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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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A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Black Square

Black Square

12/11/2017

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Lisa Dwan and Peter Marinker present a programme exploring the idea of abstraction.

Lisa Dwan and Peter Marinker present with a programme inspired by the art of Malevich exploring the idea of abstraction.

Lisa Dwan and Peter Marinker with a programme inspired by the art of Malevich exploring the idea of abstraction. The readings include Wallace Stevens, Rimbaud, T S Eliot and of course, Samuel Beckett; the musical counterpoint is provided by, amongst others, Kurt Schwitters, Beethoven, Morton Feldman, Berio, Satie, Parmegiani and Nancarrow.

Kazimir Malevich's Black Square is a totem of abstract art. He said the aim was to free art from the ballast of objectivity... a struggle which would probably seem rather odd to most composers. Music, after all, is effortlessly abstract by nature even when it seems to be insisting on its relationship with the world. Words are another matter altogether. Literary abstraction works sometimes like painting and sometimes like music.

My Black Square is then, necessarily, more of a meditation than a manifesto. It is tentative. It aspires to vivid colour, like Kandinksy, but it includes the minute monochrome shadings of Rothko. In the choices I've made I've left room too for argument. Where does abstraction begin? Is it a feature of the way we experience the world and the way we express ourselves about it? Is it dead and buried, as the erstwhile abstract painter Wyndham Lewis once rather grandly declared. As you might expect from an adventure into the abstract the programme works as a collage in the hope of creating something new.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

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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