Words and Music

Sunday 29th January 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

On the Edge.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the idea of 'on the edge', with readings by David Threlfall and Alexandra Gilbreath. Including texts by Kafka and JG Ballard, plus music by Richard Wagner and Ligeti.

Sunday 12th February 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Infidelity.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of infidelity, with readings by Fenella Woolgar and Timothy Watson. Including the characters of Tristan and Iseult to Anthony Blunt with texts from Dante, the Earl of Rochester, Robert Browning, Dorothy Parker, Hugo Williams and Jackie Kay. Plus music from Purcell, Mozart, Rachmaninov, Schoenberg and Nina Simone.

Sunday 5th March 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

To mark International Women's Day, a sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring the lives of women, with readers Fiona Shaw and Ellie Kendrick. Including texts by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Chopin, Muriel Spark, Kathleen Jamie, Emily Dickinson and Mrs Gaskell, plus music by Sofia Gubaidulina, Sally Beamish, Joan Baez, Judith Weir, Elizabeth Maconchy Tineke Postma and Louise Farrenc.

Sunday 4th June 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Clouds.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of clouds, with readings by Simon Russell Beale and Adjoa Andoh. Including poems by Yang Chi, Shakespeare, Rilke and Thoreau, plus music by Westhoff, Ligeti and Debussy.

Sunday 18th June 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Such Sweet Sadness.

A sequence of poetry, prose and music, with readings by Siobhan Redmond and Harry Anton. With writings by AA Milne, Henry James, Shakespeare, Maupassant, Robert Burns, Oscar Wilde, James Thompson and Charlotte Smith, plus music from Schumann, Strauss, Brahms, Stolzel, Paul Clayton and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Sunday 3rd September 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:45 to 19:00 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Sylvestra Le Touzel and Paul Jesson explore, through readings, what we do when we make music - from first steps through practice to public performance, and music from jazz to classical.

Sunday 10th September 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

The theme of The Great Escape is explored with readers Adrian Dunbar and Jade Anouka. The idea of escape is explored in poetry and prose, 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. But there's also the more existential desire to escape one's gender or relationship, dealt with by the likes of Christina Rossetti, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Mirroring the mood of our escapees is a soundtrack which features everything from Dowland to Ligeti, Elena Kaats-Chernin to Vaughan Williams.

Sunday 22nd October 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

The gap between solitude and loneliness is huge and puzzling. Toby Jones explores this uncertain terrain using Ligeti, Bach, Puccini and Edward Thomas as his compass. 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. Jones introduces a long list of artists who were both masters of the ensemble and of the solo.

Sunday 5th November 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

A 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 Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as the polystylistic blendings of light and serious music by Alfred Schnittke.

Sunday 10th December 2017 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Adjoa Andoh and Rory Kinnear explore human sins with poetry by Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Carol Ann Duffy and Stevie Smith and music by Kurt Weill, Mahler and Takemitsu.

Sunday 4th March 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Words and Music on the theme of mothers and daughters with readers Samantha Bond and Molly Hanson.

As we look ahead to International Women's Day, 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,.

Sunday 11th March 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

A special edition of Words and Music, recorded earlier as part of the Free Thinking Festival. Carolyn Pickles and Jonathan Keeble read texts on 'The One and the Many', exploring 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.

Sunday 29th April 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Harriet Walter and Oliver Dimsdale read poetry on the theme of reconciliation by Donne, Peter Porter and Christina Rossetti with music by Tchaikovsky, John Adams and Nick Cave.

Sunday 6th May 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Morfydd Clark and Arinze Kene with some familiar and some distinctly unsettling readings and music. Follow an uncanny thread linking Poe, Britten, Miles Davis and Stevie Smith.

The Uncanny
Words and Music

A programme exploring both the familiar and the eerie in music and readings, which are performed by actors Morfydd Clark and Arinzé 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.

Sunday 13th May 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Actors Claire Benedict and David Neilson read literary musings on forgetting and forgetfulness. With prose and poetry from Ogden Nash, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Philip K Dick. Music included is Debussy, Purcell, Philip Glass, Villa-Lobos and Jacques Brel. The Art of Forgetting embraces the story of 'S', the Russian mnemonist whose memory demonstrated no distinct limits.

Sunday 1st July 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

An exploration of boredom, as a spur to action of an opportunity for contemplation, in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Jane Austen's Emma and the songs of Cole Porter.

Sunday 2nd September 2018 (starting this evening)
Time: 18:45 to 20:00 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

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! Producer: Zahid Warley.

Sunday 30th September 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Owen Teale and Thalissa Teixeira with readings on flux, chaos and becoming, reflecting the theme of Change celebrated in the 2018 National Poetry Day on October 4th. '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 in this programme. Some of the works featured seem surprised to observe that change, flux and instability are 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. The relationship between stasis and flux is explored in Philip Reich's Piano Phases, as well as in music from SUNN 0))) and Aphex Twin. Marianne Moore, Marcel Proust, and Chuang Tzu, seem more moved by the beauty of transience. Similarly, Wagner and Johann Strauss contribute music that celebrates flow as it depicts it. https://nationalpoetryday.co.UK/ Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Sunday 21st October 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

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 Janácek's opera after she dies at the hands of a poacher. Producer: Harry Parker.

Sunday 28th October 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Autumn is a season which has inspired composers and writers. In today's edition of Words and Music, a selection of poetry and music to celebrate autumn and walking in the leaves. Poetry read by Lesley Sharp and Julian Wadham.

Sunday 11th November 2018 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:42 (1 hour and 12 minutes long)

Women in war from the mothers of soldiers in the First World War to Jane Duran's Silences from the Spanish Civil War and the war correspondence of Martha Gellhorn, from Bryony Doran, the mother of a young British soldier serving in Afghanistan to the mother of poet Wilfred Owen. With music by George Butterworth, P.J. Harvey, Gideon Klein and June Tabor. The readers are Carolyn Pickles and Lara Rossi. This includes words from the Motherhood, Loss and the First World War, a project by Big Ideas to mark the centenary of the end of World War I.

Sunday 20th January 2019 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

"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 élue (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.

Sunday 16th June 2019 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Bloomsday.

This week's Words and Music is a special edition to mark Bloomsday - an annual celebration of James Joyce's groundbreaking 1922 novel Ulysses. Taking place across one day (16th June 1904), Ulysses is a post-modern retelling of The Odyssey, principally following the characters of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the city of Dublin. This programme follows 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 DC, 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 hear a discussion about James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake on Free Thinking next week. Matthew Sweet's guests include Eimear McBride and New Generation Thinker Eleanor Lybeck.

Sunday 7th July 2019 (starting this afternoon)
Time: 17:30 to 18:45 (1 hour and 15 minutes long)

Genesis.

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