Words and Music

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

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: Work and Play

Work and Play

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Work and Play

Readings and music depicting millers, blacksmiths, office drudgery and downtime.

From Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness to Philip Larkin's evocation of work as a toad, via the testimony of Victorian girls collected together by Margaret Llewellyn Davies.

Eight minutes Idle is writer Matt Thorne's evocation of office life. Herman Melville's Bartleby preferred not to do what his office boss asked for,  whilst in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver enjoys sliding down heaps of grain in the mill and playing with spiders' webs.  Other readings in this episode exploring work and play convey the toil of blacksmiths, mowing and reaping in works by Dickens, Wordsworth and Robert Frost, and the experience of being self-employed is wittily described in a poem by LL Barkat.  Our readers are Tommy Sim'aan and Julia Winwood and we hear music by Dvořák, Eric Coates, Alexander Mosolov, Van Morrison and Dolly Parton.

Producer in Salford: Nick Holmes

READINGS:
Charles Dickens     Great Expectations 
William Wordsworth     The Solitary Reaper 
Robert Frost             Mowing 
Shel Silverstein         I Cannot go to School Today 
Walt Whitman          I Hear America Singing 
Matt Thorne             Eight Days Idle 
Muriel Spark             A Far Cry From Kensington 
Bertrand Russell        In Praise of Idleness 
Elizabeth Gaskell       North and South 
Margaret Llewellyn Davies editor of    Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women 
Philip Larkin               Toads 
Marge Piercy              The Secretary Chant 
Toni Morrison             Tar Baby 
Emily Dickinson           Rest at Night 
Rajesh Thankappan     Work and Rest 
LL Barkat                      Self-Employed 
Herman Melville          Bartleby, the Scrivener 
George Eliot                The Mill on the Floss 
Alfred Tennyson          The Lotos-eaters

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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