Between the Ears

When Ken Hollings underwent surgery at Moorfields Hospital for a detached retina he experienced an unexpected symphony inside his head, right between the ears. The sounds have haunted him ever since. Musician Martin McCarrick also found himself in a terrifying and unsettling world of head noise that began with a perforated eardrum and ended in a rare medical condition. He too has never forgotten the unexpected world of noise he heard between his ears and has set about recreating it. In this binaural edition of Between the Ears Ken Hollings goes in search of his primal sound.

Producer: Mark Burman

What's the difference between the sheep found in art and real sheep?

In a sheep bell-rich melange, we go in hunt of the real thing, with sheep farmer, author of world best-seller "Driving Over Lemons" and ex-Genesis member Chris Stewart, and academic, writer and potential Bo-Peeper Alexandra Harris.

Those famous shepherds watching their flocks by night were, of course, following in a great tradition - guarding sheep, leading them to pasture, and then probably killing their babies - just like Able, the first shepherd.

From ancient times, the shepherd and the sheep they care for, have been the most consistent of rural sights - they appear in poetry, plays and painting, inaccurately, romanticised, and highly symbolic.

The closest Alexandra Harris has been to real sheep has been wandering past a few woolly bundles on the South Downs. She is, of course, more familiar with the Pastoral in art - from the Greek idyll to Shakespeare's 'A Winter's Tale'. To her - 'shepherding suggests knowing the real facts of life, wisdom of all time coming down through the ages'.

Chris Stewart, who left the UK 25 years ago to pursue a new life as a shepherd in Spain, has 40-plus years of shepherding under his belt. He is more than familiar with the sheep's ways - their smells, herd mentality, incontinence and vulnerability. He knows how to feed one, find one and kill one, when necessary, although he still loves them dearly. To help Alexandra get to grips with the reality of the pastoral life, Chris suggests 'get your own flock of sheep and become a shepherdess....'

Enter Paco - hardy Alpujarran mountain shepherd, bachelor and philosopher - although when asked what he thinks about whilst watching his flocks all day, he can only answer 'No, pienso nada!'

Let the sheep bells fly....

Producer

Music

Count Your Blessings (instead of Sheep) sung by Bing Crosby

Poets

Sheep and bells

The detection of Gravitational Waves in 2015 was hailed as an astounding breakthrough in the world of physics and a triumph for the. LIGO project, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. But the discovery was also a triumph for the men and women who had worked at LIGO during tumultuous times. DREVER, LIGO, is the poet Robert Crawford's meditation on the Scottish physicist Ronald Drever, and his role in the search for Gravitational Waves.

The three second rule - once more like folklore or hearsay - has been discovered to be the happiest condition for the human brain.

In this imaginative journey through the synapses a work, rest and play - Susan Aldworth, Artist in Residence at York University, slips inside a scanner, under the suprvision of neuroscientists Professor Miles Whittington, and Dr Fiona LeBeau, who she has been working with on a project exploring sleep, to discover whether paying heed to the three second rhythm of the mind can help us work rest and play.

By the time you finish this sentence you will have made up your mind.

Whether we are choosing a lover,

If you've made your mind up to listen by now, I hope you choose well.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall.

Karl Marx's penultimate journey was as a corpse in a coffin being trundled up the very steep hill of Highgate to what should have been his last resting place - a three-guinea plot in Highgate's East Cemetery - in March 1883, buried alongside his wife Jenny von Westphalen. The next year a memorial procession to his grave was turned away, but ever since then the Socialist world and the curious began to beat a path to his gravesite. But then, in 1954, they dug Karl Marx up and turned him into an icon in bronze. Karl Marx, wife Jenny, grandson and housekeeper (who were also buried in the same original plot) were re-interred in a new spot. Exactly 73 years after Karl Marx's death, the famous Marx headstone, sculpted by Laurence Bradshaw, was unveiled on March 14th 1956. Wrote Bradshaw, 'I felt some of the feelings that the old architects of ancient Egypt must have felt when raising a monument of theirs to their heroes, for they had to build on sand, and we had to build on clay and gravel, two rather treacherous substances. Also as a person who has been involved for some troubled time in the socialist movement, I felt there were bound to be some attacks on this tomb'

Ever since its unveiling, the Marx memorial has attracted a never-ending flow of people, although as Bradshaw predicted the great bronze head has suffered its ignominies, including an attempt by the far right to blow it to pieces. Alan Dein follows the journey Marx made from death to bronze icon and also travels to Chemnitz, aka Karl Marx Stadt, in the former German Democratic Republic. Here the largest head of Marx in the world stares out across the town square. Once a symbol of East Germany's unofficial capital - now a tourist magnet and a source of unexpected stories.

'Hey man, you're living my dream...!'

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Special Effects: Barney Quinton.

'The old pagan gods, when ousted by Christianity, took refuge in the rivers, where they still dwell' - Old English saying

David Bramwell has a fascination and fear of water. He grew up by a water tower, close to the heart of Doncaster: a place of mystery and wonder to him, the highest building in the area, almost a kind of temple.

'We have wandered too far from some vital totem, something central to us that we must find our way back to, following a hair of meaning' - Alan Moore

With deep thought from cult author Alan Moore, the witches of Sheffield, ex-steel workers and the conservationists of Yorkshire, musician David Bramwell plunges into the river Don to celebrate its return to health and the revival of the worship of its goddess, Danu - the river's original name from pre-Roman times.

It's also an underwater musical experience for the listener... blending the sounds of the rivers, canals and streams of the Don, recorded with hydrophones, into new music, new sounds, with Bramwell's compositions.

Bramwell travels up the Don to its source, backwards in time, uncovering the history of its days as an industrial heartland, now a regenerated river - banked by forests of figs and swum through by deer.

He meets John Heaps who, as a teenager in the 1970s at the steel works, was instructed to throw cyanide in the river by the bucket-load; takes a boat with Professor Ian Rotherham, of Sheffield Hallam University, who guides him through the decaying, yet reviving industrial landscape of the city; hunts fresh fish with river expert Chris Firth of the Don Catchment River Trust; stares up at Vulcan on the Town Hall roof, the harsh overlord of industry, with folklorist and lecturer David Clarke; and hears from witches Anwen and Lynne Harling (also an archaeologist, handily), trying to bring back recognition for the goddess of the river.

But this is also a mystical journey - searching out the 'spirit of this dark and lonely water', in an attempt to come to peace with Bramwell's own fear, perhaps to atone for the wrongs committed to Danu by Vulcan, in the name of progress and industrialisation.

Going under, with Between the Ears.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Music and words performed, written and presented by David Bramwell.

Clips from Lonely Water (1973) from The COI Collection, courtesy BFI National Archive.

Alice Oswald's radio poem Rain was commissioned by Radio 3 in 2016 as part of the 70th anniversary celebrations. Written and performed by the poet, Rain was inspired by a visit to Romford Essex, which experienced a dramatic sudden rainstorm in the early hours of June 23 that year. The poem examines the effect this natural atmospheric occurrence has on an urban environment and its population.

A version of Rain has been created in binaural sound. Listen on headphones for the full effect.

Rain - written and performed by Alice Oswald

The innovative composer and electronic music pioneer Matthew Herbert physically deconstructs the instruments of a string ensemble while they play one of Beethoven's late string quartets, considered by many to be the epitome of chamber music. In a new commission, with an original performance by the Tippett Quartet, Beethoven's String Quartet in F major Op.135 is lovingly rendered until it starts to decay, collapse and become unrecognisable. The music unfolds with the sounds of the quartet being slowly replaced with the sound of snapping strings, instruments being sawn up, stamped on or burnt. In the end, all we hear are the instruments in a broken and destroyed state, in a piece which raises questions about our perceptions of acoustic instruments, in an age of instant digital reproduction.

Matthew Herbert's Requiem is jointly commissioned by BBC Radio 3, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and Centre National de Création Musicale (GMEM) in Marseille, where the sounds of broken instruments were recorded. Part of Radio 3's 70th season, celebrating seven decades of pioneering music and culture since the founding of the Third Programme.