Key Matters
May 24th, 2008 by Russell DaviesThe Speechification crew were at the BBC this week, showing them what we were up to, hoping they wouldn’t hate it. They were thoroughly charming and helpful, especially with news on new features coming soon which mean it won’t be such a struggle to uncover who actually made the programmes we all love. There does seem to be lots of good stuff around the corner. But this Key Matters programme is an illustration of what still makes Listen Again so frustrating. It’s a lovely programme, fifteen minutes about what makes the key of E flat major so distinctive, and as soon as you stumble across it you want to listen to the four programmes that preceded it. And you can’t. They’ve gone. Curses. Oh well, at least we captured this one. MP3 here.
Update: Speechification listeners are marvels. If you look in the comments you’ll see that ‘Riffle’ has the remaining programmes. I’ve grabbed them from him and here they are: C major, D minor, B flat, F sharp.
May 25th, 2008 at 5:24 am
I have all five episodes so I zipped them up (using the built-in Windows XP zip facility) and uploaded them to megaupload.com
I greatly enjoy Speeechification (great news that you got to visit BBC) so I’m pleased to make these files available to you.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AOM75YVB
I enjoyed this series. While it didn’t settle anything, I learned a few things I didn’t know — for instance the synesthete who talked about how F sharp is, for her, differently colored from G Flat, and had a good explanation.
I also appreciated how some of the guests were a bit mystical about it and the session musician (American, not by chance I’m sure) kind of poo-pooed the idea of keys meaning much. I have both impulses myself.
Keep up the great work and I wish you much more interaction with the BBC–if you wish it so. I’m a BBC lover but in the USA so I doubt it’ll happen to me.
-riffle
PS I’ve never uploaded to megaupload before so I hope I got it right
May 27th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
As riffle says, it’s great that you got to chat to the BBC. However, whilst your blog may be great at curating the good work that’s under-promoted on Radio 4, what about the bad work that’s over-promoted? I’m sure you’re looking to avoid Beeb-bashing (thus preserving you new found good-relations), and aiming to celebrate what is (in my opinion) a great institution and media outlet, but there are so many occassions Radio 4 gets it wrong.
One key example, purely because it’s fresh in the mind - Dr No.
Absolute piffle - and I don’t use that word lightly. It represented everything that is (and has been) wrong with the station’s drama output.
There may be many reasons for it to be like this, for example, budget, time, audience demographic, but maybe the drama department should realise that Dirk Maggs’ brand of “audio movie” production is preferable (and not just in my opinion) to the out dated brand of audio-theatre (which has less atmosphere than Mercury) that Martin Jarvis and co seem intent on churning out time after time.
-The Don