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: Masks

Masks

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Masks

From highwaymen to the Greek stage, from Lucretius to Philip Larkin and Rosamond Lehmann.

Nathalie Buscombe and Jot Davies read words about masks by writers including Rosamond Lehmann, Oscar Wilde and Léopold Senghor alongside music by Ismaël Lo, Bach and Offenbach.

From the masked highwaywoman described by Niamh Murphy, to the masked seducer adopted by the C18 Italian adventurer and lover extraordinaire Casanova, to the masked furies of the ancient Greek stage, masks can conjure up notions of primordial terror. But they can also be fun. 

Such images and ideas are evoked in a phantasmagoria of hiding, veiling and concealing, as Nathalie Buscombe and Jot Davies read texts by Yeats, Wilde, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Schnitzler. Ancestral masks and animal masks are conjured up in poems by Léopold Senghor and Philip Larkin, along with masks concealing the symptoms of plague and strangely winsome death masks, all set alongside music by Lindberg, Offenbach, Bach, Rodrigo and Schnittke evoking places and eras in which masking took place. Levi-Strauss and Lucretius provide a philosophical perspective: “all philosophising is masking”, Wilde wrote in “The Need for a Mask”; the conclusion might be that we all need to take care of our masks.

Readings: 

Rosamond Lehmann: The Weather in the Streets
H.V.Morton: A traveller in Rome
Sophie Werts Knudsen: Masks and Syphilis
James Harpur: The examined life XLVII: Furies
Jean Lorrain: Monsieur de Phocas
Arthur Schnitzler: Dream Story
W.B. Yeats: The Mask
Paul Lawrence Dunbar: We wear the mask
Niamh Murphy: The mask of the highwayman
Claude Levi Strauss: The way of the masks
Johnston McCulley: The Mark of Zorro
Lucretius: De rerum natura
Leopold Sedar Senghor: Prayer to Masks
Kamau Brathwaite: Masks: Atumpan
Chares Baudelaire: The Mask: An allegorical statue in the style of the Renaissance
Martin Amis: The pregnant widow, read by Jot Davies
Anon: Gas masks for dogs
Philip Larkin: Laboratory Monkeys
Heinrich Schliemann: Mycenae
Pietro Bembo: Letter to Cardinal Binniena
Giacomo Casanova: Memoirs
Karl Edward Wagner: Undertow
Richard Le Galliene: The Worshipper in the Image
Ernest Dowson: A comedy of masks
Cardinal John Deardon: Please hear what I’m not saying
Robin Hardy: The Wicker Man
Giacomo Casanova: Memoirs

Producer: Tony Sellors

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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