The Radio 3 Documentary

Paul McCartney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lee Renaldo on their debt to classical music.

In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art. It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said, “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened”. The compose...

"For the next hour, I need your ears". It's 1974 and someone is trying to recruit you for a listening experiment on public radio in Canada. Pioneering Canadian composer and soundscape maestro, R Murray Schafer really wants you to commit: "if you're just listening to this programme casually, you'd better turn it off right now". This audio experiment was part of a series on the CBC - the Canadian Br...

Via ports and truck-stops, fulfilment centres and ring roads, Aidan Tulloch follows the supply chain and reimagines the journey an item goes on in the age of 24/7 delivery.

Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.

Denton Welch lived the last years of his short life in Kent during the Second World War. His writing career took off in 1943 and in the same year he met his companion, Eric Oliver. His writing is mostly autobiographical and carries his readers from a childhood in Shanghai, boarding school in 1930s England, a near-fatal bicycle accident while he was in art college, a slow convalescence and, finally...

Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Famed for his soulful voice and perfect Yiddish pronunciation, he performed in synagogues and theatres across the Eastern United States and toured Germany, Poland and Palestine. But after his death in 1954, LaRue Jones disa...

Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespeare library, the brainchild of the first librarian George Dawson. From the outset it was to be the People's Folio, the property of the city's Free library. You can find the evidence stamped in red ink on many of the pages. That might seem like a defac...

Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life

One day, three decades after the event, the German poet and man of letters, Heinrich Heine, stood on the site of the battle of Marengo, one of Napoleon's earliest and most important victories and had an epiphany - or he invented one for his readers: ""Gradually, day by day, foolish national prejudices are disappearing; all harsh differentiations are lost in the generality of European civilization....

American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was willing to track down songs in unlikely places, once writing "I don't scare easily." She spent a night riding in a hearse in Wisconsin just to question the driver and hear his songs, w...

Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu.

“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according to which the city was created by the siren Partenope. Song has been woven into Neapolitan life ever since, giving the city an extraordinary musical culture and heritage. Joanna Robertson travels to Naples to find out what makes this city so full of so...

Metalworking has been central to the rise and success of Birmingham over hundreds of years. But how has this industry affected the culture of the city? Did the experience of working with metal and hearing the continuous clang of metal-on-metal seep into the personality and creativity of Birmingham’s inhabitants? Gregory Leadbetter’s poem traces this story from the discovery of ore in the Staffords...

From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the tiny island of Barbados. There, they were enslaved by British landowners and forced to work the sugar plantations that covered the island. Uprooted from their homelands, separated from their families and denied their humanity, they nevertheless manag...

During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these horrors as the Holocaust was unfolding before their eyes. A miraculous discovery in the Vernadsky National Library in Kyiv revealed a collect...

In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he was a teenager had been his adopted home. It was the year that Frankie Goes to Hollywood had a Europe-wide hit with Two Tribes and Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh personal computer. But Ross had an idea with more of a baroque feel. In Paris, he met a producer...

Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare Pollard. As a celebrated playwright and poet, with much of her work focused on giving a voice to forgotten women, how could she not have known about Anne Lock? In this Sunday Feature, Pollard takes listeners into Anne's world and time, as she pieces together th...

London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career. Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage and an alluring French lodger called Charles Gounod, Tavistock House is reputable for having been the home of three eccentric creatives - the Mancunian painter Frank Stone, the world’s most famous writer and actor Charles Dickens, and Victorian England’s noto...

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces together the events leading up to the controversial first performance by speaking to people who witnessed it in a Moscow concert hall 60 years ago: the composer’s son Maxim Shostakovich, the poet’s sist...

Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls, in search of clues in Basil Bunting's life and work to help understand this neglected masterpiece of twentieth century modernist poetry . It's a landscape that the former MP for Penrith and the Borders knows like the back of his hand, and it's where B...

The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive

If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Conservatory of St Petersburg, the 26-year-old started composing his first symphony, ‘Winter Daydreams’, but quickly ran out of steam. “No other work cost him such effort and suffering… its composition was fraught with difficulty,” recalled his younger brother Mo...

LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby goes on a personal journey to find out why it divides critics and audiences. Stockhausen was the most gifted composer of the post-war European avant-garde. In the 1950s, his early works - including some of the first electronic music created - confirmed his gen...

During the 1980s and 1990s, DJ Andy Kershaw travelled around Africa and the Americas searching out great music and taping it on his Walkman Pro, a new broadcast-quality cassette recorder that was bringing about a revolution in mobile recording. He also used it to capture his celebrated Kitchen Sessions, held in his small flat in Crouch End. In this episode, Andy meets Malian blues man Ali Farka To...