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: Night Owls

Night Owls

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Night OwlsClose menu

Bird and human life and creatures of the mind alive between dusk and dawn as we go owling.

Carolyn Pickles and Sam Dale read poetry and prose accompanied by Ma Rainey, William Sharp, Dolores Keane and John Lee Hooker, plus Chopin, Debussy, Elgar, Vivaldi and Wagner

The night time is the right time’, as John Lee Hooker sings…. Words and Music joins birds and humans hunting, playing, and hounding each others’ souls between dusk and dawn. We find owls and nightingales fighting each other while just outside the wood the army of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth prepares itself for battle.  In Italy, an exiled Shelley sighs his sorrows to the chant of the little owl, his wife is inside facing the night-time terror of Frankenstein . Poets Helen Dunmore and John Burnside write of all those on the night shift and others who cannot sleep….to an accompaniment of the hoots, screeches and soulful squeaks of  tawny, little, long-eared and barn owls.  With the  sounds of John Lee Hooker, William Sharpe, Ma Rainey and Dolores Keane plus Chopin, Wagner and Debussy, Elgar, Sonny Rollins, Public Service Broadcasting and John Tavener.  Readings from naturalists like Neltje Blanchan, Leigh Calvez and Gilbert White.  The poetry of John Burnside, George MacBeth, Caroline Carver, Fiona Wilson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Douglas Stewart, Tennyson and Walter Scott. The readers are Sam Dale and Carolyn Pickles.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

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

Night Owls

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