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

Podcasts

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: The Ethereal

The Ethereal

BBC Radio 3 - The Listening Service, The Ethereal

Tom Service explores the ethereal in music.

Composers across the ages have been aware that music's ability to evoke the ethereal can prompt extraordinary responses in a listener. Tom Service explores how and to what effect.

The opening orchestral strains of Wagner's opera Lohengrin with its high shimmering strings prompted the French poet Charles Baudelaire to observe that in Wagner's music he found "something rapt and enthralling, something aspiring to mount higher, something excessive and superlative". 
The ability of music to evoke a sense of the ethereal has a strange and powerful effect on listeners, something that composers have been aware of across the ages. Tom Service examines how this music creates its affect and to what ends. He draws on examples from Hldegard of Bingen, Gregorio Allegri, Wolfgang Mozart, James Horner, Einojuhani Rautavaara and George Crumb - among others -  and of course Richard Wagner.

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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The Listening Service

The Ethereal

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