Words and Music

Original version

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

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Music: Classical

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: In Flux

In Flux

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Owen Teale and Thalissa Teixeira with a programme exploring the idea of change.

Owen Teale & Thalissa Teixeira read poems and prose on adolescence, politics and metaphysics. Music from Glass, Holst, Aphex Twin to Haydn.  Writers include Nietszche & Emily Berry

Owen Teale and Thalissa Teixeira with readings and music exploring  ideas about change, chaos and becoming. 

'When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self'. So says Dogen, the medieval Japanese philosopher whose words are positioned to respond to Emily Berry's poem The Old Fuel depicting the pain of carrying on with one's emotional routines when external circumstances have changed. The tension between rigidity and flux is a recurring theme. Some of the works featured seem surprised to observe that flux is the condition of all things. If Berry struggles to accept it, Virginia Woolf presents change as being contrary to our every-day expectations, and Carson McCullers' teenager Frankie finds it as baffling as the transition from Winter to Spring. The note of anxiety is picked up by Philip Glass and Haydn. Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Marx brag that they see change as the natural condition of things, but the tone of enthusiasm in their accounts is suspicious. The inevitability of it is better captured by Seamus Heaney's Bog Queen - even in what appears to be stasis, flux rules whether we're excited about it or not. We hear flux and stasis in Steve Reich's Piano Phases,  music from SUNN 0))) and Aphex Twin. Marianne Moore, Marcel Proust, and Chuang Tzu, seem more moved by the beauty of transience.  

READINGS: 
Heraclitus  fragments translated by Philip Wheelwright 
Edmund Spenser Ruines of Rome
Friederich Nietzsche The Will to Power translated by Walter Kaufmann 
Hannah Sullivan  Repeat Until Time: The Heraclitus poem
Karl Marx and Friederich Engels  The Communist Manifesto
Marianne Moore  A Jellyfish 
Chuang Tzu  from the Book of Chuang Tzu
Carson McCullers  The Member of the Wedding
Emily Berry  The Old Fuel
Dogan Genjo Koan 
Gerard Manley Hopkins Pied Beauty 
Ovid Metamorphosis Book VIII translated by Samuel Garth
Ted Hughes  Tales from Ovid 
Seamus Heaney Bog Queen
Virginia Woolf Orlando
Marcel Proust Swann's Way translated by CK Scott Moncrieff
Edmund Spenser Two Cantos of Mutabilitie 

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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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