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.

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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: Life through a Screen

Life through a Screen

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Aoife McMahon and William Hope view the world through glass screens and handheld devices.

Aoife McMahon and William Hope view the world through glass screens and handheld devices. With poems by Leontia Flynn, John Donne and Amy Lowell.

It is through computer monitors and handheld devices that so much of existence is experienced today. We view the world through screens, living and loving via smartphones and laptops. Contemporary poets and songwriters have been quick to delight in and reflect upon our age of collapsed distances, global connection and moments of beauty caught and shared via a phone camera. “Your world / is gleaming in my hands” writes Victoria Gatehouse in Phosphorescence.

But the pervasiveness of technology and the increase in “screentime” come at a cost, challenging our notions of time, privacy, intimacy and human contact. As a dialogue by poet Leontia Flynn sets out, Ours is the Age of Interruption, or the Age of Participation, depending on how you see it. And, as Shakespeare’s Portia swipes through a list of suitors, or E.M. Forster’s Kuno longs for human contact without the aid of “the machine”, our contemporary ways of dating and communicating and sharing ourselves appear not so new after all.

Aoife McMahon and William Hope are our readers, viewing the world through glass screens and handheld devices, with music from Mozart, Holst and Richard Hawley

Readings:
Leontia Flynn - Malone Hoard
Clint Smith - FaceTime
Imtiaz Dharker - Flight Radar
William Shakespeare - The Merchant Of Venice
Sherman Alexie - The Facebook Sonnet
John Donne - Elegy V: His Picture
Victoria Gatehouse - Phosphorescence
Andrew Marvell - The Gallery
Leontia Flynn - Poems Conceived As Dialogues Between Two Antagonistic Voices, Third Dialogue
Jill McDonoguh - Twelve-Hour Shifts
Debora Greger - The War After The War, I.
D.H. Lawrence - From A College Window
Amy Lowell - Towns in Colour, I. Red Slippers
Amy Lowell - Towns in Colour, V. An Aquarium
Dannie Abse - X-ray
Charles Eisenstein - The EcoSexual Awakening
E.M. Forster - The Machine Stops
J. Krishnamurti - Freedom From The Known 


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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