The Radio 3 Documentary
This BBC Radio 3 series presents in-depth documentaries covering a wide range of cultural and intellectual topics, including history, science, philosophy, film, visual arts, and literature. Each episode explores its subject in detail, offering thoughtful analysis and expert perspectives. The program, known as The Sunday Feature, broadcasts every Sunday at 6.45pm on BBC Radio 3.
Episodes
Sound Sources
Paul McCartney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lee Renaldo on their debt to classical music.
Time Canvasses - Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism
In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art.
It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said, “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened”.
The compos
Tuner of the World
"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 Bro
Supply Lines
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.
New Generation Thinkers: The Perfect Balance
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.
The Pleasures and Pains of Denton Welch
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, final
The Black Cantor
Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Famed for his soulful voice and perfect Yiddish pronunciation, he performed in synagogues and theatres across the Eastern United States and toured Germany, Poland and Palestine. But after his death in 1954, LaRue Jones disa
Sunday Feature - Shakespeare's Brum Ting
Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespeare library, the brainchild of the first librarian George Dawson. From the outset it was to be the People's Folio, the property of the city's Free library. You can find the evidence stamped in red ink on many of the pages. That might seem like a defac
X-Ray Vision: Rudolph Fisher in Harlem
Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life
Heinrich Heine: The First Modern European
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.
Government Song Woman
American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was willing to track down songs in unlikely places, once writing "I don't scare easily." She spent a night riding in a hearse in Wisconsin just to question the driver and hear his songs, w
Tutu - A Portrait of Nigeria
Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu.
O Sole Mio
“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according to which the city was created by the siren Partenope. Song has been woven into Neapolitan life ever since, giving the city an extraordinary musical culture and heritage. Joanna Robertson travels to Naples to find out what makes this city so full of so
Metal City
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 Staffordsh
Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados
From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the tiny island of Barbados. There, they were enslaved by British landowners and forced to work the sugar plantations that covered the island. Uprooted from their homelands, separated from their families and denied their humanity, they nevertheless manag
Yiddish Glory
During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these horrors as the Holocaust was unfolding before their eyes. A miraculous discovery in the Vernadsky National Library in Kyiv revealed a collect
Scott Ross - Harpsichord Rebel
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
Unlocking Anne
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
What Walls Hold
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 not
Sunday Feature: Shostakovich and the Battle for Babi Yar
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces together the events leading up to the controversial first performance by speaking to people who witnessed it in a Moscow concert hall 60 years ago: the composer’s son Maxim Shostakovich, the poet’s sist
Briggflatts - A Northern Poetic Odyssey
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 Bu
Sunday Feature: Florence Price’s Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship
The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive
Tchaikovsky's Island of Inspiration
If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Conservatory of St Petersburg, the 26-year-old started composing his first symphony, ‘Winter Daydreams’, but quickly ran out of steam. “No other work cost him such effort and suffering… its composition was fraught with difficulty,” recalled his younger brother Mo
Then there was Light - Stockhausen and LICHT, his opera cycle based on the seven days of the week
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 geni
Even more Kershaw Tapes
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 Tou
More Kershaw Tapes
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 guit
New Generation Thinker short feature: Hilltop Histories
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 t
NGT The Balcony
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
The Apple and the Tree
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 downstair
Sunday Feature - Dissecting Beethoven
An exploration of Beethoven’s music through the body that gave him so much trouble.
Sunday Feature: The Fake Poet
Why does the image of the forlorn and abandoned poet Thomas Chatterton haunt us today?
The Silence of My Pain
Hannah French explores a hidden disability for many musicians: pain.
New Generation Thinker short Feature: COVID and The Black Death, an imperfect fit.
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 fro
Silent Witness: John Cage, Zen and Japan
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 i
The Crankiness of C.W.Daniel
New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson on the radical 20th century publisher C.W.Daniel.
The Queen Of Technicolor
Marie-Louise Muir traces her childhood idol Maureen O’Hara’s journey from Dublin's suburbs to star of the Golden Age.
The East Speaks Back
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
Ken Campbell as Never Heard Before
David Bramwell with actors whose lives were transformed by director Ken Campbell.
Glitter and Villainy
Daisy Black, Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, investigates the camp villain in history.
Rewiring Raymond Scott
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
Poles Apart
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 cu
The Hidden Reservoir
Carlo Gebler on the role of art in remembrance and reconciliation in Northern Ireland
Power Plays
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
Al Andalus - The Legacy
Andrew Hussey journeys through Andalusia searching for the legacy of Muslim Spain
Plot 5779: Unearthing Elizabeth Siddall
Actor Lily Cole plays Elizabeth Siddall who climbs out of her grave to tell her story.
Literary Pursuits: Lord of the Flies
Golding's classic novel was saved from being rejected by Faber by the luckiest chance.
Cold War in Full Swing - Louis Armstrong in the GDR
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
Sir Isaac Newton and the Philosopher's Stone
Dafydd Mills Daniel investigates Isaac Newton's more obscure studies in Alchemy.
A Unicorn Quest
Hetta Howes sets off to find the unicorn of myth in 21st century Britain.
Robinson Crusoe Road-Trip
300 years since Robinson Crusoe was published, Emma Smith traces it across the centuries
Alexander Korda: Producer, Director, Exile, Spy
Matthew Sweet unearths the film-maker Alexander Korda's wartime role as a British agent.
WATERLOG
Wild swimming enthusiast Alice Roberts examines the legacy of Waterlog by Roger Deakin.
John Ashbery - Portrait in a Convex Mirror
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
Hotel Genius
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, concei
The Deluxe Edition
Dr Seán Williams takes a first class trip through the enduring contradictions of luxury.
Jazz Japan
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 th
A History of the Tongue
A succulent & mouth watering portrait of one of the least talked about organs of the body.
Literary Pursuits: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
Sarah Dillon explores the stories behind how great works of literature were written.
Sunday Feature: Into the Forest - The Pine Tree
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.
Harlem on Fire
'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 bur
The Kristapurana
Amazing travels of the first Englishman in India & a hunt for a lost poetic masterpiece.
Sunday Feature: New Generation Thinkers
Two features by R3 New Generation Thinkers. Dr Simon Beard and Dr Islam Issa
Sunday Feature: New Generation Thinkers Hetta Howes and Eleanor Lybeck
Two Features by R3 New Generation Thinkers Hetta Howes and Eleanor Lybeck.
Inside Stories
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
Forests of The Imagination
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,
A Portrait of Parry
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
Sunday Feature: A Life in Study: Robert Lowell
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 - an
Ken Campbell As Never Heard Before
Actors Jim Broadbent, Toby Jones and Sylvester McCoy join David Bramwell to celebrate Ken
From the Ashes
Allan Little looks at arts festivals started in the aftermath of World War Two
Monteverdi's Women
Catherine Fletcher explores Monterverdi's pioneering use of female roles and performers
The Killers
Adam Smith traces the birth and afterlife of Hemingway's explosive short story.
v. is for Tony
To mark Tony Harrison's 80th birthday, Paul Farley profiles the unique poet. (R)
I Know an Island - RM Lockley
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.
In Search of Yves Klein
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!
Tony Harrison's Prague Spring
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
Binary and Beyond: part two
Emma Smith on how coverage of gender in the arts might help us understand today's debate
Binary and Beyond Part 1
Might explorations of gender in great art of the past help illuminate today's issues?
The Summer Forest
Once upon a time, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough woke up in the summer forest.
David Attenborough - World Music Collector
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 Brita
Japan's Never Ending War
Rana Mitter visits Tokyo to explore how Japan remembers World War Two today through film.
Recommended
World Questions
InsideAIR
Off Court With Greg Rusedski
IELTS, OET and UKMLA PLAB 2 Made Easy Podcast For Medical Professionals
The Systemic Way
Trauma Bonding to Secure Relationship
Golden's Oldies
Lucy & Sam's Perfect Brains
The ADHD Adults Podcast
RHISE: Real History in Simple English (B2-C1, British)
Swingers
Messy Social Work
