Speechification

Radio Three runs a lovely series of fifteen minute ‘cultural talks’ called The Essay. Monday to Thursday at 11pm. This week it was some smart and listenable radio called Maths and Music by trumpter player and mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy. Monday was all about time and counting with Steve Reich and Ewe music from Ghana. Tuesday we had Pythagoras, the music of the spheres and why so many cultures end up with twelve notes in a scale, Wednesday brought us Bach, symmetry, theme and variations and we ended on Thursday with some more twentieth century material and mathematically generated music. Brilliant stuff. Programme One. Two. Three. Four. Incidentally it’s well worth listening right to the end of programme three just to hear the continuity announcer’s way with German. No-one does foreign languages quite like Radio Three.

Here’s a nice long one. Nearly two hours of poetry and music on the theme of the weather from Radio 3: you might consider it a companion to Dan’s much scarier Aussie weather post from a few days ago. You’ll probably think this one’s a bit soporific for your cutting edge tastes but the choice is eclectic enough—from A. A. Milne to Kurt Weill and from Kathleen Ferrier to Steve Reich. I think this would make a great soundtrack to a longish train journey. London to Bristol, say. In the rain.

Here’s the programme’s MP3 and here’s the extensive playlist.

What do I learn from Radio Three’s Building a Library? I learn that, though I’ve been building (randomly accumulating, really) my own library for twenty-odd years, I know practically nothing about classical music. I learn that the potential for variation in the delivery of a piece of music is essentially limitless and yet quite often undetectable to my ears.

I learn that there are people in the world (well, Piers Burton-Page Andrew McGregor, really) who know too much about classical music. I learn that I don’t own any of the really good classical recordings (that’s what you get for choosing albums from the bargain bin by the door) and I learn that one person’s passion for and understanding of a subject can be really awe-inspiring.

This edition is about Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Here’s the MP3. Building a Library now has a podcast and, amazingly, it really works - even though the copyright rules limit the length of clips in the MP3 so the podcast version is a fraction of the length of the broadcast version. Another real joy from your national broadcaster.

St Augustine never saw a bible in his lifetime. There’s a fact to get your teeth into. This really fascinating Radio 3 four-parter (four experts: one essay each - and one of them’s the Archbishop of Canterbury!) about Augustine is full of such mind-blowing information, especially the fourth part - presented by Dr James J O’Donnell, one of Augustine’s biographers - which I’m featuring here for the podcast (MP3). Part one, part two and part three are here too. Wonderful.

If you fancy some conspiracy theory this might provide handy fuel for your fire. It’s a Radio 3 Sunday feature by Ken Hollings about the RAND corporation, the first think tank, once dubbed the ‘malevolent university’ and influencer of presidents. Though it you look at their website now they seem to be successfully cloaking their malevolence with stock photography. It’s a good old listen, and many thanks to Simon for bringing it to our attention. (I feel we’ve now got to the stage where I can use a collective speechification ‘we’) MP3 here.

Here’s another tasty slice from the hard drive cake; Stephen Fry sharing his musical favourites on Radio 3’s Private Passions. Predictably his selections are informed, eclectic and uplifting, almost entirely cheerful stuff, and all the more moving for that. And I suspect this is the first time that Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass have been heard on Radio 3. (MP3 here)

This is at the top of my pile of miscellaneous audio and I remember loving it when it went out. But only on googling it just now did I discover it was part of a series of programmes called Thinking Earth, across Radios 3 and 4, and the World Service. Only fragments seem to be Listen Again-able which is a shame because I really fancy the Radio 3 contribution - Earth Mapping; ‘a meditation on mapping with international artists who each tell us a story of a map that it important to them’. (You only get ‘meditations’ on the radio don’t you?) If anyone happens to have a copy of Earth Mapping please let us know.

Anyway, the Radio 4 contribution is An ABC Of The Night; 26 short pieces from 26 different parts of the globe, all recorded at night. It’s great stuff, with music and sound design from Nina Perry weaving it all together. And there’s a photo gallery here. (MP3 here)

Here’s some proper learning from the grown-ups over at Radio 3. Tom Paulin, a public intellectual on an almost Eighteenth Century model and a William Blake expert, has written a four-part essay about Blake’s language for the Beeb’s aforementioned Blake-a-thon.

I’m going to grab all four of these because Radio 3’s archiving policy is patchy at best. So as not to swamp the podcast with the old fruitcake (sorry), I’ll add parts two, three and four to this entry. So, remember to come back here if you’d like to hear them all (MP3s: part one, part two, part three, part four). From the  British Library’s collection, here’s a really lovely Shockwave facsimile of one of his notebooks and here’s a page about The Tyger.

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.

There’s often an interesting bit of speech hidden away on Radio 3, something you stumble over when all other options have been exhausted. This programme about artificial intelligence is just such a thing. A serious, thoughtful and interesting exploration of the 50 years of progress in the field, by Prof Maggie Boden, who actually knows what she’s talking about. I missed the first minute or so, but I don’t think you miss anything essential. (MP3)