On Touching Part 1 is a radio show about both touch (the tactile, or the haptic) and that which touches (affects or moves us). Typically, our most tender moments are those when vision is obscured and contact is obstructed, if not forbidden entirely. Fingering through his (mostly digital) collection Sam Belinfante has pulled out a selection of music that is connected through different strategies of making contact across seemingly impassable divides and within impossible situations

In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other. The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.

Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.

Track Listing:

Hocket

Meredith Monk, 1992

Performed by Meredith Monk and Robert Een, 1992

Penumbra

Sam Belinfante, 2010-11

Performed by Lore Lixenberg, 2011

L’Orfeo (excerpts)

Claudio Monteverdi, 1607

Performed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Orpheus), Julianne Baird (Euridice), John Eliot Gardiner & English Baroque Soloists, 1987

Difficulties putting it into practice, for 2 musicians

Simon Steen-Andersen, 2007

Performed by HYPER DUO (Gilles Grimaître & Julien Mégroz) for YouTube, 2018

Counting Duet #1

Tom Johnson, 1982

Performed by Sam Belinfante & Joseph Kohlmaier on Zoom, 2020

Love Song (two violins)

Alvin Lucier, 2016

Performed by String Noise (Conrad Harris & Pauline Kim), 2020

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpt)

Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Mark Tucker (The Wall), Sir Colin Davis & London Symphony Orchestra, 1996

Ursonate (excerpt)

Kurt Schwitters, 1935

Performed by Adam de la Cour & Neil Luck, 2018/20

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpts) Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Robert Lloyd (Pyramus) & Ian Bostridge (Thisbe)

Touch,

Little Mix, 2017

Performed by Little Mix as part of One World: Together at Home, 2020