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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

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Music: Classical

An odyssey through the musical universe, presented by Tom Service

Rethink music with The Listening Service. Tom Service presents a journey of imagination and insight, exploring how music works

The Listening Service: Breaking Free: Tom Service on the Second Viennese School

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Is Birdsong Music?

01/01/2017

Breaking Free: Tom Service on the Second Viennese School

BBC Radio 3 - The Listening Service, Breaking Free: Tom Service on the Second Viennese School

Tom Service considers how to listen to the Second Viennese School.

As part of Radio 3's Breaking Free season, Tom Service considers how to listen to the Second Viennese School, which developed from early expressionist ventures into atonality.

Breaking Free - the minds that changed music. Tom Service explores how to listen to the Second Viennese School - music that exploded with expressive feeling in the early years of the 20th century, and then gradually rebuilt harmony into a new system, using the 12-note series. He explains how the music developed from Arnold Schoenberg's early expressionist ventures into atonality, to the cool jewel-like precision of his pupil Anton Webern. In conversation with art historian Lisa Florman, he finds parallels in the painter Wassily Kandinsky's journey towards abstraction and his theories of shapes and colours. (Kandinsky was a friend of Schoenberg). And composer George Benjamin describes the intricate structures of Webern's music, which greatly inspired his own compositions.

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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Breaking Free: Tom Service on the Second Viennese School

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