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

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Percussion Century

Music: Classical

Colin Currie hand picks some of the greatest percussion music of the past 100 years.

Enjoy a spectacular range of music for percussion over the past 100 years with your guide Colin Currie.

Percussion Century: Hypnotic repetition

Hypnotic repetition

BBC Radio 3 - Percussion Century, Hypnotic repetition

Colin Currie presents percussion’s reflective and contemplative side.

Enjoy a spectacular range of music for percussion over the past 100 years with your guide, Colin Currie.

Close your eyes, and enjoy an hour of percussive meditation.

If there is one area of music that percussion was absolutely made for, its minimalism. In this episode Colin Currie strips percussion right back to the bare essentials as he chooses music that revels in its own sounds, patterns, loops and melodies. 

The powerful ability of percussion instruments to weave together multiple layers of sound leads to a playlist with works by John Adams, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Lou Harrison and the ‘godfather’ of minimalist music for percussion, Steve Reich, who has described Colin as “one of the greatest musicians in the world today”.

Steve Reich’s style was partly shaped by music he heard on trips around the world, and time studying with a Ghanaian drumming master, and Colin also includes some mesmerising traditional sounds with roots in Ghana and Zimbabwe.

Colin himself is one of the world’s leading interpreters of the music of Steve Reich so he starts and ends with two of Reich’s most brilliant and celebrated pieces: Music for 18 Musicians and Drumming. 

A Tandem Production for BBC Radio 3


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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