Unclassified

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

Music: Classical: Experimental & New

Elizabeth Alker with music by a new generation of composers who defy classification.

Elizabeth Alker with music by an exciting new generation of unclassified composers and performers, breaking free of the constraints of practice rooms and concert halls.

Unclassified: Melissa Harrison’s Listening Chair

Melissa Harrison’s Listening Chair

BBC Radio 3 - Unclassified, Melissa Harrison’s Listening Chair

Novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison sits in the listening chair.

Elizabeth Alker presents eclectic ambient music, and novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison sits in the listening chair with a piece that transports her to another place.

Elizabeth handpicks the best new ambient, electronic, and post-classical music and revels in the spaces between. This week she invites the novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison to sit in Unclassified’s Listening Chair to describe a piece that transports her to another place. Melissa has been in and around dance music for the last 30 years, increasingly turning towards ambient sound worlds. Her writing - including the award-winning novel All Among the Barley - connects deeply to the English countryside, and her Nature Notebook column in the Times is an evocative diary of her encounters with the natural world. Her Listening Chair selection comes from the Canadian artist Ian William Craig - known for using broken tapes in his compositions - and Melissa describes how the lack of control this brings has been an inspiration for her. 

Elsewhere in the show, Elizabeth plays a track from Manchester greats The Durutti Column’s album A Paean to Wilson, which gets a deluxe reissue on coloured vinyl. And there's new music from the Polish cellist Resina. 

This episode was first broadcast last November.

Produced by Rebecca Gaskell
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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