The Listening Service

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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

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Music: Classical

An odyssey through the musical universe, presented by Tom Service

Rethink music with The Listening Service. Tom Service presents a journey of imagination and insight, exploring how music works

The Listening Service: Recorders

Recorders

BBC Radio 3 - The Listening Service, Recorders

Tom Service explores the music and mystery of that schooldays favourite - the recorder.

Tom Service explores the music and mystery of that humble, plastic and mass-produced schooldays favourite - the recorder.

For many years, the humble, plastic and mass-produced recorder has been a mainstay of music education. The first instrument put into the hands of thousands of 20th-century primary school children across the world, creating lifelong musical memories, some good, some bad. That’s all now under threat from a small, stringed imposter: the ukulele. A recent survey of children who play a musical instrument found that the proportion playing the recorder has collapsed from 52% in 1997 to just 15% in 2020. Ukelele playing since 2014 is up by 15%.

Recorders appear in paintings as early as the 15th century and have long been associated with angels and amateurs as well as children. Henry VIII was a big fan –  ‘exercising himselfe dailie in … plaieing at the recorders’; and on hearing one in 1668 Samuel Pepys said it was ‘so sweet that it ravished me ; and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife’. He bought himself one six weeks later. An understated presence in the history of classical music nevertheless, the recorder has been utilised by composers from Henry Purcell and Handel, to Paul Hindemith and Luciano Berio.

So, what next for the recorder, and can it survive all those ukuleles? Tom Service investigates…

Producer: Ruth Thomson

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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