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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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: The Trumpet

The Trumpet

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Poetry and prose about the trumpet, with readings by Madeleine Potter and Joseph Ayre.

Poetry and prose about the trumpet, featuring the work of Victor Hugo, Langston Hughes, Alice Oswald and Kim Moore. Readings by Madeleine Potter and Joseph Ayre.

Poetry and prose about the trumpet, with readings by Madeleine Potter and Joseph Ayre.

The trumpet occupies a special place in the collective consciousness, a sonic presence throughout centuries of celebrations, ceremonies, wars and visions. Here is an instrument that brought down the walls of the city of Jericho, and whose “loud clangour excites us to arms'' in the words of John Dryden (encountered in this programme in a setting by George Frideric Handel). We hear a scene from Louis MacNiece’s BBC drama, The Dark Tower (first broadcast in 1946), a parable play on the “ancient theme of the Quest” in which the protagonist is a young trumpeter, practising his fanfare as he prepares to meet his fate.

But the instrument has many lives beyond the battlefield: for Walt Whitman, it takes on the role of otherworldly messenger, inviting him into a mystical experience; it appears as a metaphor in Alice Oswald’s celebratory love sonnet, Wedding; contemporary jazz musician Ambrose Akinmusire explores its tender and fragile possibilities; and Langston Hughes reads Trumpet Player at the BBC in 1962, his poetic ode to the instrument’s place in the history of African-American expression and memory.

Whether in the hands of apocalyptic angels, enthusiastic amateurs, mourners, or virtuosic improvisers, it seems that the trumpet is something of a summoner, calling us away from the everyday, towards another reality...

Readings:
Kim Moore - Teaching The Trumpet
John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday
Louis MacNiece - The Dark Tower
Victor Hugo (trans Toru Dutt) - The Trumpets Of The Mind
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Blow, Bugle, Blow
Walt Whitman - The Mystic Trumpeter, 1 - 3
Alice Oswald - Wedding
Walt Whitman - The Mystic Trumpeter, 5
Langston Hughes - Trumpet Player
Jackie Kay - Trumpet
The King James Bible - Book of Revelation, Chapter 8, Verses 7 - 13
Walt Whitman - The Mystic Trumpeter, 7 - 8
Eudora Welty - The Winds
Edward Thomas - The Trumpet

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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