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.

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: Mushrooms

Mushrooms

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With extracts written by John Cage, Merlin Sheldrake, Margaret Atwood and Emily Dickinson.

What Emily Dickinson calls "the elf of plants" provides the topic for today's playlist of readings alongside music by Bernard Hermann, Sun Ra, Ravel, Tchaikovsky and Gesualdo.

A foraging trip is the scene of a failed marriage proposal in Anna Karenina, wild mushrooms form the key ingredient in a Meera Sodha meal, they inform the psychedelic experiments of Timothy Leary. Alice in Wonderland encountered the caterpillar, composer John Cage became interested in them, musing on the idea of playing Beethoven making a mushroom more edible.  These are some of the readings in today's programme exploring fungi, with music from a range of composers including Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, which Disney used for a scene with dancing mushrooms in Fantasia; Anna von Hausswolff's Theatre of Nature; a pygmy song for gathering mushrooms from the Bayaka people and Dvorak's evocation of a Bohemian forest.  Our readers are Youssef Kerkour and Verity Henry.

Producer: Ewa Norman

You can find a Free Thinking discussion called Fungi: An Alien Encounter hearing from Merlin Sheldrake, in which Matthew Sweet cooks up some mushrooms for his guests available to download as an Arts and Ideas podcast  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dr46 and listen out for an upcoming Late Junction in which Merlin Sheldrake's brother Cosmo composes with the actual sound of mushrooms.

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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