The Radio 3 Documentary

"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 Broadcasting Company, called Soundscapes of Canada, consisting of ten hours of soundscape montage, field recordings and lessons in listening. From Church bells, to birdsong, to car horns and an entire episode made up of people across Canada giving the sound recordist directions: this was 'slow radio' years ahead of its time.

The series was recorded and produced by The World Soundscape Project, a group Schafer set up to raise the importance of the soundscape in what he saw as a world of increasing noise, which had reached "an apex of vulgarity". The group went on to publish Soundscape: The Tuning of the World - a vast anthology documenting just about every kind of sound you could imagine - natural, human-made and technological.

R Murray Schafer was many things – Canada’s preeminent experimental composer of the 20th Century, an artist, novelist, educator, musicologist, historian, and environmental activist. Schafer was also a romantic, with a strong sense of Canadian identity, who preferred rural life with an uncluttered sense of place. Critics, and he had many, accused him of being abrasive, a luddite, and prone to cultural appropriation.

Above all though, Murray was a passionate listener, constantly pushing his message of an "ecologically balanced soundscape" by asking "which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply?" In this sound-rich documentary (best enjoyed with headphones) John Drever, Professor of Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art at Goldsmiths, University of London explores Schafer’s life and legacy, as the soundscape now has an ISO framework for consideration in urban design and planning in the UK and beyond.

Contributors: Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, Ellen Waterman, Claude Schryer, Lisa Lavia, Tin Oberman, Andrew Mitchell and Francesco Aletta. Soundscapes of Canada and Vancouver Soundscape material used with kind permission of the World Soundscape Project, Sonic Research Lab, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Use of 'Crescendo' courtesy of Martyn Ware

Presented by John Drever Produced by Rami Tzabar A TellTale Industries production for BBC Radio 3

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, to his years travelling about the Kent countryside, picnicking, exploring churches and observing rural life with an artist's eye. And a queer eye. His subtle and gently subversive descriptions of same-sex desire and sexual identity has thrilled and challenged his readers for eighty years.

His preoccupations include art and beauty as well as pain and death. His great ability as a writer is to draw characters - often based entirely on himself and those closest to him - with tiny details which spring to life on the page. These can be very funny, cruel, poignant or erotic. He wrote novels, stories and journals as well as working with art and poetry. Regan Hutchins has always been a fan of Denton's writing and he travels to the village of Hadlow in Kent, where Denton lived during the Second World War. There he meets Denton's would-be neighbours who show him the landscape that inspired the writer. Biographers, academics, film-makers and writers help to build a picture of a writer who has, for too long, been out of sight.

Producer Regan Hutchins Reader Rob Vesty With thanks to the Hadlow Historical Society. Sound supervision by Tinpot Productions.

A New Normal Culture production for BBC Radio 3

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 disappeared from memory, leaving behind only one recording, made in 1923. Drawing on research by the veteran musician and producer Henry Sapoznik, Maria Margaronis unpacks the mystery of LaRue Jones' career. What drew him to this music? What does his life tell us about race, faith and identity in America a hundred years ago? And why was he so quickly and utterly forgotten?

LaRue Jones' story is entwined with the history of Newark, New Jersey, where he spent most of his life. Once known as the City of Opportunity, old Newark drew migrants from Europe and the American South in flight from persecution and searching for a new life. Blacks and Jews lived side by side in the city's poorer districts, absorbing each other's culture and musical traditions.

But by mid-century, Newark's Jews were moving out in search of the suburban dream. Black people, hemmed in by racism and housing segregation, were left behind in an increasingly impoverished city. Thirteen years after LaRue Jones' death, the Newark riots, or rebellion, sealed the division of the two communities. LaRue Jones, like the world that made him, was consigned to oblivion--until zealous research by Henry Sapoznik tracked down that one recording and LaRue Jones' unmarked grave, and raised the curtain on the Black Cantor once more.

Presenter: Maria Margaronis Producer: David Goren

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 defacement to some, but to Shakespeare scholar Islam Issa and members of the city's 'Everything to Everybody' project, it shows a profound commitment. In this feature Islam draws together the passion and belief of George Dawson and his fellow city fathers - Birmingham became a city in 1889 - with the voices and opinions of Birmingham today as expressed by people like the internationally acclaimed street artist Mohammed Ali. He's produced two school murals that have the Folio at the heart of the city's sense of itself. In the afterglow of the Commonwealth Games and the realisation that Birmingham's strength lies in its multi-cultural population, Islam points out that rather than some distant evidence of an elite and unfamiliar past, the time has come for the Folio to be celebrated from Sparkbrook to the Bullring and beyond.

Producer: Tom Alban

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. There are no more nations in Europe, only parties; and it is marvellous to see how these parties, for all their varying colouration recognize one another and how they understand one another, despite many differences in language."

This move past national differences would be a force for unalloyed good because, if Europeans could see themselves as a unified "civilisation" then their example would be a force that "could" lead to the liberation of the world from prejudice.

Well, he was a child of the romantic age, you can forgive his enthusiastic language but his vision anticipates the principles that created and still guide the EU.

The writer produced astounding amounts of work: poetry, verse dramas, and essays and letters while conducting love affairs and just generally being in the public eye.

His poetry became the lyrical basis for lieder by Schubert, Schumann and many others. He had huge appeal in the middle of the 19th century. George Eliot wrote four monographs about him including one on his wit - bitterly ironic ,very Jewish.

Today he is remembered in the English speaking world for this quote, "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too." When the Nazis held their book burnings outside the Berlin Opera House, Heine's were among those immolated. And when the Nazis initiated the war that would burn down a significant portion of the Europe Heine dreamed of, the connection to much of 19th century German culture was cut including the life and work of Heinrich Heine.

Michael Goldfarb tells the story of Heine's life and the Europe in which he lived through interviews and using the musical settings of his poetry in lieder, readings from his poetry and plays, and George Eliot's perceptive comments.

Heine's was a tremendous life - he endured censorship and was harassed by the police spies of the Federated German speaking nations. He lived as a celebrity - albeit an impecunious one - despite the fact his uncle was one of the German-speaking world's richest men. All the drama created a truly contemporary, 21st century sensibility

Producer: Julia Hayball Readers: Jonathan Keeble, Robbie Stevens, Clare Corbett and Pavel Douglas Sound design: Chris Maclean

A Certain Height production for BBC Radio 3

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, walked up mountains to record lumberjacks and traditional Appalachian singers and poled three miles downriver after dark on a makeshift raft to find a famed fiddler in his goldmine in California.

Listening to her recordings is like travelling back in time; they capture the voices of so many different nationalities that emigrated to the US, but she also made recordings on the Aran Islands in Ireland. During her lifetime Cowell was marginalised like so many women collectors of that period, but in this celebration of her recordings and observations, Giddens finally gives her work the attention it deserves.

With indebted thanks to the American Folklife Center archive in the Library of Congress who hold the collection of Sidney Robertson Cowell's recordings and to the following contributors who have done so much to bring her work to light:

Cathy Hiebert Kerst, folklorist and archivist who catalogued Sidney's recordings of the WPA California Folk Project.

Sheryl Kaskowitz, scholar of American music and author of forthcoming book: The Music Unit: FDR's Hidden New Deal Program that Tried to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time.

Jim P Leary, a folklorist and scholar of Scandinavian studies, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of Folksongs of Another America.

Dr. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile writer, researcher and musician (she plays fiddle with Rhiannon at the end of the programme) who has written about the collecting work of Sidney Robertson Cowell on the Aran Islands in the 1950s.

Robert Cochrane, Professor of English and folklore specialist at the University of Arkansas.

Peggy Seeger, folksinger.

California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell: https://www.loc.gov/collections/sidney-robertson-cowell-northern-california-folk-music/about-this-collection/

Producer: Clare Walker

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 the fascinating life and work of a forgotten female sonneteer.

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 song. Walking around Naples, she hears singing in the least expected places: in the street, on the seafront, protesters at a demonstration singing rather than shouting their slogans. Song has permeated the culture of Naples for centuries. In the sixteenth century, when Neapolitans felt oppressed by their Spanish king, they created the villanella style of song as a form of protest. Its San Carlo opera theatre is the oldest in the world that's still in operation. Its brilliant nineteenth century impresario Domenico Barbaja attracted the likes of composers Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini to Naples. Poets – from the amateur to the famous – wrote poems that composers set to music, creating much-loved songs like O Sole Mio. Some were advertising jingles, like Funiculi Funicula which was written to promote the new funicular railway that ran up the slope of Vesuvius. Local-born baritone Ernesto Petti, a rising international opera star, says that “Neapolitan songs should be sung with complete abandonment. You put your whole heart in it." That's what the audience end up doing at a "Napulitanata" performance, taking over the singing of “O Sole Mio” from the artists. They know it all by heart.

Presenter: Joanna Robertson Producer: Arlene Gregorius Sound engineer: James Beard Production coordinator: Iona Hammond Editor: Penny Murphy Recording of 'Santa Lucia Luntana' performed by Teresa Iervolino courtesy of Fondazione Pieta dei Turchini in Naples

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 Staffordshire hills, through the Staffordshire Hoard, the Birmingham Pieces from the Knights Templar, the establishment and development of Birmingham as a great metalworking centre becoming the Toyshop of the World, the development of steam power by Matthew Boulton, being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the City of a Thousand Trades, all the way to the birth of Heavy Metal Music.

Metal City is a co-commission between BBC Radio 3 and The Space with funding from Arts Council England. It’s a collaboration with Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. And special thanks to Birmingham City University’s School of Jewellery for metal facilities.

Producer Melvin Rickarby, grandson of a metal worker and whose dad moved from the metal factory to the steel strings of the bass guitar. Producer Rosie Boulton, great great granddaughter of a brass maker.

A Must Try Softer Production

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 managed to hold on to aspects of the culture that formed them - and to pass them on through generations of their enslaved descendants.

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite is fascinated with his Barbadian heritage and ancestry. It's a complicated story; he's descended from both black enslaved people and their enslaving white plantation owners. In this programme Peter travels to Barbados to discover the music made by enslaved people - the cultural glue that bound them to Africa - and the attempts made by the British enslavers to deny, deride or override this music. From plantation dances to Christian hymns and the discovery of some remarkable pro-enslavement propaganda songs, Peter talks to Barbadian historians and musicians to build up a picture of what the enslaved people's musical lives might have been.

Visiting significant sites on the island, catching up with relatives, and drawing on his own significant research, Peter also uncovers the story of his great, great, great, great grandparents Addo and Margaret, both of whom began their lives in Barbados enslaved but who were eventually freed by the white Brathwaites who 'owned' them. Their lives offer a window into the layered social hierarchies that developed on the island in the early years of the 19th Century, as the rising abolitionist movement in Britain gave birth to a new chapter in Barbados's complicated history.

Recorded on location on the beautiful island of Barbados, this programme examines the cultural and social legacy of enslavement, which continues to shape the nation of Barbados, and the identity of its people, today.

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 collection of Yiddish music created during the 1940s that documented their numerous traumas: dangerous train journeys, often in cattle cars; prison sentences, disease, and deep anxieties about family members left behind in Europe. During World War II, these songs were collected by amateur and professional poets, and then organised by the Ukrainian folklorist Moisei Beregovsky. However, the archive was confiscated by the KGB soon after the end of the war. The songs were never performed since, in public or in private.

Singer Alice Zawadzki, whose own family found themselves on a similar journey to Central Asia, and historian Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto), who led the project to bring these songs back to life, travel to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to retrace the journeys of those Jewish refugees who became music composers. From Tashkent and Samarkand to Bukhara and Almaty, they found abandoned factories where refugees worked, saw huts where they slept, met with the descendants of families who welcomed them and children of those survivors themselves who stayed in Central Asia. For the first time in 80 years, the songs created by Jewish refugees during the war were performed in these lands, by local musicians and composers, by children of refugees themselves, and by Alice Zawadzki.

Producer: Michael Rossi.

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 at Radio France, Nicolas Bomsel, and suggested a project that most musicians would consider absurd: recording all 555 keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti.

By 1989, Ross was dead, aged just 38. Did he know he was ill when he pitched the project? Was it a test of human endurance against the odds? Did he succeed? And who was Scott Ross, a man who has been called ‘early music’s bad boy’ and ‘the John McEnroe of the harpsichord’? Also, how is it that a musician who’s widely considered to be the best harpsichord player of his generation remains little known in the UK?

These are questions posed by music journalist Phil Hebblethwaite in this Sunday Feature. To find answers, Hebblethwaite travels to France (Montpellier, Assas and Paris), speaking to those who knew and loved Ross, and tracks down two former students of Ross’s from his decade in Canada. A portrait of a complex, contradictory musician emerges – a man with a tragic early life who, Hebblethwaite finds, seems to slip further away the better he gets to know him.

With contributions from Nicolas Bomsel, Michel Proulx, Marie-Claire Demangel, Henri Prunières, Jocelyne Chaptal, Catherine Perrin, Mario Raskin, and Didier Lestrade.

Written and presented by Phil Hebblethwaite Produced by Tom Woolfenden A Loftus Media production

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 notorious amateur soprano and litigant, Georgina Weldon.

Within its walls lies a story of personal passion and chaos colliding with extraordinary creativity. Until it was destroyed in 1901.

With the staircase creaking after dark and smog pouring in through every chink and keyhole, Ben Gernon guides us through this remarkable house, revealing what the walls hold and uncovering its unusual tenants.

Alex Jennings leads a cast in this docudrama as we join the Dickens theatre company at rehearsals for their festive production of Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep. We eavesdrop on Mr and Mrs Weldon’s crumbling marriage; witness Charles Gounod furiously composing in the upstairs bedroom with welcome interruptions from Georgina Weldon; and Catherine Dickens shares her story from the other side of that wall.

From extra-marital affairs, screaming street children, kidnap attempts and madness to amateur dramatics and shattered dreams, this is the story of one of Victorian England’s most famous houses.

Joining Ben around the house are Lucinda Hawksley, Professor Joanne Begiato and conductor Charles Peebles.

Cast Alex Jennings as Charles Dickens Katherine Kingsley as Georgina Weldon Ben Onwukwe as Frank Stone and Charles Gounod Ben Crowe as Wilkie Collins and William ‘Harry’ Weldon Jane Whittenshaw as Mary and Catherine Dickens

With thanks to Year 6 students at St Peter's Church of England (Aided) Primary School, Henfield, and Year 1 students at Underwood Church of England Primary School, Nottinghamshire, for ensemble roles.

Presented by Ben Gernon Produced by Alexandra Quinn Sound Design by Jon Calver Drama scenes written by Rob Valentine Drama scenes directed by Cherry Cookson A Loftus Media and Wireless Theatre Production for BBC Radio 3

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 sister, Elena Yevtushenko and the music critic Iosif Raiskin.

One March day in 1962, the young Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko got an unexpected phone call. Dmitri Shostakovich was on the line asking if he had permission to set one of his verses to music. The poem, Babi Yar, denounces the massacre of 34,000 Jews in a ravine near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. It condemned not only Nazi atrocities, but also the Soviet Union’s state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. Officials responded by launching a vicious campaign against the poet and banning readings or new publications of his work.

So, Yevtushenko was delighted by the famous composer’s moral and artistic support. According to his sister Elena, he felt the music had “made the poem ten times stronger”. But, as Maxim Shostakovich explains, the Soviet authorities tried to prevent the symphony from ever reaching an audience. The composer’s son recalls how his father was consumed with anxiety ahead of the premiere, still haunted by his narrow escape, decades earlier, from Stalin’s secret police.

Pauline Fairclough, author of a recent Shostakovich biography, says that, despite all the pressures, the composer never stopped experimenting with musical forms. Concert pianist Benjamin Goodman describes Shostakovich’s ‘word painting’ technique and the ways in which he conveys Yevtushenko’s verse in music to create a sombre, chilling, but ultimately consoling choral symphony. At the Babyn Yar Memorial site in Kyiv, Lucy is shown fragments of a Russian rocket which hit a nearby apartment building last spring. In the midst of a new, 21st-century war, she reflects on the nature of artistic and political courage and parallels between the Khrushchev era and Russia under Putin today.

Producer Tatyana Movshevich

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 Bunting's poetic masterpiece is largely set. Bunting called it his ‘acknowledged land’, an area stretching from Scotland to the Humber, which was once the ancient kingdom of Northumbria. A moment in time during the Dark Ages which saw a flourishing of Northumbrian art and culture, which produced the Lindisfarne Gospels, and was populated by larger than life historical figures like Eric Bloodaxe and St Cuthbert.

It’s a complex poem, which is not in the least parochial, taking in the poets travels around the world and his wide learning, and it has much in common with the modernist poetry of Eliot's Waste Land and Pounds Cantos.

Rory examines the many contradictions in Bunting's life, the conscientious objector who later served in the RAF, the socialist who had fascist friends, and the principled public man who led an unexamined private life.

But Rory leaves his journey with an acknowledgement of Bunting's exceptional poetic skill and the way in which his life weaves into the life of northern England with all its complexity and fierce rooted national pride.

Produced by Andrew Carter at BBC Radio Cumbria

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 Modest.

A school friend came to the rescue. The poet, Aleksey Apukhtin, suggested a visit to the monastery island of Valaam in Lake Ladoga near St Petersburg for some fresh ideas. Tchaikovsky refused but was lured on board a ship by the promise of delicious jam from the buffet. The trip inspired the symphony’s second movement ‘Gloomy Land, Misty Land’ with its haunting oboe that seems to echo over the Ladoga waters like a hymn.

Founded in the 14th century, Valaam was a northern outpost of the Eastern Orthodox Church against pagans. Tchaikovsky was deeply entranced by its ancient monastery’s unique a cappella style of singing called Znamenny Chant. Throughout his life he was at once immensely drawn to church services and at the same time tormented by contradictions in his faith. His search for inner peace is reflected in his Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and the All-Night Vigil.

This Sunday Feature interweaves Tchaikovsky’s music with Apukhtin’s poem, A Year in a Monastery as well as the composer's letters. Just like Tchaikovsky, Lucy Ash ends up staying on Valaam for longer than expected due to a ferocious autumn storm on Europe’s biggest lake. There she meets Brother Maxim, a young monk and a former import trader, and Father David, the head of a remote skete, or settlement of Orthodox monks, who happens to be a professionally trained jazz musician.

Producer Tatyana Movshevich

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 genius.

But LICHT wasn't so warmly received.

In LICHT Stockhausen wrote an opera cycle for the new millennium, bewildering in scale, and frequently baffling for audiences, but containing music as challenging as anything that he'd written.

The seven operas, each named after a day of the week, total more than 28 hours. It took Stockhausen 26 years to compose them, and amazingly its musical architecture derives from a three minute 'Super-formula' inspired on a trip to Japan.

Robert Worby speaks with Stockhausen’s family, life partners, critics, scholars and interpreters, who candidly put this extraordinary achievement in the context of his life and work.

Producer Andrew Carter - A Radio Cumbria Production for BBC Radio 3

Photo - Rolando Paolo Guerzoni - Stockhausen May 2003 Teatro Comunale di Modena.

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 Touré on a boat on the Niger and wins a bottle of BBQ sauce at Fred’s Lounge in Louisiana whilst enjoying some live cajun music from the Mamou Cajun Band. We witness the breakneck speed of Scottish accordionist Phil Cunningham and banjo player Gary Petersen in an impromptu session in a pub in Shetland and we take a look at the iconic Cuban song Guantanamera, with versions by Cuarteto Iglesias on a roof top in Cuba and Celina Gonzales in Andy’s Crouch End kitchen. Also from the kitchen we have vintage sessions from Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore and English psychedelicists, Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians. Plus Andy dusts off the Walkman Pro to records a brand new session with folk singer-songwriter and guitarist Steve Tilston.

Producer: Martin Webb

In this episode, Andy meets Kenyan harpist Ayub Ogada on a beach in Cornwall, the Antioch Gospel group in a car park in New Orleans, Cuarteto Iglesias on a roof top in Cuba and a young Ballake Sissoko next to the railway tracks in Bamako, Mali. On his very first day recording with his Walkman Pro, Andy visits the Edale Bluegrass Festival then travels to Leeds to record a rare performance from guitarist Mark Knopfler in a pub with his early group The Duolian String Pickers. Back in Andy’s kitchen Louisiana comes to Crouch End with sessions from blues man Lazy Lester and Cajun stars DL Menard, Eddie LeJeune and Ken Smith. Plus we pay another visit to Wilkinson's HiFi in Nelson to find out just why the compact cassette format is so enduring and well loved.

Seren Griffiths uses a walk along a sandstone ridge in Northern Cheshire to explore the way a landscape can hold multiple histories, and in doing so make it easier for us to contemplate distant futures. The landscape in question is bordered on the north by the M56 motorway. Commuters making their way into Manchester see it to their right for all of about a minute. But up on the ridge you can see that it stretches South towards Whitchurch in Shropshire. Seren starts her journey in a quarry used variously by the Romans, Iron Age settlers and latterly the victorians. She makes her way up to one of the string of Hill top forts that can be found along the sandstone escarpment, and then moves along to an old Cold War listening station, and not far away, the Frodsham Anti Aircraft Operations Room. And all the while the vista shows the canal work of the industrial revolution, the chemical plants of the 20th century and the wind turbines of the last decade. The ancient landscape hums with history and archaeology brings them into focus in the present. For Seren, and many before her, this is a magical, mysterious place which draws out timelines like a strand, with artefacts from the past projecting forwards, enduring into the present.

Producer: Tom Alban

New Generation Thinker Dr Islam Issa has a strong cultural attachment to the Balcony. In his native Egypt, the place where architectural historians believe the balcony was first developed, the balcony is a pivotal part of family homes, a place that blurs the line between private and public living. He recalls it being a place that linked communities and allowed an external life without the risks of life in the open streets.

When he saw Italians singing from their balconies during the early weeks of the COVID pandemic he was reminded that they have many other roles in political, cultural and literary settings. With the help of Egyptian film maker and photographer Alia Aidel and Shakespeare scholar Reverend Paul Edmondson, Islam explores the use of Balconies from Romeo and Juliet to Buckingham Palace and reflects on his own upbringing in which he learned to look up and in to the family balcony and yet as he matured, realised he thought of it principally as a place to look out and down.

Producer: Tom Alban

When he was a boy and returned to the family home from primary school in the afternoon, Carlo Gébler would often hear the sound of typing coming from the shed at the foot of the garden. This was where his mother, the writer Edna O’Brien, sometimes went to write her novels.

Later, when he lay in bed at night, Carlo would again hear the sound of typing. This time it would be coming from the downstairs front room where his father, Ernest Gébler, wrote plays for television.

Now 66 and an acclaimed author himself, Carlo wants to know why the children of writers often follow their parent’s footsteps into literature. Exploring the dynamics of literary lineage and his own journey into writing, Carlo asks if it is simply an iron law that the apple rarely falls far from the tree - or if the truth is something far more complex.

Producer: Conor Garrett

An exploration of Beethoven’s music through the body that gave him so much trouble.

Why does the image of the forlorn and abandoned poet Thomas Chatterton haunt us today?

Hannah French explores a hidden disability for many musicians: pain.

It's understandable that, with the onset of a global pandemic, commentators have looked to the past for comparisons. But Dr Seb Falk is concerned that with the easy headlines about the mortality rate or the economic damage, or even the positive transformations inspired by plagues of the past and particularly in his field, the Black Death of the medieval period, more subtle comparisons emerging from exciting new Plague research are being overlooked. He hears from Dr Monica Green, a leading authority on the true origins and journey of the Black Death and finds, in her use of palaeogenetic research, refinements about the plague and its impact on those who lived with it. And he talks to Dr Zoë Fritz, consultant physician and Wellcome Fellow in Society and Ethics at the University of Cambridge, about the human responses beyond the science today that echo the experiences of our ancestors centuries ago. Rather than mortality rates and economic trauma, the more profound links might be the twin challenges of uncertainty and impotence and the human desire to overcome or deny both. Producer: Tom Alban

John Cage is arguably the most important composer of the 20th century, even though he's perhaps famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, for writing a piece of music that is 4'33" of silence.

Famous because it made his reputation - after all composers write music not silence – and infamous because not unsurprisingly, it's outraged, perplexed and fascinated audiences since its premiere in 1952.

Cage though was deadly serious about his silent piece, and Robert Worby goes on an odyssey to find out what Cage thought silence was, and why silence was central to his life and work.

Robert goes to the quietest place in the UK - so quiet you can't hear a pin drop - to experience what John Cage did, when he entered an anechoic chamber in the 50s in search of silence.

But it's not as straightforward as you might think, as Robert discovers Cage didn't find the silence he was seeking, and instead found something even more surprising.

The key to understanding 4’33”, and Cage’s fascination with silence, is his interest in the discipline of Zen Buddhism, which unlocked a whole new world of hearing sound that he charted through chance operations.

It led to a meeting of like minds when Cage met Yoko Ono in New York who instantly saw the Zen influence on his work. In 1962 Ono and her husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, invited Cage to visit Japan - his Zen spiritual homeland - a trip that later became known as the ‘Cage Shock’. It was a turning point in his career whose ground breaking performances sealed his reputation as the most controversial and experimental composer in the world.

The programme features two UK premieres on Radio 3, an interview Robert recorded with John Cage when he met the composer in NYC in the 80s after finding his number in the phone book, and Cage reading his Lecture on Nothing, his enigmatic musing on silence.

Produced by Andrew Carter - A BBC Radio Cumbria Production.

Photograph of D.T.Suzuki and John Cage meeting in Japan 1962, courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson on the radical 20th century publisher C.W.Daniel.

Marie-Louise Muir traces her childhood idol Maureen O’Hara’s journey from Dublin's suburbs to star of the Golden Age.

We are used to getting a worldview from the west, but what did the east make of us? Jerry Brotton heads to Istanbul on the trail of one the world's great travellers, Evliya Celebi

David Bramwell with actors whose lives were transformed by director Ken Campbell.

At the height of his fame as a jazz composer and band leader in the late 1930s, Raymond Scott was billed as ‘America’s Foremost Composer of Modern Music’. Jazz legend Art Blakey confessed that his music ‘scared the hell out of me’. Electrical engineer, inventor, composer and musician Raymond Scott became adept at creating music that demonstrated a unique commercial appeal. He wrote for Broadway and Hollywood, he appeared weekly on national radio, his ‘novelty jazz’ tunes were licensed to Warner Bros for use in their Looney Tunes cartoons. The financial success this brought enabled Scott in the 1950s to build one of the first commercial electronic music studios in America, stocked with musical devices he himself had invented, designed and built - the Clavivox, the Circle Machine, the highly complex and ambitious Electronium, to name just a few.

Scott focused on composing and recording jingles, spots and commercials for radio and TV, grabbing Americans “by the ears”, as he described it. His soundtracks for the likes of IBM provided the wider listening public with some of their first encounters with electronic music, conjuring up visions of a future that chimed with the times. General Motors commissioned him to provide the soundtrack to their ‘Futura’ pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair; and the founder of Tamla Motown Records, Berry Gordy, later brought Scott out to California to help create the label's pop hits of the future.

Scott was forever experimenting, intent on pushing his instruments and the studio he had built as far as they would go. But too exacting to produce anything quickly, too secretive to share his inventions with others, Scott was eventually overtaken by the designers of keyboard-based synthesizers and mass-produced electric instruments who quickly exploited the territory he had so creatively mapped out for himself.

In 'Rewiring Raymond Scott' the writer Ken Hollings offers a personal reassessment of Scott's career and legacy. Ken talks to family members, archivists, music historians and producers, telling the story of how this brilliant eccentric, all but forgotten at the time of his death in 1994, changed the sonic landscape of the twentieth century.

With thanks to the Marr Sound Archives, UMKC.

Presented by Ken Hollings Produced by Dan Shepherd

A Far Shoreline Production for BBC Radio 3

Daisy Black, Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, investigates the camp villain in history.

The unknown tale of cold war communist Poland’s unlikely love affair with electronic music. Robert Worby finds out Warsaw was a beacon of musical freedom behind the iron curtain. It was here that the remarkable Polish Radio Experimental Studio was established in 1957, and this was the first electronic music studio in the Eastern Bloc and the fourth in Europe. This futuristic facility was at the cutting edge of modern music, and was a serious rival for existing studios in Paris, Milan, and Cologne in the West. But at a time when contemporary music was viewed with deep suspicion in the satellite states of the Soviet Union, and Warsaw itself had been destroyed during WWII, a shiny new electronic music studio hardly looked like a priority. But when Stalin’s murderous legacy was condemned by the new Soviet leadership in 1956, a loosening of the Eastern European communist stranglehold began. Uniquely in Poland the church and intellectuals struck an unparalleled bargain with the Polish authorities, allowing each to rub along with the other, as long as they agreed to keep their nose out of one another’s business. This suited the Communist People’s Polish Republic who were keen to distance themselves from Moscow, and supporting the Polish Radio Experimental Studio helped promote a positive image of what appeared to be a progressive society, not only to itself, but to the world. Now a new generation of Poles have re-discovered the rich musical archive of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, that created the sounds of the future, not in spite of, but because of the complex postwar history of the People’s Polish Republic. A BBC Radio Cumbria Production for BBC Radio 3. Presented by Robert Worby and produced by Andrew Carter. Photo of Eugeniusz Rudnik ©Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw https://culture.pl/en/gallery/the-polish-radio-experimental-studio-image-gallery 15 Corners of the World https://ninateka.pl/film/15-stron-swiata-zuzanna-solakiewicz

Carlo Gebler on the role of art in remembrance and reconciliation in Northern Ireland

As East Germany crumbled in 1989, actors were centre stage. Andrew Dickson discovers how had theatre had survived under communist rule, with its censors and secret police spies. Focusing in particular on the playwright Heiner Mueller he explores the brilliant creativity and unique relationship with audiences that made theatre so important. But there were compromises and setbacks too. And after the end of communism actors and writers struggled for relevance - though Mueller's work on global themes is enjoying a revival today.

Presenter: Andrew Dickson Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Penny Murphy

Andrew Hussey journeys through Andalusia searching for the legacy of Muslim Spain

Actor Lily Cole plays Elizabeth Siddall who climbs out of her grave to tell her story.

Jazz and communist East Germany seem unlikely bedfellows. Yet in 1965 Louis Armstrong became the first American entertainer to play jazz there at the height of the Cold War. East Germans celebrated Armstrong, and his visit became a propaganda victory for East Germany, helping it to boost its reputation in the wake of its oppressive government building the Berlin Wall in 1961. On his brief and only tour through East Germany Armstrong played to packed houses. His popularity surprised the authorities very much considering not one record of him was available before 1965 and your passion for the music could land you in prison. Kevin Le Gendre peeks through the former Iron Curtain to discover the dangers jazz lovers faced to pave the way for these legendary concerts to happen while tracing the tour. He speaks to jazz journalist Karlheinz Drechsel who first risked his career for jazz but then, amazingly, had the privilege to accompany Louis Armstrong on the tour and announce his concerts. He tells Kevin what it was like meeting Louis Armstrong and seeing beyond the smile and laughter that Louis Armstrong was famous for. Armstrong not only had to navigate political sensitivities on the Cold War front between East and West, but also on the home front in the US, when questioned about the Civil Rights Movement, which was at its peak. The tour left a big impression on both sides. Armstrong was very taken by the enthusiastic welcome he received and East Germany, far from the authorities’ intentions, developed a Free Jazz scene that became an unexpected export hit.

Speakers include the journalists Karlheinz Drechsel, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos and Leslie Collitt; the jazz fan Volker Stiehler; the authors Ricky Riccardi and Stephan Schulz; pianist Ulrich Gumpert; and Roland Trisch, who worked at East Germany’s Artists Agency, which enabled Louis Armstrong’s tour. Archive material of the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama on 7 March 1965 is courtesy of the Robert H Jackson Center.

Producer: Sabine Schereck

Dafydd Mills Daniel investigates Isaac Newton's more obscure studies in Alchemy.

Hetta Howes sets off to find the unicorn of myth in 21st century Britain.

Golding's classic novel was saved from being rejected by Faber by the luckiest chance.

300 years since Robinson Crusoe was published, Emma Smith traces it across the centuries

Matthew Sweet unearths the film-maker Alexander Korda's wartime role as a British agent.

Wild swimming enthusiast Alice Roberts examines the legacy of Waterlog by Roger Deakin.

Drawing on the testimony of many who knew him, Colm Toibin presents an intimate portrait of the brilliant, playful, Pulitzer-winning American poet John Ashbery, who died in 2017.

Produced in Cardiff by Steven Rajam and Lyndon Jones

It’s been described as one of the most remarkable collections of minds on the planet. It has a brilliant international faculty, but no students. Its researchers have made some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century, but it has never had a laboratory.

Sally Marlow joins scholars for the start of a new term at The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton New Jersey, conceived as a paradise for curiosity-driven research in mathematics, natural sciences, social science and history.

The Institute has more than once been called an Intellectual Hotel, and that certainly captures its leisurely pace, but appearances can be deceptive. Scholars here have an extraordinary ability to work on what everyone else is looking at, but to see something differently. Since its founding in 1930, it’s been home to a remarkable number of world-class thinkers, the most famous of whom was Albert Einstein who exerted a gravitational pull on attracting many scientists of promise to the Institute.

From John von Neumann, widely credited with inventing the programmable computer, to J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead architect of the atomic bomb, to the surprise arrival of poet and playwright T.S. Eliot - the Institute’s first Artist in Residence, Sally Marlow gets beneath the skin of some of its rich history and its extraordinary ethos, wondering how the weight of the past plays out on those bright minds there today.

As a scholar herself at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, Sally knows that space and time to think is becoming increasingly challenged, So what happens when you turn thinkers loose from the constraints of a traditional academic institution?

And amidst the Institute’s hotbed of string theorists, she seeks answers to Einstein’s biggest, most tantalising question of all - whether there's a grand, all-embracing theory, a unified theory of everything, that will complete our understanding of the laws of the universe.

Featuring interviews with Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director of the IAS, Myles Jackson, Professor of History of Science, Joan Scott Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science, particle physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, Freeman Dyson, retired theoretical physicist , historian George Dyson , Christina Sormani, Professor of Maths at City University New York, archivist Casey Westerman and composer and former artist in residence Derek Bermel.

Image courtesy of Dan King, Institute for Advanced Study

Dr Seán Williams takes a first class trip through the enduring contradictions of luxury.

Musician and journalist Katherine Whatley explores the rich and surprising history of jazz in Japan. Surprising because the chaotic individualism of this American art form appears at first to go against the very grain of Japan’s communitarian sprit. More surprising still that, having been banned as ‘enemy music’ during the second world war, jazz music was wholeheartedly embraced in Japan during the immediate post war period and the US-led allied occupation. In fact the market for jazz within Japan was once so great that the country has variously been credited with having the highest proportion of jazz fans in the world, and with almost single handedly propping up the jazz record industry.

But the story of jazz in Japan goes deeper than the enthusiastic collecting (and extensive reissuing) of American jazz records. As an American growing up in Tokyo, a student of traditional Japanese music, and a huge jazz fan herself, it’s a subject that’s close to presenter Katherine Whatley’s heart. She looks at the unique contribution that Japanese musicians have made to the jazz scene, and finds that jazz has become an inextricable part of Japanese culture.

Produced by Laura Yogasundram.

A succulent & mouth watering portrait of one of the least talked about organs of the body.

Sarah Dillon explores the stories behind how great works of literature were written.

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough tells the magical story of the tree that sits at the heart of Christmas day - the pine tree. A tale of power, biological wonder and baubles.

'Fire!!' was a short-lived literary magazine from the Harlem Renaissance published in 1926, created by and for the young black artists of the movement. Featuring poetry, prose, drama and artwork from some of the biggest names of the Harlem Renaissance including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman and Aaron Douglas, the magazine was an explosive attempt to burn down the traditional western canon and replace it with a series of brutally honest and controversial depictions of African American life.

Fire!! lasted for just one issue, yet despite its very brief existence, the magazine is now considered to be an incredibly important document of the Harlem Renaissance, and an early example of an artistic youth rebellion in the African American printed press.

In this Sunday Feature, Writer, journalist and broadcaster Afua Hirsch travels to Harlem to find out all about this long-lost piece of African American history. Setting up in a house previously occupied by celebrated Harlem poet and novelist Langston Hughes, Afua discusses the history and legacy of Fire!! magazine with writer and professor Martha Nadell, and Professor Karla Holloway, whose forthcoming book 'A Death in Harlem' is set during the Renaissance.

Along the way we learn about the magazine's rapid rise and fall, and hear how the reactions to it in 1926 sum up the fascinating artistic conflicts at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance - conflicts that are still extremely relevant today - while young Harlem writers, artists and actors read extracts from Fire!! on the streets of Harlem where the magazine was born.

Producer: Nick Taylor.

Extracts from Fire!! read by: Kelechi Ezie Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks Elan Cadiz Brian Francis

Amazing travels of the first Englishman in India & a hunt for a lost poetic masterpiece.

Two features by R3 New Generation Thinkers. Dr Simon Beard and Dr Islam Issa

Two Features by R3 New Generation Thinkers Hetta Howes and Eleanor Lybeck.

Author Carlo Gebler has spent nearly three decades working in the Northern Ireland prison system as a teacher of creative writing. He's been in all the prisons there - including the notorious Maze/Long Kesh H-Blocks - and has done everything from basic literacy to high end literature; letters to victims to Open University essays. As many of the prisoners Carlo has worked with in their cells would testify, he's spent a long time inside.

Now Carlo wants to know if prison arts and education made any difference to the lives of those he taught. He meets the inmates attending classes in the education and skills section of HMP Magilligan on Northern Ireland's north coast. He visits his former boss who each day would tell him his job was not to teach, but to be a human being. He catches up with some of the former prisoners he worked with over many years and finds out what they're doing now.

Looking back at the protocols and practices which characterised his prison work, Carlo asks about the true potential of arts and education when it comes to punishment and rehabilitation.

Producer: Conor Garrett for BBC Northern Ireland

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough enters the forests of our imagination, looking for stories. Alternative realities, holy quests and fairytales hidden among the glories of the Autumn forest.

Despite our evolution in the African rainforests, Eleanor wonders whether it is tales from the frozen North that have given us the most potent forests of the imagination, invading our psyche, inhabiting our stories, inspiring our architecture,

Legendary fairytale guru Jack Zipes introduces us to the darker side of the Black Forest, the central point of European folklore. Eleanor travels to Shakespeare's Forest of Arden, part real, part imagined - a forest full of magic and mystery, where we can become better versions of ourselves. We hear tales from the vast frozen Taiga forest, encircling the world in the North. And in the African rainforest we meet early hominids as they flit in and out of the trees, watching the forest biology shaping what we are and the stories we tell.

On the way we see the strange reality of the forest itself communicating. And as darkness falls, our imagination takes over as we spend a moonlit night in the New Forest, high in an oak tree, in the company of ravens, owls and deer.

Producer: Melvin Rickarby

Sir Hubert Parry is largely remembered today for a handful of iconic works including Jerusalem, I was Glad, Blest Pair of Sirens, and for writing the hymn tune to Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. But Parry was far more significant than these few works which have remained in the public consciousness. In this centenary year since the composer’s death, Simon Heffer argues for a reevaluation of Parry not only as a composer, but as a writer and educationalist. In interview with biographer Jeremy Dibble, he puts Parry back on the map and explores the composer’s influence over younger generations of musicians including Vaughan Williams, Gurney and Howells. Parry promoted as both a writer, and a teacher at the Royal College of Music, that music should have a moral and social purpose, and that musicians should have the widest education and training. Simon Heffer visits the Royal College of Music to discuss these points with its Director, Professor Colin Lawson, and also to look at the handwritten score of a work that has been hailed as the beginning of a musical renaissance in England, Parry’s Scenes from Prometheus Unbound.

Parry’s own interests originally lay in the music of Brahms and Wagner, and it is through the fusion of these two Germanic schools within his own music that a musical renaissance is seen to have begun, especially in British symphonic music. Dr Wiebke Thormahlen and Dr Kate Kennedy discuss Parry’s influence upon younger generations of composers through not only his music, but also his teaching, where he’d often make arrangements of music by the likes of Palestrina and Lully, so that his students could perform this music during his illustrated lectures. Simon Heffer also takes a trip to Shulbrede Priory where many letters, diaries and photos associated with Parry are held, to get a better understanding of Parry the man including his relationship with his wife, his interest in the women’s suffrage movement, and also his interest in driving cars very fast, or deliberately sailing in stormy waters.

Produced by Luke Whitlock for BBC Wales

Author Colm Toibin profiles the turbulent and brilliant life of American poet Robert Lowell, once considered the greatest living poet in English.

Four decades ago, the American poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977) died quietly in the back of a New York taxi. In his arms, he clutched a priceless portrait of his third wife, the Guinness heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood. Yet Lowell was on his way to see - and hopefully reconcile with - another woman: his beloved second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. At the time of his passing, he had - almost unwittingly - embroiled both former wives in a scandal that had polarised the American literary community.

It was a strange, tragic end to what was one of the most brilliant careers in the history of 20th century letters. In his lifetime, Robert Lowell was arguably the most celebrated poet in America - not just a writer, but a major public figure: a "Boston Brahmin" whose ancestors had arrived on the Mayflower and helped found the American nation. Lowell's groundbreaking 1959 volume "Life Studies" had introduced a generation of readers to the idea of "confessional" poetry - stanzas that drew candidly from the poet's experience - and he was a teacher to Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and several other poetic giants. Erudite, charming and hugely personable, Lowell not only attracted a large and loyal circle of friends, but poured his vast intellectual powers into verses that were dense with historical allusion, dazzling linguistic turns and deep emotional insight. Everything - all of history, all of humanity - seems at Lowell's fingertips, and in his finest poems - among them "For The Union Dead", "Skunk Hour", "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and "Man and Wife" - he seems uniquely to be placing his own experience and history on a vast, almost unimaginable canvas of human history. In his pomp, his poems seemed to carry on the great, sweeping modernist tradition of TS Eliot, WH Auden and Ezra Pound.

Yet Lowell's vast literary and intellectual imagination carried with it deep personal cost. Lowell suffered for most of his life with what would now be thought of as bipolar disorder. Not only did his "manias" cause him to be repeatedly institutionalised, they irreparably fractured many of his relationships, hurt those closest to him, and scarred his ability to create. Only in recent times can we understand his behaviour as a hereditary mental illness - as part of the same great, difficult inheritance that brought him wealth, fame and privilege as a member of the American aristocracy.

Forty years on, Lowell's star has waned. His reputation seems no longer to be in the highest reaches of the poetic firmament: he's a writer who is more read-about than actually read. In 2017, is his poetry simply too difficult, too wilfully intellectual, too privileged, too white and male? Or does the secret of his decline lie in that murky scandal - a still-raw controversy about the limits of a poet's private and public worlds - one that still inflames passions today?

Written and presented by the writer Colm Toibin, in this documentary Robert Lowell's remarkable life and career is remembered and appraised by those closest to him, shedding new light on one of the giants of 20th century poetry.

Producer: Steven Rajam for BBC Wales

Actors Jim Broadbent, Toby Jones and Sylvester McCoy join David Bramwell to celebrate Ken

Catherine Fletcher explores Monterverdi's pioneering use of female roles and performers

Adam Smith traces the birth and afterlife of Hemingway's explosive short story.

To mark Tony Harrison's 80th birthday, Paul Farley profiles the unique poet. (R)

Jon Gower uncovers the work of the pioneering naturalist RM Lockley, whose work inspired Watership Down, paying tribute to the stunning coastline and island where Lockley worked.

Liliane Lijn explores the work of postwar French artist Yves Klein, famous for patenting ultramarine blue and jumping from a window in the suburbs of Paris. Leap into the Void!

Chris Bowlby travels with Tony Harrison to Prague, to discover how one of Britain's best known poets was shaped by the cultural energy and tragedy of 1960s Czechoslovakia. Harrison reads from his Prague poems in the locations where they were written. And he relives with Czech friends stories of cafes and cartoons, sex and surveillance and the hope and despair of a people fighting Soviet tanks and secret police with words, plays and tragic self-sacrifice.

Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Penny Murphy

Emma Smith on how coverage of gender in the arts might help us understand today's debate

Might explorations of gender in great art of the past help illuminate today's issues?

Once upon a time, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough woke up in the summer forest.

David Attenborough reveals a side of himself that nobody knows, as a collector of music from all over the world. We hear the stories that surround it, and the music itself.

One of David Attenborough's first projects was 'Alan Lomax - Song Hunter', a television series he produced in 1953-4. The famous collector of the blues and folk music of America gathered traditional musicians from all over Britain and Ireland and, for the first time, they appeared on television. David loved the music, the people and, inspired by Lomax, he became music collector himself.

From the start there was a connection between wildlife and folk culture broadcasting: BBC natural history staff shared an office, and equipment, with colleagues busy recording traditional songs, tunes and stories. Soon after 'Song Hunter' Attenborough began travelling the world for the series 'Zoo Quest'. This time the hunt was for animals, captured live for London Zoo. The series also looked at the culture of local people and if he came across music Attenborough recorded it. In Paraguay he met some amazing harp players and recorded what became the series' signature tune. This started a craze. Remember Los Trios Paraguayos?

Wherever he went to make programmes David Attenborough recorded musicians. When the lads carrying the crew's baggage in New Guinea started singing, he taped them. He recorded songs in Borneo longhouses, drumming in Sierra Leone, gamelan music in Java, Aboriginal didgeridoo players and palace music in Tonga.

Attenborough gave the music to the BBC and it has sat, unheard, in the Sound Library ever since. Now he listens again to recordings he made half a century ago. He reveals the memories and stories they evoke, and his delight in the music.

Producer: Julian May

Rana Mitter visits Tokyo to explore how Japan remembers World War Two today through film.

Exploring different aspects of history, science, philosophy and the arts.

Rana Mitter visits Tokyo to explore how Japan remembers World War Two through movies.

Rana Mitter visits Tokyo to explore how Japan remembers World War Two today through film.

In this Sunday Feature, historian Chris Harding travels from Tokyo to the deep countryside of Japan's north east to tell the alternative story of the country, looking at how, throughout their history, Japanese people have used ghosts and ghost stories to make sense of themselves and their place in the world.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, taxi drivers in the area reported 'ghost riders' in their vehicles. The local fire services were called out regularly to locations that turned out to be deserted - but when they started praying for the souls of the dead before returning to base, they were never called back again to the same site...

For most of us Japan is the ultimate secular, modern, and future-looking society. But what we encounter in breakthrough films like Ring is a small hint at a vast cultural landscape almost entirely unknown to us: ghosts and the ghostly, never far from the surface in popular consciousness in Japan and breaking through at times of transition or crisis.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Imagine where we’d be without Shakespeare’s plays. It’s difficult to contemplate now. But it was thanks to another man that many of them were brought to life.

Today, Richard Burbage is a not a household name. But he should be. He’s the man for whom many of the great Shakespearean roles were created. One of the founding members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, playing at the newly built Globe in 1599, he’s one of the foundations upon which British theatre was built. Andrew Dickson talks to leading actors, rummages among the archives and dissects some of the greatest parts in acting to discover Burbage’s crucial role – and realises that without Richard Burbage, there could be no Shakespeare.

Producer: Penny Murphy

Paul Morley asks "Can there be too many artists in the world?"

There were many real blind, black bluesman, scraping a living in the Deep South a hundred years ago. From Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson on opposite street corners in Dallas to Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller in Georgia and the Carolinas, the early 20th century saw blind bluesmen playing everything from the lewd, raw blues of the juke joint to the God-fearing spirituals beloved of the new wave of Southern churches and with a musical legacy that's lasted through the decades.

How did this group of blind musicians, faced with all the disadvantages of race, segregation, disability and poverty, manage to achieve celebrity in their own day and leave such a lasting mark on the history of American music?

Gary O'Donoghue, who is blind himself, explores the elements of race and culture that made this phenomenon possible.

Presenter, Gary O'Donoghue Producer, Lee Kumutat Sound Engineer, Peter Bosher Every member of the production team who made this programme is blind.

Editor, Andrew Smith

Acclaimed actor Simon Russell Beale is fascinated by the concerto and how the role of the soloist has evolved from baroque times to now. In this Sunday Feature (exploring the theme of this year's Free Thinking Festival - The One and the Many), Simon explores the complex dynamics between the soloist and orchestra, drawing parallels between the world of the concerto and that of the stage. He asks whether the concerto really is a competition between the soloist and the orchestra or a deeper musical communion. He also asks why the concerto has endured beyond the symphony and ponders whether the spectacle of the virtuosic solo voice pitted against the many is the secret success behind the concerto.

Simon Russell Beale talks to violinists and period-performance experts Margaret Faultless and Simon McVeigh about the emergence of the baroque concerto, to the violinist Nicola Benedetti about what it is like to be a soloist in a highly virtuosic work like the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and to the conductor Marin Alsop about her role in a concerto performance. He also talks to Cliff Eisen about how the rise of the virtuoso led to more heroic concerto writing in Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt, and to composer and clarinettist Mark Simpson about what the concerto means today. Plus musicians from the Philharmonia as they prepare to perform Bartok's democractic masterpiece, the Concerto for Orchestra, and pianist Lucy Parham with whom he studies the piano and has collaborated in concerts of words and music.

Simon Russell Beale is one of the most respected actors in the UK, playing great Shakespearean roles from Benedict in Much Ado about Nothing to Richard III and King Lear. More recently, he has won Best Supporting Actor at the Evening Standard Film Awards for his role as the malevolent Lavrentiy Beria in Armando Iannucci's satirical film, The Death of Stalin. Simon Russell Beale is also a keen musician who was educated as a chorister and still plays the piano. He has also made TV programmes on choral music and the symphony.

Sarah Dillon discovers the story behind the writing of R.L. Stevenson's horror classic

Robert Worby on how post-war German radio and new music were conscripted to fight the cultural cold war, juggling political, economic and cultural forces outside of their control.

In 1933 Franz Werfel's epic novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" was published to huge acclaim. Werfel was then at the height of his powers, an internationally known author. He told the story of Armenian villagers who, in 1915, resist deportation & annihilation by Turkish forces on the holy mountain of Musa Dagh led by an Armenian émigré who has returned to his ancestral home at this most fateful time. Set against the Ottoman Empire's attempts to deport or destroy its Armenian populations, in the middle of a terrible war, which resulted in the murder of somewhere between 800,000- 1.2. million Armenians. These acts of mass murder led to an international outcry during WW1 and a campaign of denial both by the Ottoman empire and the successor Turkish government after 1923. Germany, former ally of the Ottoman empire, also rejected any guilt by association but the assassination of Talaat Bey, former Ottoman Minister of the Interior and key architect of the Armenian extermination, gunned down in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian, caused a furore. The subsequent trial became a major media event and exposed the knowledge of the German government about the massacres. The fate of the Armenians was widely discussed and many on the right explicitly linked them with the 'Jewish question' as Hitler rose to power.

Franz Werfel, already a famous poet and well-known author, touring the Middle East in 1929 with his new wife, Alma Mahler, encountered pathetic Armenian refugee children. Their plight was the spark for his vast work. For both Werfel and its many readers "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" was not just an epic tribute to Armenian resistance and survival but a warning to the Jews of Germany & Austria. Werfel's works were burned and banned in Germany soon after the Nazi's took power. A Turkish government request to have Musa Dagh removed from German bookshelves was eagerly embraced by Joseph Goebbels. Werfel & Alma Mahler fled Germany first to France & then to America. As early as 1933 Hollywood attempted to film Musa Dagh, a hit in the States, precipitating close to a 50 year campaign by Turkey's ambassadors to make sure no film would ever be made by Hollywood. Maria Margaronis tells the extraordinary story of an extraordinary book with biographer Peter Stephan Jungk in Vienna, members of the Armenian Musa Dagh diaspora & Alma Mahler's grand daughter Marina. With Anton Lesser as the voice of the book. Producer: Mark Burman

Alexander the Great's Tomb was famous and then it disappeared. Classical historian Edmund Richardson has spent the last few years following in the Macedonian's wake and admits to a growing obsession with the mystery of the missing corpse and its final resting place. Join him as he goes in search of those who claim to have found the conqueror's last remains, peers into a legend-filled sarcophagus standing shyly by the Rosetta stone in the British Museum and follows an imaginatively talented English gentleman to Alexandria during the Napoleonic Wars where rumours abound that the French have uncovered a great secret. The quest, not the bones, that's the thing.

Contributers: Professor Paul Cartledge; Dr Nora Goldschmidt; Dr Neal Spencer Readers: Sudha Bhuchar; Rupert Holliday Evans

In the second half, Sarah Jackson, from Nottingham Trent University, investigates the human voice, its mechanical counterparts and the way the remote voice has affected the way we express ourselves. Framed by a 1960s GPO information film about the newly automated exchange featuring 'Mr Phone' and his friends, this documentary explores the relationship between the voice and the machine.

Ian Sansom attempts to resurrect the spirit of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky

How do Russia's latest cultural émigrés feel about leaving their homeland? In Russia, culture is increasingly on the front line - many writers, theatre directors and academics feel stifled or under attack. Lucy Ash hears from those who have wrestled with the dilemma of whether to leave. For some, working abroad opens up space to think, while for others, the grief of obscurity can be all-encompassing.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, President Putin's most famous opponent, avoids speaking English and spends his days in cyberspace. He is among a long line of opposition figures trying to imagine a different Russia from beyond its borders. We drop anchor in Berlin, described by one poet as the 'stepmother of Russian cities', which, like London, is experiencing a surge of Russian cultural energy not seen since the aftermath of the October Revolution.

The current exodus has an eerie precursor. During the creation of the Soviet Union, Lenin decided to 'cleanse' the state by shipping out undesirable thinkers. The passengers of the so-called Philosophy Steamer faced a bleak choice, between execution or deportation. Nearly a century on, cheap flights and the internet make many highly educated Russians feel like global citizens - and that, as music producer Philipp Gorbachev says, living in a global culture is 'the only way of existence'. But mixed feelings of rejection at home and homesickness abroad can be a paralysing cocktail.

Including contributions from Boris Akunin, best-selling novelist; Alexander Delphinov, poet; Philipp Gorbachev, music producer; Mikhail Kaluzhsky, playwright; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Open Russia foundation; Sasha Lapina, art student; Aigulle Sembaeva, German-Russian Exchange; and Vadim Zakharov, artist.

Producer: Dorothy Feaver.

Dr Louisa Egbunike, lecturer in English at City University London, is interested in the shifting frame of Afrofuturism. The term was originally coined in 1993 to bracket together work by African-American writers, artists and musicians who were dealing with science-fiction and speculative themes. However it has only recently been suggested that work by creatives living in Africa and those who are part of the more recent African diaspora could also be described as Afrofuturist. Louisa talks to the writer Chikodili Emelumadu and the film makers Nosa Igbinedion and Wanuri Kahiu about whether this is a label that they welcome being applied to their work and the extent to which traditional African mythology was Afrofuturist long before the word was invented.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

And in the second half of the programme, Dr Seán Williams of the University of Sheffield argues that the sometimes mundane context and subject matter of German Lieder and literature in the 18th and early 19th centuries have surprising things to tell us about what is ordinarily viewed as the highest of high art. Seán explores economic and social settings in the one hundred years between Bach’s Coffee Cantata and Schubert’s songs, when consumerism was on the rise, and with it the middle classes and lower nobility discovered a love of ... stuff. Songs at the piano, reading novels on the sofa with a bout of indigestion, a poodle at your feet. Such were the bourgeois drawing-rooms in which Romantic yearning for the affirming power of nature and the agony of the human condition took hold of the imagination.

Producer: Tom Alban

Opera Historian Dr Alexandra Wilson dons her cloche hat and steps into the shoes of a flapper for a journey back to 1920s London. Jazz was the new fad imported for America, dance clubs were taking the city by storm and cinemas were popping up on every corner. But what was the place of opera in this new entertainment world? Based on new research, this feature will guide listeners around the heady operatic world of 1920s London to some of the venues where opera was thriving, including music halls, cafes and schools. This was a time when opera was not 'elite', and rich and poor rubbed shoulders at the opera, just as opera itself interacted in fascinating ways with jazz, music hall, and celebrity culture.

With contributions from modern-day performers and historians, alongside comments from 1920s' critics, conductors and audience members, Wilson challenges the idea that the interwar period was an operatic wasteland, sandwiched between the Edwardian 'golden age' and the emergence of a subsidised operatic establishment after World War Two. Opera was very much alive in the 1920s, and hugely diverse - a People's opera.

Producer - Ellie Mant.

John Tusa revisits the provincial German towns where as a 19-year-old national serviceman he first discovered opera in 1955 and finds out why, 62 years on, it’s still thriving there.

Back then, he was based in the centre of the country, at the garrison in Celle. None of his fellow officers seemed to think it at all unusual when John vanished off from time to time to spend an evening in nearby Hanover glorying, for example, in the Verdian climaxes of what was billed as “Die Macht des Schicksals”. Though only when the orchestra struck up the opening bars of The Force of Destiny overture did John realise what he’d booked seats for!

From Hanover, it’s a 300-mile round trip to Essen, in the much-bombed Ruhr valley, but to enjoy the wonders of Mozart’s Idomeneo, or to travel to the far north of the country to have his first ever taste of Wagner, it was worth it…

More than 60 years on, original programme pages in hand, John retraces those journeys to find out what makes German opera, outside the great houses of Berlin and Munich, tick. Because tick it certainly does.

Along the way, John meets the current “Intendants” (directors) of all three houses, their artistic directors and house singers. Today, still, Germany counts its opera houses in the dozens – as many as 80 or 90 of varying sizes – most with an ultra-loyal public who are happy to pay not-many euros to enjoy often world-class singing and playing. So what’s the trick? And – in the Facebook age – is the audience of young people shrinking? And what are the houses doing to counter that?

Oh, yes: and at Hanover, John enjoys the latest Forza del Destino, while in Essen, it’s still Mozart (Clemenza di Tito in 2017), and in Kiel, he catches up with Wagner – The Valkyrie.

Producer: Simon Elmes

When Dana Gioia was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2015 he was invited to read in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. But Gioia believes the role is to encourage poetry throughout the state. He has a mission: to visit every county in the state of California.

There are 58, stretching from Del Norte 1,000 miles south to Imperial, bordering Mexico; from the Sierra mountains and redwood forests to the desert; densely populated Los Angeles (almost 10 million) to almost empty Modoc (fewer than 10,000); with established communities from Mexico and Europe joined recently by people from the Far East.

Everywhere Gioia is joined by other poets and young people participating in Poetry Out Loud. For several years Gioia was Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. One of his initiatives was this nationwide competition for young people to memorise and recite poems. It is astonishingly popular.

40-odd counties in, producer Julian May joins Gioia to create a radio road movie for Radio 3. Gioia reads in a pub yard in Mariposa, a gold-mining town, while humming birds dart and hover. A few days later Gioia hears of a huge wildfire coming within a mile of the wooden town. In a library in Madera, roasting in California's central valley, a woman from Peru recites a love poem in Spanish. In marches a squad of lads - military boots, buzzcuts. They are from the juvenile hall youth correctional facility. Each, says Officer Martinez, can recite a poem by heart. There is an event in Turlock, settled by Assyrians, another in San Diego near Mexico and, in his home county, Sonoma, Gioia appears at poetry event in a vineyard.

All this, and more, in 'Every County in the State of California', a radio road movie.

Presenter:Dana Gioia Producer: Julian May

Adam Smith traces Ernest Hemingway’s brutal, brilliant short story - from its birth in gangster-era Chicago, through its Hollywood afterlife as a noir classic, to its strange status as Ronald Reagan’s last movie.

Ernest Hemingway wrote his short story ‘The Killers’ in 1926. Two hitmen enter a small-town lunch-room. They have come to kill an ex-boxer who has double-crossed someone. The boxer is warned, but doesn’t run.

Hemingway captures the American man at a moral crossroads. Should he follow the code of the boxing ring, where a man proves himself, and go down fighting? Or should he grab the easy money and throw in his lot with the gangsters?

Hollywood loved it - and so Adam traces how a colourful cast of characters turned this short, sharp story into two very different movies.

The first, in 1946, is a black-and-white noir classic. It was the brainchild of Mark Hellinger, a producer who was all too friendly with real-life gangsters like Bugsy Siegel. It made the names of its new stars, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. But its main screenwriter - Hemingway’s friend and fellow boxing fan John Huston - went unsung.

The next, in 1964, was much gaudier. At the heart of this version is a truly bizarre scene. Ronald Reagan, his acting career on the slide, reluctantly agreed to play a violent crook who is pretending to be a legitimate businessman.

And yet this hinted at the pasts of the producers of this movie. They too had long-time links with the gang world, stretching right back to Al Capone’s Chicago.

It was meant for TV but was deemed too violent. Especially as it featured a scene queasily similar to the assassination of President Kennedy, which happened on the second day of shooting. And the sniper? Future President Ronald Reagan.

And so finally Adam explores how this failing actor ended up playing a role that catches the delicate moral line between playing by the rules and doing whatever it takes to get rich. Just as he was about to launch his career as a political megastar.

The Edinburgh Festival was founded 70 years ago in the aftermath of World War Two. 1947 was a year of shortages and rationing, and the idea of starting an arts festival in Scotland's capital city must have seemed highly ambitious. Yet with the support of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Rudolf Bing, the general manager of Glydenbourne Festival Opera, undertook the challenge. It was to prove an international success that has lasted 70 years. With contributions from those who attended the first festivals in the 1940s and music from early performances, Jim Naughtie reflects on the origins of what has become the world's greatest arts festival. Producer Mark Rickards.

Forster's gay love story was a forbidden book, unpublished until his death.

Allan Little looks at arts festivals started in the aftermath of World War Two