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: Everything Must Change

Everything Must Change

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A meditation on 'the way of time' and life as constant transformation.

Poetry, prose, field recordings and music combine in a meditation on 'the way of time' and the experience of life as constant interconnected transformation.

This edition of Words and Music circles around a song by Bernard Ighner, Everything Must Change, heard in this programme in Nina Simone’s powerful 1978 interpretation. The ballad is a meditation on “the way of time” and the truth that life is itself constant transformation. We inhabit a world in flux, collapse and transition. But in this programme, we are invited to marvel at how all things are interconnected, to sit with the knowledge that, in Thomas Hardy’s words, the elements that make up a “ruddy human life” become the green shoots of a young tree, that bones become coral and eyes, pearls, in the famous imagery of Ariel’s song from The Tempest. The readers are Emily Taaffe and William Ash. 

D.H. Lawrence and Marcus Aurelius suggest that to embrace change is to experience life more fully and more naturally. We hear Aretha Franklin and Philip Ayres desperately promise a constant love, immortal, beyond time. We sit by a river with the poet, Wisława Szymborska, and lie with lovers in the tall grass of high summer, savouring the present. The theme-and-variation form is heard in the hands of Rubbra and Schubert. We gaze at the clouds, through the music of John Luther Adams, and turn our awareness inwards to the flow of thoughts “that flash, kaleidoscope-like, now in, now out”, in the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. As Alice in Wonderland knew all too well, the cells of the body are itching and dancing with life and transformation if we care to notice.

Our readers are William Ash and Emily Taaffe. 
Featuring the voice of Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso, recorded in New Mexico.

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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