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

BBC Radio 3

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Music: Classical

Music: Classical: Experimental & New

Radio 3's primary contemporary music programme, featuring live performances and sessions

Radio 3's primary contemporary music programme, featuring live performances and studio sessions from the best new groups, and premiering works commissioned by the BBC

Hear and Now: Sounds of Japan

08/02/2014

Sounds of Japan

BBC Radio 3 - Hear and Now, Sounds of Japan

Music by Japanese composers Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Keiko Harada.

Ivan Hewett and Ilan Volkov discuss Japanese composers Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Keiko Harada, including orchestral and electronic works written between 1962 and 2003.

'Listening to my music can be likened to walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.' Toru Takemitsu's beguiling combination of Japanese traditional instruments and a sound-world inspired by Western composers, at once modernist, lush and refined, won him international recognition. November Steps from 1967 was the breakthrough work which set Takemitsu on an aesthetic path he rarely left over the remaining three decades of his life.

In conversation with Ilan Volkov, Ivan Hewett explores not only this more familiar side of Takemitsu but also an earlier aspect with the rarely performed 'Corona II'. The 1962 graphic score has complicated instructions for the players, including the positioning of transparent plastic red, yellow and blue squares on concentric circles. Takemitsu is also put in the context of fellow Japanese composers: his near contemporary Toshi Ichiyanagi (once married to Yoko Ono) and, still in her forties, Keiko Harada.


Toru Takemitsu: Green (November Steps II); Marginalia
Keiko Harada: Third Ear Deaf III
Toshi Ichiyanagi: Parallel Music; Life Music
Toru Takemitsu: Corona II
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor).

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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