The Listening Service

The Listening Service episodes:

• 03.31.2024

  What's the point of Listening?

  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...

  
• 03.10.2024

  Needle Drop: the power of classical music in film

  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...

  
• 03.03.2024

  Impassioned argument: Elizabeth Maconchy's string quartets

  "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...

  
• 02.25.2024

  Songs of the Moon

  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...

  
• 02.05.2024

  'Pathétique'

  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 passion with perhaps...

  
• 01.21.2024

  Turangalila!

  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,...

  
• 01.16.2024

  Jumping Fleas: the rise and rise of the Ukulele

  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...

  
• 12.31.2023

  Resolutions

  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....

  
• 12.11.2023

  New York, New York!

  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...

  
• 11.26.2023

  The Trombone Section

  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...

  
• 11.19.2023

  The Old Testament of Music

  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....

  
• 11.05.2023

  In it to win it

  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 keyboard face-offs of 18th-century...

  
• 10.29.2023

  Hitting the High Notes

  Tom Service explores the enduring appeal of the tenor voice.

  
• 10.22.2023

  Unripe Cherries: Brahms's Symphony No 4

  Tom Service explores one of the most popular, played, and performed works of all time - Johannes Brahms's Symphony No 4 in E minor.

  
• 10.08.2023

  The Ethereal

  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 higher, something excessive and superlative"....

  
• 10.01.2023

  Strange Tuning

  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...

  
• 09.17.2023

  Gloria!

  Tom Service enters the sublime and joyous world of Poulenc's Catholic choral work Gloria.

  
• 09.10.2023

  What's the Point of Symphonies?

  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...

  
• 07.26.2023

  Musical Time Travel: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams

  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...

  
• 07.09.2023

  What's on the programme?

  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 immersive...

  
• 07.02.2023

  Secret Music: Byrd's Masses

  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 of the...

  
• 06.25.2023

  All American Ives?

  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 the contemporary...

  
• 06.18.2023

  Surround Sound: Tallis's Spem in alium

  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 experience - one...

  
• 06.04.2023

  Artificial intelligence and music

  Tom Service programmes himself into the matrix of musical artificial intelligence.

  
• 05.28.2023

  Ravel's Bolero: A Piece without Music?

  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 the...

  
• 05.07.2023

  All the King's Music

  Tom Service assesses the history of the masters of the king's (or queen's) music - a pantheon of 21 names, some brilliant, some average, some really rather forgettable. What have the incumbents done with their time in the post, and...

  
• 04.23.2023

  Once upon a time... The Fairy-tale Operas of Judith Weir

  Tom Service delves into the deep (and often dark) worlds of Judith Weir's fairy-tale and folk-inspired operas, including Blond Eckbert and The Vanishing Bridegroom.

  
• 04.09.2023

  Wild Isles: Wild Music

  Inspired by David Attenborough’s Wild Isles series, Tom Service goes in search of music that reflects British wildlife and wilderness, and our relationship with it. From the songs of Henry Purcell written whilst wolves still roamed the British Isles to...

  
• 03.26.2023

  Stravinsky, the puppet master: Petrushka

  Tom Service takes you on a journey into the extraordinary world of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka, based on an archetypal puppet myth that shares the story of Punch.

  
• 03.19.2023

  Here Comes the Bride

  Tom Service with a guide to music written for and performed at weddings.

  
• 03.12.2023

  Bluebeard's Castle: Enter at Your Peril

  Tom Service intrepidly explores Bluebeard's Castle - the one-act Symbolist opera by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok first performed in 1918 which features just two characters: Duke Bluebeard and his fourth wife Judith. Newly married, he brings her home to his...

  
• 03.05.2023

  Collage, writ large: Berio's Sinfonia

  Tom Service explores Luciano Berio's Sinfonia - an iconic piece of the late 1960s modernism, scored for orchestra and eight amplified voices who speak, whisper and shout texts by Samuel Beckett and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This groundbreaking work also incorporates a...

  
• 02.19.2023

  Mystery, rumour and deception: Mozart's Requiem

  Tom Service examines Mozart's final masterpiece - a work shrouded in mystery, rumour and deception. He’s joined by Dr Kathryn Mannix, a specialist in palliative care, who considers the factors of creativity - and music-making in particular - at the...

  
• 02.05.2023

  Symphonic Steampunk: Saint-Saëns's Organ Symphony

  "I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again." So said child prodigy, virtuoso pianist, intellectual, conductor and composer Camille Saint-Saëns about his wildly successful 1873 ‘Organ Symphony’. Famously...

  
• 01.22.2023

  On the March: Pomp, Circumstance and Dam Busters

  The musical and military features of the march seem pretty unpromising terrain for composers - you’ve got to constrain your creativity to two-time, easy to remember tunes that keep pace in strict time. And yet the form of the...

  
• 01.15.2023

  David Lang: The Little Match Girl Passion

  Tom Service delves into David Lang's secular take on the Christian Passion: The Little Match Girl Passion. Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, the work, scored for chorus and percussion, and lasting barely more than half an hour, takes inspiration...

  
• 01.01.2023

  Also Sprach Zarathustra: Strauss’s New Dawn

  Made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra which was composed by a young Richard Strauss in 1896 is much more than just two minutes of cosmic fanfare. Based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical...

  
• 12.11.2022

  Britten's Choral Christmas

  Tom Service delves into the music of Benjamin Britten and explores the unusual stories behind some of his best-loved festive works, including St Nicolas and A Ceremony of Carols.

  
• 12.04.2022

  Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune: Half Man, Half Myth, All Debussy

  Tom Service plunges into the heady sound world of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. "The flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music" according to composer Pierre Boulez - how does Debussy do...

  
• 11.20.2022

  Kurt Weill and The Threepenny Opera

  Tom Service takes a musical dive into the decadent sound world of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's epoque-making The Threepenny Opera.

  
• 11.06.2022

  Steve Reich's Different Trains: Minimalism and Memory

  Tom explores Steve Reich’s 1988 work Different Trains, its use of sampling and speech melodies, and its evocation of the Holocaust. Our witness is the author and journalist Jonathan Freedland. Producer: Ruth Thomson

  
• 10.23.2022

  The Hebrides Overture: Mendelssohn's melodious cave

  Tom Service explores the story behind the very first orchestral tone poem and one of the best-loved pieces in classical music: Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture. Cave expert Prof Stuart Jeffrey shares his insights into Fingal's cave (which inspired Mendelssohn to write...

  
• 10.02.2022

  Musical Ecstasy

  Tom Service explores musical ecstasy from techno to classical, dissecting 'Ecstasio' by the British composer Thomas Ades and talking to the Dutch composer and DJ Junkie XL

  
• 09.25.2022

  Stormy Weather

  Tom Service explores how and why storms and extreme weather events have inspired classical composers from Beethoven to Britten. With meteorologist, space physicist, and double bass player Dr Karen Aplin. Producer: Ruth Thomson

  
• 09.18.2022

  The Enchantment of Chant

  The immense power of chant to transform both the listener and the chanter has ensured the survival of this ancient musical form. Starting with the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Tom explores how chant has resonated across a thousand years of...

  
• 09.11.2022

  Abracadabra

  Tom Service waves his magic wand to explore the connections between music and magic, discovering how an 18th century German poet, 19th century French composer, and 20th century cartoon mouse, cast a spell over audiences everywhere in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. With...

  
• 07.14.2022

  TV Themes

  Tom Service explores television themes with Oscar-winning composer Anne Dudley, who wrote the music for Poldark, Black Narcissus, and Jeeves and Wooster.

  
• 06.26.2022

  The Music of Sound

  Did music begin in ancient cave systems? How did medieval cathedrals inspire musical developments? What effect does a particular concert hall have on the music heard there, or the music on the design of the concert hall? And what...

  
• 06.12.2022

  What's the point of cadenzas?

  Tom Service is joined at the 2022 Hay Festival by the American pianist, writer and self confessed 'classical music nerd of the highest order' Jeremy Denk, to explore cadenzas - virtuosic solo improvisations - with help from Freddie Mercury, John...

  
• 06.05.2022

  Royal Music

  Royal music throughout the ages. Tom Service asks: what makes it sound royal, and why? And is there really such a thing as a royal sound world? Royal music doesn’t have to be heraldic, ranging from the pomp and...