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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Between the Ears

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Innovative and thought-provoking features on a wide variety of subjects

Innovative and thought-provoking features that make adventurous use of sound and explore a wide variety of subjects. Made by leading radio producers.

Between the Ears: A Moment of Mishearing

Discussion & Talk

Music: World

A Moment of Mishearing

13/11/2010

BBC Radio 3 - Between the Ears, A Moment of Mishearing

Amit Chaudhuri on how music has a common root in both Eastern and Western traditions.

Indian novelist Amit Chaudhuri, a classically trained singer of Hindustani music, reflects on how music has a common root in both Eastern and Western traditions.

Indian novelist, critic and Professor of Contemporary Literature at UEA Amit Chaudhuri, also a classically trained singer of Hindustani music, presents a Between the Ears in which he reflects on the nature of music and how it has a common root in both eastern and western traditions. 

"I could hear certain Indian ragas in what Hendrix was playing - like Dhani, Jog, Malkauns - not because I'd gone looking for them, but in a way that one becomes aware, one day, of another dimension to an outline: like, for instance, the duck-rabbit, Wittgenstein's famous mutant"

He explores his own musical education, weaving in references to Tagore, Wittgenstein, Cage, Magritte and Frankie Goes to Hollywood - "an excellent song; but, to my ears, noise, and noise I still wouldn't have any idea what to do with."

and tells how chance mishearings of popular western tunes led him into the world of MySpace and YouTube and a second career as a successful recording and performing artist

"The typical hotel Indian classical muzak was my ambience - the santoor, whose tinny, glossy notes I was trying successfully to ignore, when it seemed to launch, without prior notice, into 'Auld Lang Syne'. I listened intently; but, in a few moments, the music had gone back to being the raga it was, Bhupali, a pentatonic identical to the Highlands scale from which the Scottish melody was derived. My project had such non-serious beginnings".

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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