CotW wins award

[french frank]

"BBC Radio 3′s Composer of the Week programme has been voted by listeners as the best arts and music programme on radio at the 23rd Voice of the Listener and Viewer (VLV) awards."

http://www.classicalmusicmagazine.org/2015/06/radio-3s-composer-of-the-week-wins-listener-award/

[Gordon]

Coo! that was quick of the mark they were only announced a couple of hours ago at the VLV Spring Conference!!

See here for details and articipants http://www.vlv.org.uk/vlv-events/awa...onference.html

including a link for the nominations and categories down the page. All nominations but 1 in the Arts Programme category were R3. R3 not nominated for best digital station but CFM was!! Catherine Bott nominated as best individual contributor to Radio! Don't know yet if she won or not. Presentations by our dear "friend" Mr Naughtie!!

[Pianorak]

Very pleased to hear that!

[Serial_Apologist]

COTW should now be made R3's flag-bearer!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

COTW should now be made R3's flag-bearer!

[teamsaint]

COTW should now be made R3's flag-bearer!

One of them, along with an expanded strand of " Discovering Music".

[MrGongGong]

COTW should now be made R3's flag-bearer!

Here is the For3 flag where RW is slain by the forces of the Havergal Brian society
Wave it high brothers and sisters

[Bryn]

Here is the For3 flag where RW is slain by the forces of the Havergal Brian society
Wave it high brothers and sisters

Hang on. RW gave us a particularly fine Gothic (in the RAH if not via Radio 3, and the audio engineering problems can hardly be laid at his door), and the issue on CD of The Tigers was also sorted under his leadership. I hardly think the HBS has much of a gripe with him.

[doversoul1]

Congratulations to Donald Macleod and the production team, and hurray to the Real Listener Power.

[EdgeleyRob]

Fully deserved.

[gradus]

Consistently one of the best music programmes on R3; a fully deserved award.

[Sir Velo]

At the risk of being a lone voice in the wilderness here I have to confess to finding the avuncular storytelling approach which DM adopts to be somewhat antagonistic to a full appreciation of a composer's work. The programmes suffer from insufficient critical analysis of compositional development, with any criticism limited to the "how ignorant they were back then, compared to us not to recognise the great genius" kind. In fact, the best programmes are usually those where an expert guest is invited on (eg George Benjamin on Ligeti) and MacLeod takes a back seat.

Allied to that, I find the falling cadences with which DM imparts the inevitable news of the composer's demise drive me to tears of laughter, which I recognise is not the reaction intended to be engendered.

It's all a far cry from Antony Hopkins and Robert Simpson.

[Serial_Apologist]

At the risk of being a lone voice in the wilderness here I have to confess to finding the avuncular storytelling approach which DM adopts to be somewhat antagonistic to a full appreciation of a composer's work. The programmes suffer from insufficient critical analysis of compositional development, with any criticism limited to the "how ignorant they were back then, compared to us not to recognise the great genius" kind. In fact, the best programmes are usually those where an expert guest is invited on (eg George Benjamin on Ligeti) and MacLeod takes a back seat.

Fair enough - another criticism I would make would be loss of chronological continuity: this week's COTW on Koday personnifying an instance in point. But I think all this has to do with a general tabloid-style downplaying of innovation as being illusory or elitist - shades of Stalinist Socialist Realism re-justified as an apologia for market determinism, i.e. so-called freedom through choice - ignoring the innovation that most works feed off, while at the same time emphasising the biographical. At least this serves to place music and musicians in wider contexts that help make sense, as against concentration on works delimited by individual idiomatic development divorced from context I and others of my 1950s/60s generation were brought up on. The creator's world makes him or her so much more interesting unless one suffers tunnel vision, and this has to be said in favour of the present COTW. The solution surely must lie in a better balance between considering the works for themselves and placing them and their makers in their times.

[french frank]

It's all a far cry from Antony Hopkins and Robert Simpson.

But it doesn't have the same purpose as their programmes. We don't have programmes like that because their programmes ceased and weren't replaced, the nearest being Discovering Music - particularly when it first started.

Composer of the Week is, or so I thought, principally biographical, setting the music against the composer's life. Was it ever a musicological programme?

[Tevot]

One of them, along with an expanded strand of " Discovering Music".

Mos Def ... as hipsters apparently say

Best Wishes,

Tevot