The Listening Service

Tom Service asks why music has always been an essential part of mourning. With the help of cognitive neuropsychologist Catherine Loveday, he compares the music of two royal funerals separated by three centuries, and by tracing the development of funeral music into abstract art music he uncovers the private grief behind Bach's great D-minor violin Chaconne. And before ending with a Top Ten countdow...

Across the globe, music has been an essential rallying-cry of revolution and social change: from the Marseillaise to Strange Fruit, from classical symphonies to hip-hop, music has accompanied some of the most vital changes to our world. How does music do it? Peggy Seeger, folk music icon and protest-song-writing genius, tells us how her life in music has been a clarion call for political and socia...

The Listening Service returns to its regular slot now the Proms are over, and chooses one of the BBC's "Ten Pieces III", Elgar's "Enigma Variations", to look at codes, ciphers and hidden messages in music. What might be the "dark saying" or mystery tune that the Enigma Variations are based around? Which other composers were keen on the use of codes and ciphers in their music? And if we can't crack...

While The Listening Service takes a break, why not try this episode of The Proms Podcast?

Whether it's an eye-wateringly high soprano or profoundly low bass, lightning quick rappers, the star castrati of the 18th century, the screamers, the growlers, the robots or the singers that can produce two notes at once - there are a lot of extreme voices out there. Tom Service takes a trip through the many purveyors of vocal pyrotechnics from Mozart and Rachmaninov to Stockhausen, Tom Waits and...

Tom Service discovers endless variety in music based on a drone - from rustic dance to mystic religious ecstasy. Medieval Christian music used a drone to provide support for their liturgical chants; old country dances went with a swing to the drone of bagpipes and hurdy-gurdy. Much Indian classical music builds elaborate melodic variations over a drone. Minimalist composer Lamonte Young has a neve...

Ever gone out dancing? Or found your fingers and toes tapping along to your favourite tune? We find rhythm irresistible as humans. But what is rhythm? How do we feel that beat - and do we need it to enjoy music? Tom Service explores rhythm in music from Bach's courtly dances to Steve Reich's clapping hands, finds out what puts the rhythm in RnB and discovers music that has no rhythm at all. Meanwh...

In a special edition of The Listening Service recorded live at this year's Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, Tom is joined by the composer Richard Sisson (at the piano), and poet Gillian Clarke to discuss the art of setting words to music. From the thwarted romance of Lieder to the game-changing musicals of Stephen Sondheim and the era-defining pop songs of Jarvis Cocker, finding the perfec...

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...

As part of Radio 3's Breaking Free: Martin Luther's Revolution, The Listening Service asks where the idea of communal singing, especially in religious contexts, came from in modern Europe. It seems natural to us today but the practice of congregational singing was once a radical, revolutionary idea that brought religion and politics together. And - what do the football chants heard on the terraces...

Who wrote the first folk song? It's an age old question, these tunes that everyone knows which have been passed down from generation to generation... Where do they come from? Enlisting the help of ethnomusicologist and folk singer Dr Fay Hield and folklore expert Steve Roud, Tom Service embarks on a quest to the very origins of music. It's a journey that takes him back in time from modern-day folk...

The most famous beard in classical music? Perhaps. And if so, what does Johannes Brahms's abundant facial hair have to do with his music? Tom Service looks at four contrasting compositions for clues: the First Piano Concerto, the Second Sextet, the choral piece 'Gesang der Parzen' (Song of the Fates) and the A-major Intermezzo.

Tom Service ponders brevity in music - how short you can go? From Beethoven bagatelles to Webern's chamber miniatures, short doesn't need to mean lightweight. Short pieces may be intricate as a netsuke or as simple as a sonic doodle. Or suggest a fragment of something larger. Tom talks to sonic artist JLIAT, who has made a piece lasting 1/44100 of a second. But he's thinking of shorter pieces.

Tom Service immerses himself in Deep Listening, a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros. It's a kind of sonic meditation, a way of approaching music with more sensitivity that anyone can practise. In exploring this concept, Tom also explores the music of Oliveros, one of the most influential composers of the late twentieth century. She was a pioneer of electronic music, working with tape m...

A programme recorded earlier this afternoon at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead, in which Tom goes on a journey into musical time and space. Find out what connects Wagner and Stockhausen, speed metal and slow movements - and how you can transform the fastest music in the world into the slowest, right in front of your ears...

The Listening Service - an odyssey through the musical universe with Tom Service. Join him on a journey of imagination and insight, exploring how music works. Today - What's all that that Noise? Tom investigates. When is noise just noise, and when is it music? Is it just sound in the wrong place? Tom finds that, though we resent noises in the concert hall, music needs some noise in it to give it c...

The Listening Service - an odyssey through the musical universe with Tom Service. Join him on a journey of imagination and insight, exploring how music works. With Valentines Day just around the corner, Tom explores the enduring power of love songs. He talks to Ted Gioia, author of Love Songs: The Hidden History who explains that the very first traces of writing in human history are hymns to love....

Tom Service asks whether the way we see composers depicted in art influences the way we hear their music. With particular reference to three pictures that you can see on the Listening Service page of the Radio 3 website for this programme - Hildegard of Bingen, Bach and Beethoven. Rethink music with The Listening Service.

Virtuosity: what does it mean to be good? Really, really good? If you're a virtuoso pianist, violinist, cellist, does that mean you can play faster than everybody else - or better? From Liszt to Paganini, Horowitz to Lang Lang, 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 movingl...

A hotbed of vice, immorality, and social meltdown... or a musical embodiment of gilded nostalgia and conservatism... The sounds of an empire at whirling play in Vienna... or the final soundtrack to the end of a musical and political world order... Tom Service invites you to dance through history in three-time, and whirl through waltzes both wonderful and weird. With dance historian Darren Royston...

Breaking Free - the minds that changed music. Tom Service explores how to listen to the Second Viennese School - music that exploded with expressive feeling in the early years of the 20th century, and then gradually rebuilt harmony into a new system, using the 12-note series. He explains how the music developed from Arnold Schoenberg's early expressionist ventures into atonality, to the cool jewel...

Tom explores how Schoenberg hears the music that he is going to write. 'I hear the music which I am going to write. I hear the music and I have acquired a thing which every composer has to acquire in time. I have acquired the capacity of finding out what composes this music which I hear in my mind, in my imagination. And it's a kind of analysis of course but it's possible to mechanically express,...

We hear Schoenberg on the reception of his music in America, Europe. 'When in 1933 I came to America I was a very renowned composer, even so that Mr. Goebbels himself in his "Der Angriff" reprimanded me for leaving Germany. Thanks to the attitude of most American conductors and under the leadership of Toscanini, Koussevitzky, and of Walter, suppression of my works soon began with the effect that t...

Tom looks at Schoenberg’s plea to musicians to play the correct notes in his String Trio, and why it matters so much to his serial music... 'A true musician, reading the score during the performance of one of my later works, went to the artists' room and showed the players many errors, faults, and other shortcomings he had observed in their rendition. He was given the very strange answer: "Maybe,...

Tom looks at Schoenberg’s love of Gershwin, who was also his tennis partner in Hollywood. 'George Gershwin was one of these rare kind of musicians to whom music is not a matter of more or less ability. Music, to him, was the air he breathed, the food which nourished him, the drink that refreshed him. Music was what made him feel and music was the feeling he expressed. Directness of this kind is gi...