Words and Music

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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: What Is Modern Art?

What Is Modern Art?

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From scoffing critics to celebrations of invention-prose, poetry and music inspired by art

Scoffing critics to celebrations of invention - prose, poetry and music inspired by art, including Steve Reich and Christina Rossetti, Yasmina Reza, Don McLean and Robert Hughes.

From scoffing critics to celebrations of invention - prose, poetry and music inspired by art with readings by Peter Wight and Indra Ové.  

READINGS and TV clips 
Jeremy Paxman interviews Damien Hirst on Newsnight 2012
Albert Wolff: Review of an 1876 Impressionist Exhibition 
Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation 
Andy Rooney asks When Did This Become Art? 
Wallace Stevens: The Man With the Blue Guitar 
Plato: The Republic Book 10 translated by Robin Waterfield 
Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting published 1450 translated by John R Spencer  
Elizabeth Jennings: Caravaggio's Narcissus in Rome 
John Donne: Witchcraft by a Picture 
Bruno Alfieri: Review of Jackson Pollock quoted in a Time magazine article "Chaos, Damn It!" 1950
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray 
Marcel Proust: The Guermantes Way translated by Mark Treharne 
Yasmina Reza: Art  translated by Christopher Hampton 
John Rothenstein on Bridget Riley: Modern Painters Volume III 
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts: Harlem is Nowhere 
Frank O'Hara: To Larry Rivers 
Robert Hughes from his TV series The Shock of the New 1980

Producer: Luke Mulhall

We hear from TV presenter Jeremy Paxman questioning Damien Hirst, the Director of the Tate 1938–64 John Rothenstein's analysis of Bridget Riley's art of optical illusion and predictions about the future of art from the influential Australian Robert Hughes - presenter and author of the Shock of the New 1980 documentary television series. 

Readings include Christina Rosetti's poem In an Artist's Studio, extracts from Plato on what making art is; the American critic Susan Sontag's argument for a new erotics of art; John Donne's poem Witchcraft by a Picture; a speech from the hit play Art, written by Yasmina Reza and translated by Christopher Hampton, which depicted the response of his friends to a man buying a completely white painting and the views of residents in Harlem to photographs of their streets in an essay from Sharifa  Rhodes-Pitts. 

Claude Debussy scorned the term Impressionism but it didn't stop critics using it to describe his compositions and the music choices in this programme include Debussy's La Mer performed by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Don McLean's Vincent inspired by Van Gogh's painting of Starry Nights,  Clarence "Pinetop" Smith's Boogie Woogie and Four Organs by composer Steve Reich, one of the people sharing their view of an art work from the collection of MOMA, in New York in the new podcast and Essay series The Way I See It - which you can find on BBC Sounds and available to download. 

You might also be interested in the Free Thinking programme collection of discussions of visual art and debates about running a museum recorded with Frieze London Art Fair https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

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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