On Touching 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 Part 2:

Miserere, with additional embellishments by Deborah Roberts (Excerpt),Gregorio Allegri, c.1630. Performed The Tallis Scholars & Peter Phillips

E.T., the extra-terrestrial (Main Title), John Williams, 1982

2 Men Meet, Each Presuming the Other to Be from a Distant Planet (Opening), James Wood, 1995. Performed by Steven Schick, Critical Band & James Wood, 2012

Heptapod B, Jóhann Jóhannsson & Joan La Barbara, 2016

The Harmonics of Real Strings (I), John Lely. 2006/2013. Performed by Anton Lukoszevieze, 2014

Játékok (Games), Harangok (bells), Hoquetis (hocquets) and Sirató (weeping), György Kurtág, 1973. Performed by Márta & György Kurtág. 1997

Toccata in G Minor, BMV 915, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1710. Performed by Glenn Gould, 1980

Clapping Music, Steve Reich, 1972. Performed live by Collin Currie & Steve Reich, 2019

Living for the City, Stevie Wonder, 1973