The Radio 3 Documentary

In this episode, Andy meets Kenyan harpist Ayub Ogada on a beach in Cornwall, the Antioch Gospel group in a car park in New Orleans, Cuarteto Iglesias on a roof top in Cuba and a young Ballake Sissoko next to the railway tracks in Bamako, Mali. On his very first day recording with his Walkman Pro, Andy visits the Edale Bluegrass Festival then travels to Leeds to record a rare performance from guitarist Mark Knopfler in a pub with his early group The Duolian String Pickers. Back in Andy’s kitchen Louisiana comes to Crouch End with sessions from blues man Lazy Lester and Cajun stars DL Menard, Eddie LeJeune and Ken Smith. Plus we pay another visit to Wilkinson's HiFi in Nelson to find out just why the compact cassette format is so enduring and well loved.

Seren Griffiths uses a walk along a sandstone ridge in Northern Cheshire to explore the way a landscape can hold multiple histories, and in doing so make it easier for us to contemplate distant futures.

Producer: Tom Alban

New Generation Thinker Dr Islam Issa has a strong cultural attachment to the Balcony. In his native Egypt, the place where architectural historians believe the balcony was first developed, the balcony is a pivotal part of family homes, a place that blurs the line between private and public living. He recalls it being a place that linked communities and allowed an external life without the risks of life in the open streets.

When he saw Italians singing from their balconies during the early weeks of the COVID pandemic he was reminded that they have many other roles in political, cultural and literary settings. With the help of Egyptian film maker and photographer Alia Aidel and Shakespeare scholar Reverend Paul Edmondson, Islam explores the use of Balconies from Romeo and Juliet to Buckingham Palace and reflects on his own upbringing in which he learned to look up and in to the family balcony and yet as he matured, realised he thought of it principally as a place to look out and down.

Producer: Tom Alban

When he was a boy and returned to the family home from primary school in the afternoon, Carlo Gébler would often hear the sound of typing coming from the shed at the foot of the garden. This was where his mother, the writer Edna O’Brien, sometimes went to write her novels.

Later, when he lay in bed at night, Carlo would again hear the sound of typing. This time it would be coming from the downstairs front room where his father, Ernest Gébler, wrote plays for television.

Now 66 and an acclaimed author himself, Carlo wants to know why the children of writers often follow their parent’s footsteps into literature. Exploring the dynamics of literary lineage and his own journey into writing, Carlo asks if it is simply an iron law that the apple rarely falls far from the tree - or if the truth is something far more complex.

Producer: Conor Garrett

An exploration of Beethoven’s music through the body that gave him so much trouble.

Why does the image of the forlorn and abandoned poet Thomas Chatterton haunt us today?

Hannah French explores a hidden disability for many musicians: pain.

It's understandable that, with the onset of a global pandemic, commentators have looked to the past for comparisons. But Dr Seb Falk is concerned that with the easy headlines about the mortality rate or the economic damage, or even the positive transformations inspired by plagues of the past and particularly in his field, the Black Death of the medieval period, more subtle comparisons emerging from exciting new Plague research are being overlooked. He hears from Dr Monica Green, a leading authority on the true origins and journey of the Black Death and finds, in her use of palaeogenetic research, refinements about the plague and its impact on those who lived with it. And he talks to Dr Zoë Fritz, consultant physician and Wellcome Fellow in Society and Ethics at the University of Cambridge, about the human responses beyond the science today that echo the experiences of our ancestors centuries ago. Rather than mortality rates and economic trauma, the more profound links might be the twin challenges of uncertainty and impotence and the human desire to overcome or deny both. Producer: Tom Alban

John Cage is arguably the most important composer of the 20th century, even though he's perhaps famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, for writing a piece of music that is 4'33" of silence.

Famous because it made his reputation - after all composers write music not silence – and infamous because not unsurprisingly, it's outraged, perplexed and fascinated audiences since its premiere in 1952.

Cage though was deadly serious about his silent piece, and Robert Worby goes on an odyssey to find out what Cage thought silence was, and why silence was central to his life and work.

Robert goes to the quietest place in the UK - so quiet you can't hear a pin drop - to experience what John Cage did, when he entered an anechoic chamber in the 50s in search of silence.

But it's not as straightforward as you might think, as Robert discovers Cage didn't find the silence he was seeking, and instead found something even more surprising.

The key to understanding 4’33”, and Cage’s fascination with silence, is his interest in the discipline of Zen Buddhism, which unlocked a whole new world of hearing sound that he charted through chance operations.

It led to a meeting of like minds when Cage met Yoko Ono in New York who instantly saw the Zen influence on his work. In 1962 Ono and her husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, invited Cage to visit Japan - his Zen spiritual homeland - a trip that later became known as the ‘Cage Shock’. It was a turning point in his career whose ground breaking performances sealed his reputation as the most controversial and experimental composer in the world.

The programme features two UK premieres on Radio 3, an interview Robert recorded with John Cage when he met the composer in NYC in the 80s after finding his number in the phone book, and Cage reading his Lecture on Nothing, his enigmatic musing on silence.

Produced by Andrew Carter - A BBC Radio Cumbria Production.

Photograph of D.T.Suzuki and John Cage meeting in Japan 1962, courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson on the radical 20th century publisher C.W.Daniel.