Here's to radio for musically curious folk that doesn't exclude newcomers
BBC Radio 3 90-93FM
In the three blissful years since we jettisoned our television, our big radio has become the item at which we point all the furniture. This has, I've found, created an expectation of quality whenever it's switched on. Listening so closely makes you have no truck with guff, which may be why Radio 3 has begun to make far more sense to these ears than it once did. That, and finally "getting into" classical music, which for many years seemed about as easy to me as "getting into" Oxbridge or a pair of drainpipes.
Radio 3 doesn't mean to be scary, I know it doesn't; it just happens to present a challenge to those unused to, or not schooled in, the music that it broadcasts. It exudes the kind of calm authority you don't know that people are capable of having until you enter a very particular, very rarefied world. There is a slightly queasy feeling of having arrived once it becomes your station of choice, which its programmes and presenters do both everything and nothing to dispel. Everything, in that someone like Sean Rafferty, the warm, garrulous presenter of In Tune (weekdays, 5pm), is far more inviting a presence in the house around teatime than, say, Eddie Mair. (A few weeks ago Rafferty had the sleepy-voiced jazz singer/pianist Diana Krall in to plug her new album; you could almost hear him melt, like the butter on a soggy crumpet, through the keys.) And nothing, in that it has to assume vast musical knowledge on the part of the listener simply to get on with broadcasting music.
So - my musical education began with Composer of the Week, Donald Macleod's daily address, which, taken with Charles Hazlewood's Discovering Music (Sundays, 5pm), permits you to catch up with the aforementioned knowledge so you can enjoy the rest of the station's output. There's no denying that these programmes are necessary, if Radio 3 is to provide a public service for the musically curious in a climate of rigid incuriosity.
As long as music education barely exists in schools, poor Donald has to do the job himself. I love the way he savours the minutiae of his subjects' lives: it matches the fervour with which pop fans gobble up details of sock size and favourite foods, but information is used here as context, not trivia. You're invited to think about music as something that has a place and a time beyond the moment you first heard it - the soundtrack of the spheres, rather than the one to your life.
Yet when Iain Burnside, for instance, starts talking about Buxtehude on his Sunday morning programme (10am),you immediately go back to feeling as though you'll never make your way through the maze of names. Don't do it, you think - Donald hasn't got to him yet! There's little that Radio 3 can do to prevent its neophyte listeners from freaking out once in a while without turning into a cross between Classic FM and the For Schools and Colleges service. (Not that there's anything wrong with Classic FM, of course - there's nothing like a good advert for DFS after every Elgar movement.)
There is no need (in a parallel universe) for Radio 3's output to feel and sound intolerably difficult to most people. We are the problem - or, rather, the stuff to which our ears are exposed the rest of time is - not the station. It does have its sticky moments when it feels more like a posh pirate station than the BBC's "proper music" flagship. The newsreaders (usually the continuity announcers) often sound as though they're reading bits out from the Daily Telegraph in their own time, as surprised and bewildered as we are to find out what the news is. Ian Skelly, in particular, leaves the most disconcerting pauses between each news item - several seconds, in which you begin to fear he's had some sort of turn from the shock of the quarter-point rate cut.
Then there's Late Junction (Tuesdays to Thursdays), which served as my initiation into Radio 3 several years before I dared listen to anything else. I still can't believe that it's had a show a week docked and its time shunted firmly into the graveyard. Its scheduling was perfect until a year ago: the last note, and your signal to retire for the night, struck at midnight. Now it doesn't even start till 11.15pm, and not even the promise of wall-to-wall Jan Garbarek is enough to make me stay up until 1am. Daft timing, as Buxtehude (probably) once muttered to himself.
Pick of the week
Underneath the Lintel
5 January, 2.30pm, Radio 4
Richard Schiff as a Dutch librarian in Greg Berger’s one-man play.
A Sense of Liverpool
Starts 7 January, 3.45pm, Radio 4
Cosmic Scousers big up the Capital of Culture. First up: Levi Tafari, poet.
Marc Riley’s Brain Surgery
9 January, 7pm, 6 Music
British Sea Power perform tracks from their inspired new album.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
