Speechification

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)

Here’s a real find. While I was hunting around for links to use in the ‘Wrestling for Britain’ entry I came across this 2001 page from the Radio 3 archive. Five short programmes from a series called Work in Progress in which George Szirtes, poet, translator - and presenter of the wrestling programme - talks about writing a novel set in the wrestling world (a novel which, unless I’m mistaken - hasn’t yet been published).

I love stuff about the creative process - I’ve often thought of doing a blog about it. Anyway, the Work in Progress pages appear to be a creative process goldmine - although obviously of quite Radio 3-type stuff (lots of poetry and theatre, no video games). Dozens and dozens of Real streams, from people like Roy Strong and Paul Muldoon, Vadim Jean and Ian McEwan.

Pic of George Szirtes from georgeszirtes.co.uk.

Tell me you don’t hear the tiniest trace of disdain in James Naughtie’s voice as he walks us through a motley parade of 1960s post-serialists and proto-minimalists. I think he’d really rather be telling us about Verdi or Mozart. Fascinating series, though (Real, MP3), and the music which goes out straight afterwards on Radio 3 (Real, MP3) is beautiful and surprising.

Here’s something from the archive. A programme from Radio 3’s long-running feature series Between the Ears. I recorded it in January 2003.

This edition is pretty grim on paper: a kind of meditation on the death of children, putting together stories from parents who’ve lost children (including David Harrington from the Kronos Quartet) with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (a heartbreaking setting of poems by Rückert written on the death of one of his children).

I hesitated to put this one up because, speaking as a parent, it’s quite hard to listen to but there’s nothing gratuitous about it, it’s put together beautifully and there’s real insight. I’d like to link to the programme’s web page but Radio 3’s archive only goes back as far as 2004. Here’s the MP3.

The photo of Mahler, taken in 1909, is from the Wikimedia Commons.