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Playing the Skyline

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Musicians look at how the land meets the air and imagine it as music.

Tim Marlow joins musicians as they look at how the land meets the air and imagine it as music.

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Playing the Skyline: Series 2

Playing the Skyline: Series 2: Episode 1: Newcastle and Gateshead

Newcastle - Kathryn Tickell and Hannabiell Sanders

Episode 1

Episode 1: Newcastle and Gateshead

Series 2

Newcastle and Gateshead

BBC Radio 4 - Playing the Skyline, Series 2, Newcastle and Gateshead

Piper Kathryn Tickell and jazz trombonist Hannabiell Sanders play the skyline of Newcastle

Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell and Afro-jazz bass trombonist Hannabiell Sanders look at Newcastle - the Sage, the Tyne bridges - and create new music that follows the skyline.

In 'Playing the Skyline' Tim Marlow joins two musicians as they look at how the land meets the air, and imagine it as music. They give their responses, then begin playing the skyline, before creating new pieces. Later, Tim hears how they are getting on and, finally, the musicians, Tim and Radio 4's listeners hear their finished works.

On old nautical charts as well as the bird's eye view there is often a coastal profile - the outline of the land seen from the point of view of a sailor approaching it. Radio producer Julian May was struck by the musicality of these, the undulations of hills are melodic, the spacing of landmarks - trees, spires - rhythmic. Musicians could, he thought, take the line dividing the earth from the air, place it on a stave - literally or imaginatively - and play the skyline. 

In the first of this new series Kathryn Tickell and Hannabiell Sanders turn the skyline of Newcastle into music. At the old Baltic flour mill by the Tyne they look upstream, where the great curves of the Sage Concert Hall and the bridges meet, to be end-stopped by the square solidity of the castle, from which the city gets its name.

Kathryn Tickell is steeped in the traditional music of Northumberland. She plays the region's indigenous instrument, the Northumbrian Smallpipes. So her music, she says, "always speaks in the accent of the Northeast." 

Hannabiell Sanders' accent is very different. Her father is Jamaican and she was born in the American South. How would she describe her music? "Psychedelic Afro-funk jazz fusion!"

Hannabiell's bass trombone (called Tyler) can glide smoothly over the curves of Newscastle's skyline, something tricky for Kathryn, on the pipes it is impossible to slide from one note to another.

Producer: Julian May.

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Presented by Tim Marlow. Musicians create a musical rendering of skylines.

Tim Marlow presents three programmes in which two musicians look at how the land meets the air and imagine it as music.

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Playing the Skyline

Series 2

Episode 1: Newcastle and Gateshead

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