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: Rest and Respite

Rest and Respite

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Rest and Respite

Poems of pause and peace, read by David Ajao and Florence Roberts.

Poems of pause and peace, read by David Ajao and Florence Roberts. Music by Jacques Ibert, Meredith Monk, Henry Purcell and William Walton.

This is a moment of pause and peace. Even with the cosmic stop-button pushed by the pandemic and global lockdown, it can still seem that the world is obsessed with speed: hyperactive work patterns, immediate information transfer, group video conferencing, a psychological drive towards ever-increasing productivity, more and more of everything all at once.

Slowing things down for a short while, David Ajao and Florence Roberts read sedentary and still poetry, where resting is a human right, a spiritual act, a conversation with nature, a rebellion and resistance, a naughty break from normality. Meanwhile, musical evocations of rest and repose come from Jacques Ibert, Meredith Monk, Henry Purcell, and William Walton.

If you need permission to let your body and mind recover and rejuvenate, rest here a while ...

Readings: 
Phyllis Webb - Sitting
John Brehm - Layabout
A.E. Housman - Yonder see the morning
Mardsen Hartley - The Very Languor
Goldwin Smith - The True Business Of Live (Epigrams, V, 20)
Emily Dickinson - I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl (443)
Rhina P. Espaillat - “Find Work”
Paul Laurence Dunbar - A Lazy Day
Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Triumph Of Life (extract)
Shuntaro Tanikawa - I Sit (trans. Takako U. Lento) from “The Art Of Being Alone: Poems 1952-2009” © Takako U. Lento, a Cornell East Asia Series book published by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
Thierry Paquot - The Art Of The Siesta (extract - trans. Ken Hollings)
Douglas Dunn - Modern Love
Anne Boyer - Extract from “No” © Anne Boyer, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, in 2018. 
Audre Lorde - A Burst Of Light: Living With Cancer (extract)
Miyo Vestrini - Schedule (trans, Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig)
Kwame Dawes - Before Winter
Wendell Berry - The Peace Of Wild Things © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from The New Collected Poems. Broadcast by permission of Counterpoint Press. 
Kei Miller - The Longest Song
Dora Maar - I rested in the arms of my arms
John Berger - Once In A Poem (extract)
Yehuda Amichai - I, Who Am Still Living, May I Rest In Peace (trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfield)

Produced by Jack Howson.  
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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