A short feature from Radio France International's English service. It went out in August, just after Barack Obama's nomination. We learn that French people think of Barack Obama (correctly) as mixed-race and not black. But we also learn that as they've got to know Obama they've started to call him 'black' in response to his presentation in the US media (MP3).
Here we go: another one from the archives. The thing about Pierre Boulez is that he’s quite difficult to like - and his music is so prickly and deliberately inaccessible. But he’s got the magisterial Gallic charm thing going on. Oblique, Mercurial, uncompromising, obsessed. He’s kind of Napoleonic (Godardian?).
This hour long profile - which went out on Radio 3 a couple of years ago on his eightieth birthday - is really good value: lots of use is made of the Beeb’s exceptional access - all the top names are involved. The result is a portrait of the man but also of a fascinating and contradictory period in musical and intellectual history (MP3).
The pic is from the Wikimedia Commons.
bookmarks by: delicious.comSpeechification is a celebration of speech radio from around the (English-speaking) world. It's maintained (intermittently, it has to be said) by a scattered band of listeners most of whom live in Britain, which explains the preponderance of programmes from Radio 4, the nation's number 1 speech network.
We record or link to programmes and wrap the whole lot up in a podcast, which is probably the best way to absorb this stuff.
Of course, one day this might turn into something else, maybe a new way of curating speech radio. Or maybe it won’t.
Your hosts on this not very wild ride are Steve Bowbrick, Russell Davies, Dan Hill, Bobbie Johnson and James Bridle. Drop us a line with your thoughts, unless you wish to complain about continuity announcers and their accents.
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