Words and Music

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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: Only Connect

Only Connect

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Inspired by the words of EM Forster, we look at some ways in which we connect.

Mark Strong and Bettrys Jones with various kinds of connections, from writers including Ann Sexton, Arthur Conan Doyle and Wendy Cope, plus music from Brahms to Kate Bush.

On the 50th anniversary of EM Forster's death, we focus on the words ‘Only connect…’  - the epigraph to his novel Howards End - and consider some of the many connections that we might experience.   Attempts to connect with others and the pain when those attempts fail.  The solace provided by seeking a connection with nature, communication with alien species, the ingenious process of deduction, the technology that connects us to one another, the associations we draw from treasured objects.  And there are musical connections from Brahms, Kate Bush, Messiaen, Suzanne Ciani and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan among others.

Readings:

EM Forster – Howards End
Robert Browning – Two in the Campagna
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – To Nature
Paul Muldoon – Milkweed and Monarch
John Masefield – Up on the downs
Adrienne Rich – Face To Face
RS Thomas – They
Wendy Cope – For My Sister, Emigrating
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Stockbroker’s Clerk
Ivor Gurney – The Telegraph Post
Jenny Erpenbeck – Go Went Gone
Anne Sexton – When Man Enters Woman
John Keats – On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer
Naomi Mitchison – Memoirs of a Spacewoman
George Herbert – Deniall

Producer: Torquil MacLeod


In the Free Thinking playlist and available as an Arts and Ideas download - you can hear the authors Deborah Levy and Laurence Scott discussing with Shahidha Bari What's So Great About EM Forster in a discussion recorded with an audience at the British Library in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0873lxv

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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