Private Passions

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

Private Passions Podcast

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Theaster Gates

Michael Berkeley’s guest is American artist Theaster Gates.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is American artist Theaster Gates. With Scott Joplin, Joseph Boulogne, Rachmaninoff and gospel music.

Theaster Gates is a potter, a sculptor, a film-maker, a curator of black history, a real estate developer and a professor of fine art in Chicago, where he lives - and where he’s also transformed a whole run-down area near the university. When he was made a professor in 2007, he bought a derelict bank for a dollar, tore out the urinals, cut them up and sold them off at five thousand dollars each as artworks – thereby raising enough money to create a large new art centre. That was just the beginning, as he explains. Gates’s art and installation work is shown all over the world, and current projects include a library for Obama and this year’s Serpentine Pavilion building. As his recent show at the Whitechapel revealed, his work is ambitious and provocative - he takes pots and deconstructs them so that they’re exploding, back to the original clay. He films his work in dream-like spaces - a huge abandoned factory, for instance, full of broken bricks and haunting music, including his own singing.

Theaster Gates is also a musician, the founder of a group called The Black Monks of Mississippi, which aims to rescue old songs from the black South. He brings Michael Berkeley a playlist that includes Scott Joplin, Joseph Boulogne, Rachmaninoff and gospel music sung by Leontyne Price. 

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3
Produced by Elizabeth Burke

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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