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: Two-tone

Two-tone

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Inspired by the musical fusion in 70s Coventry, we celebrate the mix of black and white.

We range across musical fusions, the black-and-white piano keyboards, the inspiration of Jamaica and writings by Hannah Lowe, Leone Ross, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

Jade Anouka and Rhys Bevan with a range of readings set alongside music in a programme inspired by Coventry's history.  As the New Music Biennial comes to Coventry this weekend as part of its City of Culture programme, this episode takes its inspiration from the musical fusion in the city in the 1970s that produced the two-tone pop sound. But our canvass takes the black and white iconography of that musical moment as a starting point for a programme featuring the sounds of the piano keyboard, with its stark juxtaposition of ebony and ivory, in music from classical to jazz, from the mix of styles that burst out in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance, examples of cross cultural relationships from Othello to novels by Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy, the reflections of poet Hannah Lowe on her Jamaican father's love of the blues, and an excerpt from musician Pauline Black's memoirs about the birth of two-tone band The Selecter in Coventry in the late 1970s.   

Producer: Graham Rogers

Radio 3 is recording and broadcasting music from the New Music Biennial starting in next weekend's New Music Show.

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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