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Press Releases
Radio 3's Between The Ears returns for new winter series
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Between The Ears, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 3's innovative radio features strand,
returns on 22 November 2008 for a brand new season of challenging
and unique programmes.
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Highlights from the new series include an
audio stroll through Venice, a look at how randomly recorded
sound can be a trigger for memory and an exploration of that
favourite British topic – the weather – through the eyes of an
American artist.
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Abigail Appleton, Head of Speech Programmes, Radio 3,
said: "I always look forward to hearing a new series of Between The
Ears – these are risk-taking programmes that offer listeners the
most adventurous and creative radio feature-making.
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"I'm delighted
at the new season and hope that listeners will enjoy the range of
audio treats on offer."
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 When Silence Sings (Saturday 22 November) is a contemplative audio walk
through Venice, a tourist spot well known for its heritage,
canals and art fairs.
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It is also one of the few places in the
world where the sounds of the city are not drowned out by cars.
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Our guide to the backstreets of the city and its vibrations is
Tonie, a Norwegian psychologist and author now in her mid-fifties
who has been deaf from birth.
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As Tonie leads us down alleyways
and off the tourist trail, she meditates on the role sound and
not being able to hear has played in her life and, in turn,
invites us to reflect on how we listen.
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Dramatist and theatre director Lou Stein looks back on
experiences in his life that he's recorded on mini-disc in the
evocative Crossing The Same River Twice (Saturday 29ÌýNovember).
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The
programme draws upon the many sound recordings that Lou has made
during his life, mapping a distinctive audio journey that
explores the tensions between selective memory and identity.
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It
takes him from his South Brooklyn childhood to citizenship in the
UK, via Belfast and the Outer Hebrides, to becoming the father of
a child born with Down's Syndrome.
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Randomly recorded sound, Lou
has found, is an extraordinarily precise trigger for memory.
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In Mole Jazz (Saturday 6 December), a widow, Leni, remembers her
husband, Ed Dipple, who was the force and life behind record
shop, Mole Jazz.
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Leni's private memories are set against the
public face of the shop, and the cool and funky records that were
sold there.
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Mole Jazz was a tiny specialist shop near Kings Cross which
specialised in vinyl jazz records.
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Ed was running auctions in the
shop organised through computer and long before the internet was
up and running. Then one day the shop was no longer there. Ìý
Ed had
died, the business had complications and Leni moved to France
where she became a poet, writing a series of poems about her
late, great husband.
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In 2008, vocal group The Clerks and their founder and director,
Edward Wickham, Director of Music and a Fellow at St Catharine's
College, Cambridge, commissioned composer Antony Pitts to develop
a live electro-acoustic concert programme with them based around
the repertoire featured in their album In Memoria.
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Partly
inspired by an exploratory visit to the tunnels of the National Coal
Mining Museum near Wakefield, and recorded in unusual performance
spaces including Crossness Pumping Station in Bexley, In Memoria (Saturday 20 December) evokes the deep music of memory represented by the
great late-medieval and early-Renaissance composers and from our
own age.
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Ockeghem, Dufay, Obrecht, and Josquin each wrote motets
to memorialise themselves and their colleagues. Their voices are
presented as part of a living concert; fragments of anecdotes and
reflection – drawn from children's songs, poetry and real stories
– culminate in a new motet by Antony Pitts for three pairs of
voices.
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Woven In Time (Saturday 27 December) is an evocative and poetic
story about black female identity as told through the words of
poets, Zena Edwards, Khadijah Ibrahim and Jean Binta Breeze, and
the lives of women in a late night Afro-Caribbean hair salon: a
place where women congregate over several hours to shape their
outer selves with intricate new hairstyles of corn rows,
dreadlocks and weaves, and share their inner selves as they
socialise and ponder the trials of life.
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Taking the themes of
woven hair and woven lives, of history and culture, the programme
explores the link between the changing politics of black female
identity, notions of black beauty, and how this has been
expressed through hair to the present day.
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In Weather Reports You (Saturday 3 January) the influential
American artist Roni Horn explores the power of the weather to
tell us who we really are.
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She believes that when we talk about the weather we are really talking about ourselves and here compiles recordings of people's stories and reflections on the
weather, gathered in Norfolk, to conjure what is, in effect, a
collective portrait.
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A major exhibition on Roni's work opens at
Tate Modern early next year.
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Between The Ears schedule
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When Silence Sings, Saturday 22 November, 9.30pm
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Crossing The Same River Twice, Saturday 29 November, 8.30pm
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Mole Jazz, Saturday 6 December, 9.15pm
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(Repeat, to be announced, Saturday 13 December)
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In Memoria, Saturday 20 December, 9.15pm
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Woven In Time, Saturday 27 December, 9.30pm
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Weather Reports You, Saturday 3 January, time to be announced. Ìý
Radio 3 Publicity
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