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The Listening ServiceEpisodes
BBC
The Listening Service
A weekly Music podcast featuring Tom Service
4 people rated this podcast
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Episodes of The Listening Service
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Isn’t it great to be able to listen to so much music, to be able to search and scroll and find anything you want…? Or to have tracks suggested for you without even thinking about it…? Or is it? Perhaps you miss the days when you had to save up
Tom Service discovers the mighty musical power of needle drop - the use of pre-existing music in film soundtracks.From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Barbie, from The Shining to Maestro, Tom listens in to some of the most iconic film scenes using nee
"For me, the best music is an impassioned argument". So said one of Britain's greatest 20th-century composers, Elizabeth Maconchy. Who?? Despite her many awards and medals - including a damehood in 1987 - and a lifetime spent promoting new m
Many of the most instantly recognisable works in classical music are inspired by the Earth’s moon – Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’, Dvořák’s ‘Song to the Moon’. Tom Service takes us on a musical voyage to the moon (an
Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony is given the subtitle "Pathétique", the use of the French word removing some of the negative connotations that the word pathetic has in English, which is the literal translation. Pathétique suggests something of great
It made Pierre Boulez want to vomit: Francis Poulenc thought it was atrocious: and Igor Stravinsky said all you needed to write it was enough manuscript paper. But its composer wrote all 80 minutes of it as a love song, and a hymn to joy. So ju
Tom Service explores the world of the Ukulele, from the Hawaiian Royal Court of King Kalakaua to Blackpool Pier with George Formby, the Royal Albert Hall where hundreds of ukulele players performed Beethoven's Ode to Joy at the 2009 BBC Proms,
The word 'resolution' has several meanings. It can refer to something that has been settled or resolved. It can infer a desire to do something differently or to behave in a changed way - as in a New Year resolution. It can also mark the final u
Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it's Tom Service, exploring the musical life of The Big Apple, from its underground scene to John and Yoko's loft and Superman's skies. He roams The City That Never Sleeps, whose origins as the swampy "hilly isl
At the back row of the orchestra, usually three in number, sit the trombone section, but why three and how long have they been there? Tom Service reflects on their history and the ways in which they are employed. He looks back on over five hun
Tom Service explores JS Bach's extraordinary The Well-Tempered Clavier, a series of 48 preludes and fugues for keyboard in all 24 major and minor keys. It's widely regarded as a towering achievement and a cornerstone of western art music. The
From Strictly to village fête vegetables, competitions are embedded in our culture. And music is no exception: think of the Pythian Games of ancient Greece, the mediaeval singing competitions which selected the Master Singers, the improvisatory
Tom Service explores the enduring appeal of the tenor voice.
Tom Service explores one of the most popular, played, and performed works of all time - Johannes Brahms's Symphony No 4 in E minor.
The opening orchestral strains of Wagner's opera Lohengrin with its high shimmering strings prompted the French poet Charles Baudelaire to observe that in Wagner's music he found "something rapt and enthralling, something aspiring to mount high
Mozart's famous Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola makes its effect not least through the unusual tuning of the strings of one of the solo instruments. Mozart asks the viola player to retune the strings half a tone higher than is usual.
Tom Service enters the sublime and joyous world of Poulenc's Catholic choral work Gloria.
What exactly is a symphony, and how can one written in the 18th century by the ‘father of the symphony’ Joseph Haydn (he wrote over a hundred), have anything in common with one written today? Where did they come from in the first place, and why
Tom Service experiences musical time travel as he listens to "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis" by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with its magical interplay of ancient and modern.And film music expert Neil Brand examines how this and other classic
Who decides what goes into a classical music concert? What music will there be? What constraints are there on what can be played? And how have ideas about concerts changed over the years, from Beethoven's four-hour marathons to today's immersiv
England in the 1590s. Elizabeth I is the reigning monarch and the religion of the country is Protestantism. Celebrating Catholic mass is outlawed. What does William Byrd, one of Elizabeth's most favoured composers, do? He writes three settings
What links baseball, life insurance and American art music? Charles Ives does! Unknown during his lifetime in Connecticut and New York the experimental composer and church organist created his unique style entirely on his own terms away from th
Tom Service surrounds himself in Tallis's Spem in alium, a colossal Renaissance masterpiece for 40 individual voice parts, arranged in eight groups of five voices, each situated all around the listeners. This was the original surround sound exp
Tom Service programmes himself into the matrix of musical artificial intelligence.
Tom Service explores Ravel's Bolero – a classical chart-topper, concert-hall-filler and the soundtrack to Torvill and Dean's Olympic skating glory. Written in 1928, Ravel described it as a 'piece without music in it' and agreed with the lady at
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