My Music, Music Play'st

Laurie Stras: What if the composer known as 'Anonymous' was really a woman?

Belden C. Lane: The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

Esther Freud: Hideous Kinky

Dame Nellie Melba: Memories and Melodies

Gwyneth Lewis: Voice (from Sparrow Tree)

Sarah Jackson: Vocal Chords (from Pelt)

Min Kym: Gone

Nina Simone, interviewed by Brantley Bardin in Details magazine January 1997

Nandini Das: Courting India: England Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

William Blake: Cradle Song

Cosey Fanni Tutti: Re-Sisters

Jackie Kay: Piano 4pm (from Empty Nest: Poems for Families)

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Vita Sackville-West: To Ethel: 8th May 1944 (from Quartet: How Four women changed the musical world)

Anna Akhmatova: Music

Women of the world, take over!' From Grace Jones to Jane Austen and Ethel Smyth's March.

Women Beware Women2014021620160228 (R3)Women Beware Women is an unashamed tribute - not to the bloodthirsty vision of Middleton's Jacobean tragedy from which it borrows a title but to some of the poetry and prose written by women and to some of the music they've composed.

As you might expect there's quite a range - from Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes to Elizabeth Bishop and Anna Wickham; and from Ute Lemper to Meredith Monk and Lili Boulanger. Mothers and daughters; lovers, children, friends and missing men - they're all part of a programme, which while not polemical does try to sketch out the profile of a distinct sensibility. In the end the title is an invitation rather than a warning. It could hardly be anything else with Anne Reid and Michelle Terry acting as the hosts.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Texts and music on the theme of women, with readings by Anne Reid and Michelle Terry.

Women In Love2015062120170702 (R3)Diana Quick and Sophie Ward read a selection of poems inspired by the love between women over the ages - from the great Sappho whose many poems exist in tiny fragments, to Virginia Woolf in comic vein and the aunt and niece partnership who travelled Europe writing exquisite poems under the nom de plume Michael Field. Includes music by Hildegard of Bingen, Delibes and Debussy.

Broadcast as part of the BBC's Gay Britannia season.

Texts and music inspired by the love between women. Readers: Diana Quick and Sophie Ward.

Women Walking2016120420210307 (R3)From the Yorkshire moors of Emily Bronte, and the travels around Britain of Jini Reddy, to the Paris city streets paced by George Sand as she carved out her freedom to live an unconventional life as a writer, and the idea of the fl neuse described by Lauren Elkin: from the fearlessness of Little Red Riding Hood in the Brothers Grimm story and Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods to the endurance of Robyn Davidson crossing the Australian desert with a camel: today's programme looks at women walking alone, at this 'impropriety' in earlier centuries and at rebels who strode out unchaperoned, those walking alone in life, the female 'flaneuse' and women adventurers. Nina Sosanya and Natalie Simpson are the readers and music comes from composers and performers including Fanny Mendelssohn, Cecile Chaminade, Sofia Gubaidulina, Jennifer Higdon, Laurie Spiegel, Grace Jones and Eliza Carthy among others.

This week sees International Women's Day on March 8th and Radio 3 is looking at Spring, nature and the Soundscapes for Wellbeing project https://canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/soundscapesforwellbeing/

You can find Jini Reddy in a recent Verb discussion about The Walk https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rwmz

Radio 3 also has a focus on women in classical music running on March 8th.

Producers: Janet Tuppen and Torquil MacLeod

Nina Sosanya and Natalie Simpson read from travel diaries to novels warning against walks.

Women Writing War2018111120231112 (R3)From WWI to Afghanistan, testimony from wives, mothers and women journalists read by Carolyn Pickles and Lara Rossi is set alongside music by Martinů, Messiaen, Max Richter, Clare Connors and Miles Davis.

We begin with Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman before our collaboration with the Big Ideas Project, Motherhood Loss and the First World War, brings letters from the mothers of soldiers in the First World War. Their words are heard with commissioned music by Clare Connors. Helen Thomas, the young wife of the poet Edward Thomas remembers their last night together before he returned to the Front, heard with George Butterworth's The Bank of Green Willow: both Thomas and Butterworth did not return from the war. The great American journalist Martha Gellhorn's report on the devastation in Madrid is set alongside Samuel Barber's A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map, inspired by the death of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. Much closer in time is the war in Afghanistan. The music of Miles Davis is heard as the American Iraq veteran and poet Chantelle Bateman remembers her post-traumatic stress on returning from the conflict. And the poets Bryony Doran and Isabel Palmer tell of their experiences of being the mothers of young soldiers in Afghanistan. Women Writing War ends with May Wedderburn Cannan's July 1919 and her final lines, ‘Never for us is folded War away, Dawn or sun setting, Now in our hearts abides always our war' are heard with Elgar's Carissima.

Producer: Fiona McLean

The annual episode made in partnership with the Imperial War Museum of Radio 3's Arts & Ideas programme Free Thinking is available now on BBC Sounds. It looks at the gallery's art collection. And on the Free Thinking programme website you can find a series of episodes exploring different aspects of war.

READINGS

Phoebe Smith: Letter to Rabindranath Tagore

SA Walker: Letter to her Son

Moniza Alvi: How the Stone Found its Voice

Mary Borden: The Forbidden Zone

Helen Thomas: World Without End

Audrey Withers: Vogue's Victory Edition

Jane Duran: Spanish Civil War

Martha Gelhorn: Spanish Civil War

Cecily Mackworth: En Route

Isabel Palmer: Worse Case Scenario

Ruth Fainlight: Handbag

Chantelle Bateman: PTSD

Bryony Doran: Snow on the Line

Margaret Postgate Cole: The Falling Leaves

May Wedderburn Cannan: Woman Demobilised

With poetry and prose by the mothers of soldiers and music by Messiaen and P J Harvey.

Lara Rossi and Carolyn Pickles with poetry and prose by the mothers of WWI soldiers and of young men serving in Afghanistan with music by P J Harvey, Samuel Barber and June Tabor.

From WWI to Afghanistan, testimony from wives, mothers and women journalists read by Carolyn Pickles and Lara Rossi is set alongside music by Martin?, Messiaen, Max Richter, Clare Connors and Miles Davis.

We begin with Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman before our collaboration with the Big Ideas Project, Motherhood Loss and the First World War, brings letters from the mothers of soldiers in the First World War. Their words are heard with commissioned music by Clare Connors. Helen Thomas, the young wife of the poet Edward Thomas remembers their last night together before he returned to the Front, heard with George Butterworth's The Bank of Green Willow: both Thomas and Butterworth did not return from the war. The great American journalist Martha Gellhorn's report on the devastation in Madrid is set alongside Samuel Barber's A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map, inspired by the death of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. Much closer in time is the war in Afghanistan. The music of Miles Davis is heard as the American Iraq veteran and poet Chantelle Bateman remembers her post-traumatic stress on returning from the conflict. And the poets Bryony Doran and Isabel Palmer tell of their experiences of being the mothers of young soldiers in Afghanistan. Women Writing War ends with May Wedderburn Cannan's July 1919 and her final lines, ‘Never for us is folded War away, Dawn or sun setting, Now in our hearts abides always our war' are heard with Elgar's Carissima.

Wordsworth's World2020092720201222 (R3)Noma Dumezweni reads from the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth - Roger Ringrose her brother's poems - in a programme marking the anniversary this year of the Lakeland poet (7 April 1770 - 23 April 1850). Dorothy's journals are a unique insight into everyday life for the Wordsworth siblings at Grasmere, and in this edition you can hear Dorothy's rich descriptions of locations and events, set against the poems they inspired in William, including Lines Written in Early Spring and Composed upon Westminster Bridge. The musical backdrop includes Wordsworth's contemporary Beethoven but also features music by Fanny Mendelssohn (who like Dorothy, knew about having a celebrated sibling), Benjamin Britten and Schubert.

On the Free Thinking website you can find an episode in which a pair of Wordsworth scholars from the University of Lancaster's Wordsworth Centre share their research:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gw70

Producer: Georgia Mann

Readings: Extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal are interspersed with the following poems

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

To A Butterfly

The Excursion, Book IV

I Grieved for Buonaparte

Composed By The Sea-Side, Near Calais, August 1802

Elegiac Verses in Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth

Extract from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798

Noma Dumezweni reads from Dorothy's journals - Roger Ringrose reads her brother's poems.

Work And Play20231015Eight minutes Idle is writer Matt Thorne's evocation of office life. Herman Melville's Bartleby preferred not to do what his office boss asked for, whilst in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver enjoys sliding down heaps of grain in the mill and playing with spiders' webs. Other readings in this episode exploring work and play convey the toil of blacksmiths, mowing and reaping in works by Dickens, Wordsworth and Robert Frost, and the experience of being self-employed is wittily described in a poem by LL Barkat. Our readers are Tommy Sim'aan and Julia Winwood and we hear music by Dvořák, Eric Coates, Alexander Mosolov, Van Morrison and Dolly Parton.

Producer in Salford: Nick Holmes

READINGS:

Charles Dickens Great Expectations

William Wordsworth The Solitary Reaper

Robert Frost Mowing

Shel Silverstein I Cannot go to School Today

Walt Whitman I Hear America Singing

Matt Thorne Eight Days Idle

Muriel Spark A Far Cry From Kensington

Bertrand Russell In Praise of Idleness

Elizabeth Gaskell North and South

Margaret Llewellyn Davies editor of Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women

Philip Larkin Toads

Marge Piercy The Secretary Chant

Toni Morrison Tar Baby

Emily Dickinson Rest at Night

Rajesh Thankappan Work and Rest

LL Barkat Self-Employed

Herman Melville Bartleby, the Scrivener

George Eliot The Mill on the Floss

Alfred Tennyson The Lotos-eaters

Readings and music depicting millers, blacksmiths, office drudgery and downtime.

From Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness to Philip Larkin's evocation of work as a toad, via the testimony of Victorian girls collected together by Margaret Llewellyn Davies.

Eight minutes Idle is writer Matt Thorne's evocation of office life. Herman Melville's Bartleby preferred not to do what his office boss asked for, whilst in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver enjoys sliding down heaps of grain in the mill and playing with spiders' webs. Other readings in this episode exploring work and play convey the toil of blacksmiths, mowing and reaping in works by Dickens, Wordsworth and Robert Frost, and the experience of being self-employed is wittily described in a poem by LL Barkat. Our readers are Tommy Sim'aan and Julia Winwood and we hear music by Dvo?ကk, Eric Coates, Alexander Mosolov, Van Morrison and Dolly Parton.

Writers And The Bbc2022102320231001 (R3)From wax discs to colour TV and Marshall McLuhan's 'global village', a comedian's audition for the 'Deputy Head of Variety' to advice on how to read a poem on radio: to go alongside the celebration of the anniversary of BBC drama marked at this year's Contains Strong Language Festival, today's programme takes its cue from fictional depictions of the corporation and references to specific programmes. Actors Henry Goodman and Grace Cookey-Gam read texts by authors who worked at the BBC including George Orwell who between 1941-1943 was a Talks Producer on what was then the 'Eastern Service' and gives us here his views about poetry on the radio; PH Newby, the first winner of the Booker Prize and a former controller of the Third programme and Penelope Fitzgerald, who worked at the BBC during the Blitz when she was in her twenties. Other extracts from novels include Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole, Gordon Burns's The North of England Home Service, Jonathan Coe's new book Bournville and an imagined Queen's Speech from Alan Bennett. There are archive extracts featuring John Gielgud and an unusual voice for the shipping forecast, poems written by Roger McGough, Wendy Cope and Elizabeth Burns and music commissioned by the BBC, plus pieces by Britten, Debussy, Faur退, Chopin, Bach, Bart Howard, Django Reinhardt and American rock from the 1960s.

Producer: Juan Carlos Jaramillo

Readings:

A for Announcer' by Eleanor Farjeon (from 'The ABC of the BBC')

Bournville' by Jonathan Coe (excerpt)

‘The North of England Service' by Gordon Burns (excerpt)

Three Rooms' by Jo Hamya (excerpt)

Shipping forecast, read by Alan Bennett on BBC Radio 4

Listening to Bach's B Minor Mass in the kitchen' by Elizabeth Burns

Poetry and the Microphone' by George Orwell (excerpt)

Sonnet 18' by William Shakespeare

Lessons' from Ian McEwan (excerpt)

A is for The Archers and Adultery' by Wendy Cope

Human Voices' by Penelope Fitzgerald (excerpt)

The Whistling Woman' by AS Byatt (excerpt)

‘Going Out Live' by Mark Lawson (excerpt)

‘Feelings have changed' by P.H. Newby (excerpt)

Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾' by Sue Townsend (excerpt)

Afterwards' by Thomas Hardy

The Uncommon Reader' by Alan Bennett (excerpt)

To Poetry Please' by Roger McGough

With poems and novels depicting the announcers, auditions, vox pops, concerts and news.

Years Of Wonders2009032220091222 (R3)Juliet Stevenson and Kenneth Cranham read prose and poetry describing the momentous times that the composer Henry Purcell would have witnessed. He was a baby at the the time of Charles II's Restoration to the throne, but would have known the Great Plague and Great Fire of London. In adulthood, he would have seen both the accession and the forced abdication of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as well as the coronation of James's daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange.

Readings include excerpts from Pepys, Evelyn, Dryden, Aphra Behn and Defoe, while the music includes Purcell and his contemporaries alongside works from the 20th century.

A programme of words and music spanning the turbulent period of Purcell's lifetime.

Yeats At 15020150607A century and a half after the birth of WB Yeats, this edition of Words and Music seeks to convey the scope of this prolific poet's work and also the inspiration that his poems have provided over the ensuing years for a wide range of composers from Sir Michael Tippett to Joni Mitchell. The poems are read by Brid Brennan and Lorcan Cranitch.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

A sequence of poetry and music to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the poet WB Yeats.

Young And Easy2009032920091228 (R3)Readings of poetry and prose, interspersed with music, exploring the intensity of youth and its transience.

Hattie Morahan and Samuel West read poetry and prose by Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn, AE Houseman, Evelyn Waugh, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen and Caroline Bird.

Music includes Debussy, Schumann, Butterworth, Prokofiev, Thomas Morley, Britten and Bernstein.

Poems and music on the theme of youth, with readings by Hattie Morahan and Samuel West.

Yours Sincerely20160306Yours sincerely: Rosalie Craig and James D'Arcy read extracts on the theme of letters.

Letters can be the most intimate form of expression, defiantly public, or a window onto somebody's life at a particular time. They can be funny or tragic, or in the case of some novels, a useful way for a character to convey, or miss, vital information. The programme includes a number of real letters from people such as Scott of the Antarctic, Elizabeth I and Siegfried Sassoon, plus fictional letters from works by Hardy, Austen and Shakespeare. There are letter scenes from operas by Mozart and Tchaikovsky, plus letter-related music by Janacek, Britten and Leonard Cohen.

Texts and music on the theme of letters, with readings by Rosalie Craig and James D'Arcy.

191520150201Anna Chancellor and Malcolm Storry read from literary names including Edith Wharton, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, P. G. Wodehouse and John Buchan who all published in 1915. For some the war is a vital subject, for others, it's a background presence - and for many, their work shows no hint of the conflict unfolding in Europe and beyond. The music includes Delius, Barber, Bessie Smith and an archive recording of Elgar conducting his own work Polonia Op 76.

Producer Mohini Patel.

A sequence of texts and music produced under the shadow of war.