Between the Ears

Researchers Bongani Kona and Catherine Boulle have spent the last year piecing together the story of one woman’s decades-long search to find the remains of her father, a South African political activist who died in 1966. In between visiting old prisons and sifting through archival collections, Bongani begins dreaming about the ghost of his own father, a man he's never met.

The quest to uncover the meaning behind these recurring dreams leads to Julia, a spirit medium and healer, who practices one of the oldest forms of divination on the planet – “throwing the bones”. In consultation with ancestral and spirit worlds, Julia deciphers “energy fields within one’s psyche, spirit and soul body.” This is all to bring solace to troubled souls and minds; to “these soft houses in which we live”, as Kei Miller writes, “and in which we move and from which we can never migrate, except by dying.” Khangela, in isiXhosa, is to look, or to search.

Khangela forms part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea. The card at the heart of Khangela is The High Priestess.

Bongani Kona is a writer, and a lecturer in the department of history at the University of the Western Cape. Catherine Boulle is an audio maker and writer, currently based at the University of Cape Town. Together, Catherine and Bongani won the 2021 Whickers Radio & Audio Funding Award for their documentary about South Africa's Missing Persons Task Team, and the case of James Booi.

Produced by Bongani Kona and Catherine Boulle

The joys and horrors of the internet, evoked by stories, sounds and an exciting new electronic and vocal work composed by Kieran Brunt. Opens with an introduction by the composer.

30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee created the very first website. This powerful edition of Between the Ears explores how the internet has dramatically reshaped our lives over the following three decades.

In 1990s Glasgow, a young woman in a physics computer lab glimpses a different future for the world - and herself. In Luton, the web awakens a young man’s Sikh identity - a few years on, it will bring him riches. In 2001, a young mother in France finds escape through Wikipedia. Ten years later, an Austrian law student is horrified when he requests his personal data from Facebook…

Over four movements of music and personal stories, the Virtual Symphony moves from sunny optimism to deep disquiet, as our relationship to the internet shifts. Around these stories, composer Kieran Brunt weaves electronic and vocal elements in an exhilarating new musical work commissioned by BBC Radio 3.

Kieran Brunt and documentary producer Laurence Grissell worked in close collaboration to produce a unique evocation of the way in which the internet has fundamentally changed how we experience and understand the world.

Composer: Kieran Brunt

Interviewees:

Electronics performed by Kieran Brunt

Programme mixed by: Donald MacDonald

A radiophonic exploration of The Gododdin, a lament for the fallen, bringing to life one of the oldest, yet enduringly relevant, treasures of European literature

The Gododdin occupies a unique place in the literature of the United Kingdom. The oldest Welsh poem - a battle elegy from around 600AD - it was passed down orally, possibly in the form of song, for hundreds of years. Written down by two scribes in the 13th century in a form of proto-Welsh - Brythonic - then spoken from Scotland down through Cumbria to present day Wales, it's as strange yet accessible to Welsh-speakers today as Chaucer is to English-speakers. The events commemorated are real, but took place before Wales and England even existed, and long before there was such a thing as the English language.

The Gododdin were a tribe based south of present day Edinburgh, who, as Britannia was reshaping itself in the post-Roman era, were fighting off incursions of Anglo-Saxons from the east. The poem describes a real battle. The time is the 7th century; the site of the battle near Catterick; the context, a warring world of rival tribes and chieftains. We can identify the lord, Mynyddog Mwynfawr, who gathers the Celtic warriors together from his own tribe, calling for help from Gwynedd in present-day Wales. And we know that the poem was composed by Aneirin, who must have been present at the battle.

Aneirin recorded what he witnessed in a series of 100 elegies for the fallen. What we hear is an evocation of the men who went into battle, hopelessly outnumbered, and were cut down. Their names in themselves are a form of poetry, the naming a sacred act of commemoration. The characters of the fallen are here preserved like bog-men of fifteen hundred years ago. 'Madog cut down men like rushes, but was shy before a girl'; 'At court the quiet one, Erthgi made armies groan'.

The Gododdin, largely forgotten, re-emerged in the early twentieth century. Its tale of the pity of individual lives ended in battle, often young lives, carries clear relevance today. The Gododdin also deals in what we would now call collateral damage: the bereaved and the bereft. The epigraph to David Jones's First World War masterpiece In Parenthesis is taken from The Gododdin, and it collapses the distance between the 20th century and the 6th century: 'Sennyessit e gledyf ym mhenn mameu' - 'His sword sounded in the heads of mothers'. Today, the Gododdin's ancient tale of warriors, far from home, serving a nobleman and paying with their lives, seems both timeless and timely.

Between the Ears: Rhythms of Remembering enters into the world of The Gododdin, weaving extracts of Gillian Clarke's new English translation of the poem with an immersive soundscape and music. Her translation of Aneirin's words - the first complete one by a poet - read by Lisa Jen Brown, provide the backbone of the programme, and the poem's history and resonance today is explored through interviews with Gillian, theatre director Mike Pearson, and Ieuan Jenkins, who recalls his experience of serving as a young soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With music specially composed for the programme by Georgia Ruth.

Produced for BBC Wales by Megan Jones

Maria Margaronis surrenders to the life of the hive to explore the ancient folk customs around the telling the bees.

The lives of bees and humans have been linked ever since the first hominid tasted a wild hive’s honey. Neither domesticated nor fully wild, honey bees are key to our survival, a barometer of our relationship with nature. Without them, we’d have no fruit, no nuts and seeds, and eventually, no food. No bees; no songbirds. Silent woods.

For centuries, we’ve projected stories and beliefs onto these strange, familiar creatures, seeing them as messengers between this world and the next. In this Covid-wracked year, Maria Margaronis explores the old customs of “telling the bees” about a death or significant event, lest they grow angry and leave us. She enters the sonic world of the hive to hear what the bees might be telling us in the company of wise bee guides like Toxteth’s Rastafarian Barry Chang, Mississippi's Ali Pinion, Lithuania's Paulius Chockevicius and young beekeeper Zhivko Todorov in London’s busy Finsbury Park. Others tell us and their bees their significant news. Follow bee tellers and bee callers on a seasonal journey from summer through winter into spring, tuning in to to the hum of the hive and the buzz of the universe.

Recorded binaurally.

Producer: Mark Burman

Bogs have always captured the human imagination, inspiring both fear and fiction. Between the Ears wades into this treacherous netherworld in a search for the lost and found.

These liminal spaces have a unique and troubling consistency: neither absolutely water, nor absolutely earth, but a potentially dangerous mix between the two.

Writers have long been fascinated by the dangerous pull of the bog but also by the secrets that lay buried the peat, from 'The Slough of Despond' in John Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' to Seamus Heaney's 'Bog Poems'

Producer Neil McCarthy and author and former rock climber Jim Perrin attempt to cross a bog called Waun-y-Griafolen in Snowdonia. A living entity, the bog erases paths over time and the duo's navigation becomes as uncertain as the ground beneath them. As they make their way, and as the days fades, they are accompanied by the reflections of Hetta Howes ('Transformative Waters'), Karin Sanders ('Bodies in the Bog'), and artist Mark Daniels who also finds he's strayed from the path.

They squelch their way, hoping to understand the bog's contradictory nature before getting swallowed up.

Featuring the poem 'Bog Queen' by Seamus Heaney

Original composition and sound design by Phil Channell

Composer and sound artist Rob Mackay traces the migratory route of the monarch butterfly, from the Great Lakes in Canada to the forests of Mexico, via the shifting coastal landscape of the eastern shores of Virginia.

Presented and sound designed by Rob Mackay, produced by Andy King.

Stories of real life chance encounters, inspired by the 75th anniversary of the much-loved film Brief Encounter. Introduced by Matthew Sweet.

Using different recordings of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 - which famously underscores the 1945 film - Between the Ears reflects on how a chance meeting can change our lives forever.

In the 1950s two people bump into each other changing trains at Harrow-on-the-Hill station. In 2001, two strangers meet on a train bound for Edinburgh. In 2014 two paths cross in a departure lounge at Toronto Airport. Meanwhile, a few Christmases ago in a pub in Margate eyes meet across a crowded bar.

For each person, for good or ill, life will never be the same again. Between the Ears tells their stories, set to Rachmaninov's haunting music.

Producer: Laurence Grissell

Sound mixed by Donald MacDonald

Featuring the voices of:

Barry and Maureen Leveton

Featuring the following recordings of Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No. 2:

Krystian Zimerman, Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa