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: Looking Back on Childhood

Looking Back on Childhood

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Looking Back on Childhood

Poets and writers reflect on their childhoods. Read by Rebecca Lacey and Abraham Popoola.

Poets and writers reflect on childhood experiences, featuring texts by Alice Oswald, James Baldwin and William Wordsworth. Readings by Rebecca Lacey and Abraham Popoola.

Poets and writers reflect on their childhoods. With readings by Rebecca Lacey and Abraham Popoola.

What was it like to be a child? What was expected, and what did we wish for? What experiences in the present prompt us to remember? This episode of Words and Music explores how it feels to look back on different stages of childhood.

In a Louis MacNeice poem, the smell of a particular brand of soap is enough to inspire a flood of involuntary memories; while Jackie Kay is watching on the shore as the girl she was walks “out to sea [...] further and further away.” There is part of the poet Alice Oswald that has not yet left her childhood hiding place, inside a laurel bush “in Berkshire somewhere.” Jan Morris’s memoir reflects on how it felt to be “born into the wrong body.”

Youth was a wandered-through, clambered-over landscape for the nature poet Wordsworth; for Adrienne Rich, childhood was a time when knowledge was “pure”, even “pleasurable”, contained in encyclopedias, lacking the contradictions and complications of the adult world. Seamus Heaney invokes the imaginative play of siblings at home whose sofa is transformed into a train. Driving in his car listening to Sly and the Family Stone, the poet A. Van Jordan is pulled over by the police. The encounter prompts a lyrical meditation on music, manhood and racism. The music in this episode comes from Charles Ives, Georges Bizet and Stevie Wonder.

Readings:
Alice Oswald - Aside
Melissa Stein - Anthem
Seamus Heaney - A Sofa In The Forties
William Wordsworth - The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time
Adrienne Rich - From Morning-Glory to Petersburg
James Baldwin - Sonny’s Blues
Laurie Lee - Cider With Rosie
A. Van Jordan - Que Sera Sera (© 2007 by  A. Van Jordan, in arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
Louis MacNeice - Soap Suds
Thomas Hood - Past and Present
Jan Morris - Conundrum
D.H. Lawrence - Piano
Jackie Kay - The Past

Produced by Phil Smith
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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Words and Music

Looking Back on Childhood

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