The Early Music Show

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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

Music: Classical: Early Music

Performance and news from the world of early music.

An exploration of early music, looking at early developments in musical performance and composition in Britain and abroad. UK only: please note that not all episodes are podcast.

The Early Music Show: On Bach's Farm

On Bach's Farm

BBC Radio 3 - The Early Music Show, On Bach's Farm

Mark Seow explores links between Bach's music and farming - of the soil, heart and soul.

Mark Seow explores the links between Bach's music and the subject of farming - not only of the soil but also of the heart and the soul.

Bach’s Germany was an agrarian society. Just beyond Leipzig’s city walls, farmers worked the land to grow crops that sustained its citizens. Some of Bach’s music explicitly engages with farming. Its rustic oomph and repetitive motifs call to mind the manual toil of digging. John Eliot Gardiner even described the texture of one Bach cantata as “warm topsoil, fertile and well irrigated”. Yet devotional writings of Bach’s time make it clear that farming was something not just done out on the fields. Instead all Lutherans were to be farmers of sorts: they were to plough the “soil” of their hearts so to receive the Word of God and bring it to fruition.

The notion that scripture was a type of seed pervaded eighteenth-century thought, and Bach was intimate with this kind of corporeal agricultural. In this episode, violinist and member of Chineke!, Mark Seow explores how the cultivation of Lutheran hearts as if they were farmland urge us to rehear much-loved moments of Bach, including movements from his Christmas Oratorio and the St Matthew Passion.

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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