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

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Music Appreciation Movement

The Essay: The Music Appreciation Movement: Episode 3

Factual: History

Music

The Music Appreciation Movement

Episode 3

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Musicologist Richard Witts explores the significance of programme notes.

Richard Witts explores the significance of programme notes and how the BBC took on the mission to inform and educate its audience about classical music.

In the early twentieth century a prominent British movement sprang up under the title 'Music Appreciation', with the aims of introducing to 'ordinary' listeners 'great' or 'serious' music, and teaching them 'the art of listening'. Radio became a chief means by which this misson was to be accomplished, while books, adult education courses and regional 'Music Travellers', also contributed to a new educational field. In this series, musicologist and cultural historian Richard Witts of Edge Hill University explains the movement's origins, ambitions and idiosyncrasies, and clarifies why it fell out of favour in the second half of the twentieth century. In this third programme he explores the significance of programme notes, and looks at how the BBC took on the mission to inform and educate its audience about classical music.

Producer: Sara Davies

First broadcast in August 2011.

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.

Musicologist Richard Witts describes the development of Music Appreciation

Musicologist and cultural historian Richard Witts describes the development of Music Appreciation, the 20th century movement that aimed to teach the art of listening correctly

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