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Words on Music

Notebooks, memoirs, reviews, poetry and prose: Ian explores writing about music for print and broadcasting with Georgia Mann, Hannah French, Kate Molleson and Corey Mwamba.

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins鈥� practise notebooks, pianist Stephen Hough鈥檚 account of tackling Tchaikovsky鈥檚 First Piano Concerto, the voice of Fairport Convention鈥檚 Sandy Denny in the words of Scottish poet Don Paterson, and E. M. Forster鈥檚 evocation of Beethoven鈥檚 5th Symphony in Howard鈥檚 End: just some of the texts we鈥檒l hear on tonight鈥檚 celebration of writing about music.

Ian鈥檚 joined by four Radio 3 presenters to discuss the challenges of all sorts of music writing, from concert reviews to programme notes, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and scripts for radio. His guests are Essential Classics Georgia Mann who pored over Oasis reviews in the N.M.E. in her teens, Hannah French from The Early Music Show who once read a biography of Pablo Casals in a day, Composer of the Week鈥檚 Kate Molleson who started out writing concert reviews at University in Montreal, and Corey Mwamba who presents Freeness and immersed himself in jazz books at Southampton library whilst doing his A-Levels.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Available now

43 minutes

Last on

Fri 1 Mar 2024 22:00

Broadcast

  • Fri 1 Mar 2024 22:00

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