Tom Service considers whether Claude Debussy was an impressionist or not. He is often said to have composed Impressionist music - in such popular works as Claire de Lune and La Mer. But Tom argues that Debussy's music has quite a different character to that of the Impressionist painters - and to prove it he discusses the techniques of those painters with art historian Anthea Callen. Debussy, Tom argues, was a modernist, an abstract composer and also (in his opera Pelléas et Melisande) a creator of nightmares.

Tom Service tells stories in sonata form.

This word sonata originally meant simply a piece of music. But over the course of music history "sonata form" came to mean something very specific and laid the foundations for over two hundred years of sonatas, string quartets, symphonies and concertos.

In this edition of The Listening Service, Tom explores sonata form - according to the revision guides it's all about Exposition-Development-Recapitulation. But it’s so much more than that - the template is just the bare bones of a three act drama - lyrical, exciting and compelling musical stories are told in sonata form. How can you hear them? How is it done?

With David Owen Norris at the piano, with his Sonata of the Prodigal Son.

We all think we know what 'The Blues' means - whether it's feeling down in the dumps or a musical genre that links Muddy Waters through to The Rolling Stones.

But what is it really? What makes The Blues the Blues? And where did it come from? Tom Service is joined by jazz pianist Julian Joseph to discover its earliest African-American origins right up to current-day Blues music and its influence on classical musicians.

Whether we're talking Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, classical composers using 'Blue' notes or that feeling of melancholy - the Blues has often found its way onto the concert stage too. Tom looks back across classical music history to find that actually music has had a bad case of the blues for many centuries.

Tom Service examines Dvorak's Symphony No 9, "From the New World", one of the BBC's current "Ten Pieces III". Dvorak told the New York Herald in 1893 that "a serious and original school of composition should be established in the United States of America" which he hoped would have at its foundation black composers, like those he met, taught, and whose music he promoted at the National Conservatory of Music of America. Alongside Dvorak's Symphony "From the New World', Tom explores the lesser known Symphonies of three black composers: William Grant Still, Florence Price and William Dawson and how they realised Dvorak's dream for American music and used the symphony to create new languages and communities of listeners.

Tom service explores the extraordinarily original music of Bela Bartok. This Hungarian composer, who was a contemporary of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, managed to avoid the direct influence of these two giants of modern music and created his own musical style, partly inspired by the folk music that he discovered (and recorded onto wax cylinders) in the Hungarian countryside before the First World War. His six string quartets are unmatched for their intensity and invention, and as a concert pianist himself, he wrote much groundbreaking piano music, including three concertos. Bartok's pedagogical series of pieces called Mikrokosmos is still much used by students of the piano, and Tom discusses the composer's piano music with another virtuoso pianist, Cédric Tiberghien.

Tom Service celebrates The Joy of Bach.

Mahler's music - Huge eighty minute long symphonies, enormous orchestral forces, it should be thought of as the epitome of a complex cerebral classical music culture, surely?

Not if Mahler has anything to do with it.

Tom Service discovers how Mahler is the first non-classical Classical composer, how he happily harvested his tunes from everwhere from folk songs and children's rhymes to the landscape and nature, and how we as listeners are the most crucial part of them all and why he wanted every one of us to hear his music differently.

Everyone loves good music, but when is music bad? Can we objectively define bad music - are there any rules to help - or is it a matter of taste and fashion? What music was once thought good but we now regard as bad? (And vice versa.)

Tom Service invites you to take stroll around a rogues' gallery of musical fakers, from the perpetrators of innocent pranks, to calculating fraudsters' deliberate deceptions. As well as the satisfying sight of seeing musical experts consuming humble pie, what are the motivations behind musical hoaxes? How can aesthetic value shift when work, once thought to be by a musical giant, is discovered to be a forgery or a by a much lesser figure? To help answer these and other questions, Tom is joined by Frances Christie, Sotheby's Head of Modern British Art, and author of An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin, Rohan Kriwaczek.

David Papp (producer)

Tom Service investigates the rise of the synthesizer. How did this initially crude assemblage of electrical components develop in a few decades to become one of the most ubiquitous and flexible of musical instruments? He consults Peter Zinovieff, inventor of the first British commercially available synthesizer (the VCS3, made in his garden shed in Putney); and also young composer/performer Hannah Peel, who likes to work with the sound of vintage analogue synths.