The Listening Service

Today, 'amateur' has become a byword for sloppiness and low standards. But for centuries amateurs were the bedrock of musical life and an essential and vitalising force for composers, providing not only a cohort of highly-accomplished performers and the most discerning audience but also a lucrative vein to be mined by music publishers. To find out how and why attitudes changed - and if they are still changing - Tom Service is joined by writer and historian Katy Hamilton.

David Papp (producer)

Tom looks at how modern audiences are hooked on silence in the concert hall. Citing a recent incident where the rustling of a sweet wrapper by an audience member in Malmo created a ruckus so powerful that it spilled spectacularly into a violent brawl, Tom will examine why silence is considered so important and noise so abhorrent in classical concerts.

Music where the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many - but also where the many can become one... Tom Service looks at music performed solo or in unison. What is happening in music where there is no harmony? And how can a single musical line build a sense of community?

LET'S GET ANGRY!

Music’s power to express and exorcise anger has taken composers, performers, and listeners, to the Dark Side of music’s profoundly emotional powers. How do you make the sounds of anger? We’ll scream like heavy metal virtuosos and operatic divas, we’ll explore the harmonies of anger through the sounds of the angriest classical music over the centuries, and we’ll hear what happens in our brains when we just have to express our vexatious impulses.

But while there’s a cathartic feeling of release once we’ve got over the musical, emotional, and hormonal expression of angriness, music itself can also make us angry. It makes Tom Service angry: when you’re on hold on that phone-call to the gas-board, when that TV theme or YouTube meme gets stuck in your head and just won’t budge: music can make us as exquisitely cross as any other fact of our lives.

We'll get anger management advice from Commander-In-Chief, Shred guitarist Berit Hagen (angry), composer Richard Sisson (very angry) and Professor of Black Studies Kehinde Andrews (seething).

From the sounds of anger to anger-inducing ear-worm: join us in an emotionally exorcising edition of The Listening Service. You’ll feel better. And if you don't you can get very angry with us!

Even today, some music lovers will nod knowingly when they hear Brahms's comparison of Anton Bruckner's epic symphonies with a nightmare-scary giant snake that kills its victims in the inescapable embrace of its crushing coils. Poor Bruckner, ever the easy target of sneering critics. At once childishly obsessive and intensely spiritual, ultra-sophisticated musician and naive country bumpkin: even by composers' standards he stood out as weird. No wonder the music was so hopeless!

But Tom Service wants you to think of Bruckner as one of the greatest and most original symphonists of all time (whose symphonies really don't all sound the same), as much master of daring long-range musical form as of the perfect miniature.

David Papp (producer)

It's huge, it's awkward, it's difficult to play, and while it’s totally pivotal to the musical spectrum, it's rarely talked about.

It's the epitome of the elephant in the room, and yet we'll discover why it is possibly the most underrated instrument in the orchestra.

Tom Service talks about the history and development of the largest and lowest pitched orchestral string instrument, and hears how it's played today. He's joined by performers Leon Bosch and Daphna Sadeh to discuss why the bass is much, much more than the elephant in the room.

Can you hear 'masculine' and 'feminine' in music? And how have these concepts had an impact on music and how people have heard it over the centuries? With Tom Service.

Tom Service dispenses Style Counsel - what are the different eras in music history, and how can you tell them from each other? How did they come about and grow and change? And as Radio 3 is about to launch its New Year New Music season, is there an overarching distinguishing style in music today? Tom is joined by composer and writer Neil Brand at the piano for some answers.

What is a key? In western music, if all the intervals and possible chords in every scale in any major key are the same (and ditto for every scale and chord in every minor key), why do we need 12 major keys and 12 minor ones? What have keys meant to composers down the centuries and has that changed? Are keys now so last-century (or even before that)? What even is a key? Why is the Pythagorean Comma important and what even is it?

So many questions... To attempt some answers, Tom Service enlists the help of harpsichord maker and tuner Andrew Wooderson, harpsichord player Masumi Yamamoto and musicologist Katy Hamilton.

David Papp (producer)

Tom Service delves into the dark side of Franz Schubert. What can we hear in his music?

A provincial composer who died young, described as looking like a "little mushroom", on the face of it Franz Schubert doesn't seem a likely candidate for deep insight into the human condition. But appearances are very definitely deceptive, and some of his music can seem deceptively straightforward as well. Join Tom Service for a journey into Schubert's psyche and discover what his music tells us about the man, and perhaps about ourselves.

With Dr Laura Tunbridge of Oxford University.