The Listening Service

To mark the 150th anniversary of Rossini's death, Tom Service salutes the opera composer who was a celebrity in his own time, whose music was whistled in the street. A colourful, jovial character, Rossini was also a renowned gourmand (Bolognese-spattered manuscripts are evidence that he composed while he ate) whose love of food permeated his whole creative outlook. His innovative whipping up of mu...

What do we actually mean when we talk about "classical music"? What is - or isn't it? By its narrowest definition it's essentially mid-18th to early 19th century music and yet it's usually used to mean much much more. So how is classical music defined these days? Is it a walled garden of a very distinct style, or can it embrace all sorts of things? Does being played by an orchestra make something...

The Listening Service had a question from a listener: "When I see the musicians playing, they seem to be looking at their sheet music, not the conductor. Can an orchestra not function perfectly well without a conductor? If I'm intensely moved by a piece of orchestral music, is it not the musicians which moved me? Why must I applaud some arbitrary conductor, who never touched a single instrument th...

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Tom Service explores arguably the most famous piece of music in the world: the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It's a piece which has been appropriated by everyone from the European Union, to the writer Anthony Burgess, who used it as an unsettling counterpoint to the murderous exploits of the characters in his novel A Clockwork Orange. Tom asks...

Enter the magical musical world of the forest. It's charming, mysterious, beautiful and scary. Tom Service is your guide as he explores the magical role of the forest in music, from the Romantic charms of Schubert songs to the nightmarish spirits of Weber's Freischütz opera, and beyond to the symbolic psychological forests of Schoenberg's Erwartung and Sibelius's Tapiola. He also talks to sound ar...

The line-up of early 20th-century English composers includes great figures such as Holst, Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax and Frederick Delius. Since the 1950s, these composers have been dogged by a casual and unkind slur against their work, namely by referring to it as 'cowpat music'. Tom Service argues that, far from producing shallow and whimsical pastoral scores, the music produced by this Englis...

A rollercoaster of a show as Tom experiences how music gets our hearts racing. How do composers from Bach to Jarvis Cocker manipulate speed in music? How can a slow movement by Sibelius be 'faster' than 'speedcore' dance music? Tom takes us inside the mechanics of speed, and discovers that Sibelius controls our heart rate in symphonic music in the same way that a DJ in Ibiza does as their set unfo...

From the dawn of human music-making, all instrumental music has been made via technology, whether bone flutes, violins, pianos, tape or synthesisers. Is new musical technology driven by the needs of composers and musicians or are they dazzled by its possibilities before they can really get to grips with it? How has cheap technology impacted on music, now that laptops have done for expensive studio...

Space. A place few men or women have gone before ... but plenty of composers have. The universe has inspired musicians for hundreds of years and consequently we all know what space music sounds like. Or do we? From Holst and David Bowie to John Williams via Ligeti, Thomas Ades and the Beastie Boys, Tom Service dons his spacesuit on a mission to explore why cosmic-inspired music sounds the way it d...

Less really is more on today’s The Listening Service: we’re maxing out on minimalism, that most popular but also most divisive and most misunderstood of all 20th-century musical movements. Music that either makes you bliss out or brings you out in hives - it's the sound of that rhythmic repetitive music by a quartet of American composers - Steve Reich, Philip Glass, LaMonte Young, and Terry Riley,...

Humanity has used music to commune with the sacred for as long as we have been human: from the caves of Chauvet, tens of thousands of years ago, to the churches, temples, and synagogues of today, we have sung and hymned and played our connection with our God(s). Something else has happened in modern Western society: as organised religion has waned, a cult of music has developed, in which we don't...

What does it mean to be good? If you're a virtuoso pianist, violinist, cellist, does that mean you can play faster than everybody else - or better? What does it mean to be a virtuoso? Are you in league with the devil, as 19th-century critics said about the violinist Paganini, or are you able to communicate more movingly, more emotionally, more humanly than other players? In association with Prom 3...

Tom Service looks at how pieces of music end, and asks what endings mean. Are they mere framing devices, or can they suggest weightier thoughts of triumph, or conversely, of death? And what of the fading away so prevalent in pop music? From Beethoven's insistent affirmations to Tchaikovsky's bleak despair, from Haydn's witty farewells to Human League's intimations of eternity, the ways that music...

Tom Service investigates the link between music and colour ahead of Prom 45 and Stravinsky’s colourful folk-ballet Petrushka. A piece of music can be 'dark' or 'bright' or we could be singing the 'Blues' - but what does that mean? Professor Jamie Ward - an expert in synaesthesia - is on hand to help. Tom delves into a world of musical colour from Messiaen and Copland, Scriabin and Ravel to David B...

The sea in all its musical majesty

Tom delves in to folk music’s mysterious history before Prom 27, celebrating folk music across Britain and Ireland with Sam Lee and The Unthanks.

Dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight

Dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight, Tom Service signs his soul in blood as he explores musical versions of the Faust story - including Mahler's epic setting of Goethe's Faust in his eighth symphony. Guest Matthew Sweet lends his devilish expertise on Faustian films, from Bedazzled to The Witches of Eastwick. Recorded earlier today at Imperial College, London, as a prelude to tonight's Pr...

Why synths are so cool

As the world's greatest celebration of orchestras and orchestral music that is the BBC Proms gets underway, Tom Service attempts to shed some light on three centuries of orchestral manoeuvres... When did orchestras begin and why? Why do they have standardised sections of strings, woodwind, brass and percussion? Why did they seem to get bigger and bigger as the 19th century turned into the 20th? Wh...

Music – where do we start?

Tom Service savours the sound of the fifth - an interval with many meanings, from mystic drone to military bugle call. He's joined by Early Music expert Jeremy Llewellyn who explains the significance of the fifth in medieval music, related to The Music of the Spheres and used to invoke the Almighty in religious chant; and by composer David Bruce, who describes how composers today find fresh uses f...

Today on The Listening Service Tom gets into gear for the truck driver modulation - crunching from one key to another, and not worrying overly about the musical synchromesh. There's not too much attention paid to the proper rules of harmony in today's programme, which celebrates the emotional and dramatic impact of the well-placed sudden key change. From Bruckner to Bon Jovi, Mahler to Michael Jac...

"My music is best understood by children and animals," pronounced Igor Stravinsky, no doubt with a twinkle in his eye. According to his critics (and jealous colleagues), Stravinsky's composing consisted of picking up any old second-hand musical baubles he fancied, like a restless musical magpie - sometimes he even had the effrontery to leave them virtually unchanged. Frustratingly, audiences seeme...

In this special edition of The Listening Service recorded live at this year's Hay Festival, Tom Service explores the parallels between great children's literature and music written for young people. From Debussy to Prokofiev, Bizet to Britten - childhood has fascinated some of the greatest composers - how does their approach compare to children's writers and illustrators? What can we learn from mu...