Words and Music

Original version

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

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Drama

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: Less Is More

Less Is More

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Jane Lapotaire and John Heffernan enter the world of the simple, the small and the lost.

Readers Jane Lapotaire and John Heffernan look beyond Lent to the power of miniatures, simplicity, absence and loss, through the words of Basho and Joan Didion.

Lent starts this week, a time when many people give up something they love in the run up to Easter. But the value of ‘less’ to the human experience can be so much more than self-deprivation and abstinence, as this programme attempts to prove. 
 
Minimalist artists and designers have shown that “less is more”. Poets have long understood how to offer much with few words: like Basho and Buson, the Japanese masters of the haiku, or Edgar Allan Poe using repetition in The Bells. 
 
American writer Joan Didion offers a personal experience of how mundane events take on painful but rich significance when we lose a loved one; Walt Whitman enjoys a sun bath in his birthday suit; and Sappho’s Fragments suggest art is all the more beguiling when only shards of the original work remain.
 
Join readers Jane Lapotaire and John Heffernan to experience the power of miniatures, memories, absence and simplicity to stir the spirit and spark the imagination. With music by Joseph Haydn, Duke Ellington, Marin Marais and Ann Southam.

Readings:

Robert Herrick - To Keep a True Lent		
W. H. Davies - Money, O!
Haikus by Basho, Boncho and Onitsura (translated by Geoffrey Bownas)
Juan Ramón Jiménez - Eternidades
Walt Whitman - A Sun Bath: Nakedness		
John Pawson - In Praise of Minimalism (excerpt)
Turner Cassity - The grateful Minimalist 		
Edgar Allan Poe - The Bells: IV (excerpt)
Kalpa Sutra - Life of Mahâvîra, Lecture 5 (excerpt) (translated by Hermann Jacobi
Caleb Femi - My Father Wore a terrible story of poverty 	
Madeleine L’Engle - For Lent, 1966		
John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn (excerpt)	
W. B. Yeats - Never Give All The Heart			
Joan Didion - Year of Magical thinking (excerpt)		
Sappho - Fragments (translated by Anne Carson) 	
Rabindranath Tagore - The Gardener: II

Produced by Chris Elcombe  
A Reduced Listening 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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