In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art.It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said, “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody underst…

"For the next hour, I need your ears". It's 1974 and someone is trying to recruit you for a listening experiment on public radio in Canada. Pioneering Canadian composer and soundscape maestro, R Murray Schafer really wants you to commit: "if you're just listening to this programme casually, you'd better turn it off right now". This audio experiment…

Via ports and truck-stops, fulfilment centres and ring roads, Aidan Tulloch follows the supply chain and reimagines the journey an item goes on in the age of 24/7 delivery.By BBC Radio 3

Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.By BBC Radio 3

Denton Welch lived the last years of his short life in Kent during the Second World War. His writing career took off in 1943 and in the same year he met his companion, Eric Oliver. His writing is mostly autobiographical and carries his readers from a childhood in Shanghai, boarding school in 1930s England, a near-fatal bicycle accident while he was…

Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Famed for his soulful voice and perfect Yiddish pronunciation, he performed in synagogues and theatres across the Eastern United States and toured Germany, Poland and Palest…

Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespeare library, the brainchild of the first librarian George Dawson. From the outset it was to be the People's Folio, the property of the city's Free library. You can find the evidence stamped in red ink …

Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American lifeBy BBC Radio 3

One day, three decades after the event, the German poet and man of letters, Heinrich Heine, stood on the site of the battle of Marengo, one of Napoleon's earliest and most important victories and had an epiphany - or he invented one for his readers: ""Gradually, day by day, foolish national prejudices are disappearing; all harsh differentiations ar…

American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was willing to track down songs in unlikely places, once writing "I don't scare easily." She spent a night riding in a hearse in Wisconsin…

Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben EnwonwuBy BBC Radio 3

“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, according to which the city was created by the siren Partenope. Song has been woven into Neapolitan life ever since, giving the city an extraordinary musical culture and heritage. Joanna Robertson travels to Nap…

Metalworking has been central to the rise and success of Birmingham over hundreds of years. But how has this industry affected the culture of the city? Did the experience of working with metal and hearing the continuous clang of metal-on-metal seep into the personality and creativity of Birmingham’s inhabitants? Gregory Leadbetter’s poem traces thi…

From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the tiny island of Barbados. There, they were enslaved by British landowners and forced to work the sugar plantations that covered the island. Uprooted from their homelands, separated from their families …

During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, avoiding imminent death in ghettos, firing squads and killing centres. Many of them wrote music about these horrors as the Holocaust was unfolding before their eyes. A miraculous discovery in the Ver…

In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he was a teenager had been his adopted home. It was the year that Frankie Goes to Hollywood had a Europe-wide hit with Two Tribes and Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh personal computer. But Ross had an idea with mo…

Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare Pollard. As a celebrated playwright and poet, with much of her work focused on giving a voice to forgotten women, how could she not have known about Anne Lock? In this Sunday Feature, Pollard takes listeners int…

London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career. Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage and an alluring French lodger called Charles Gounod, Tavistock House is reputable for having been the home of three eccentric creatives - the Mancunian painter Frank Stone, the world’s most famous writer and a…

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one of the biggest massacres of World War Two. Lucy Ash pieces together the events leading up to the controversial first performance by speaking to people who witnessed it in a Moscow concert hall 60 years ago: the …

Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle city walls, in search of clues in Basil Bunting's life and work to help understand this neglected masterpiece of twentieth century modernist poetry . It's a landscape that the former MP for Penrith and the Borders…

The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thriveBy BBC Radio 3

ECA Director Alex Klein interviews Gideon Zelermyer, Cantor at Montreal’s prestigious Congregation Shaar Hashomayim who has performed around the world as a featured soloist and with the Shaar Hashomayim choir, receiving widespread critical acclaim. Recorded live on 9th February 2022.

ECA Director Alex Klein interviews Alberto Mizrahi, Hazzan Emeritus at Anshe Emet Synagogue, Chicago, US. One of the world’s leading interpreters of Jewish music who has thrilled audiences worldwide on the pulpit, in recitals, symphony and opera. Recorded live on 26th January 2022.

ECA Director Alex Klein interviews Rabbi Cantor Lionel Rosenfeld. Rav Lionel is erstwhile senior rabbi at London's Western Marble Arch Synagogue and fifth generation scion of Jerusalem Rabbonim and Cantors. He is deeply respected for his composition of new and exciting Jewish music and as performer at major events around the globe, including with t…

Cantor Deborah Katchko-Gray, much respected cantorate teacher and internationally acclaimed recording and concert artist, who has served as cantor and director of music for synagogues across the United States, talks to European Cantors Association director Alex Klein. Recorded live on 5th January 2022.…

If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Conservatory of St Petersburg, the 26-year-old started composing his first symphony, ‘Winter Daydreams’, but quickly ran out of steam. “No other work cost him such effort and suffering… its composition was fraught…

Cantor Faith Steinsnyder, much respected cantorate teacher and internationally acclaimed recording and concert artist, who has served as cantor and director of music for synagogues across the United States, talks to European Cantors Association director Alex Klein. Recorded live on 22nd December 2021.…

In a 'something different' mode for the mid-season programme, Rabbi Yossi Binstock, Chazan at St Johns Wood Synagogue interviews Alex Klein, Director of the European Cantors Association and legendary UK impresario. Recorded live on 8th December 2021.

Rabbi Cantor Michael Plaskow MBE, Emeritus Chazan of London's Woodside Park and Freeman of the City of London talks to European Cantors Association director Alex Klein. Recorded live on 24th November 2021.

Cantor Moshe Dubiner, Legendary UK Chazan now in his seventh decade of professional practice, talks to European Cantors Association director Alex Klein. Recorded live on 10th November 2021.

Internationally renowned Cantor Jacob Mendelson of New York features in the second programme of the second series of our Voice of the Cantor talking about his remarkable career, in conversation with European Cantors Association director Alex Klein. Recorded live on 27th October 2021.

Internationally renowned Cantor Beny Maissner of Toronto opens the second series of our Voice of the Cantor talking about his remarkable career in conversation with European Cantors Association director Alex Klein. Recorded live on 13th October 2021.

The European Cantors Association launched Michael Jolles’s Encyclopaedia of British Jewish Cantors, Chazanim, Ministers and Synagogue Musicians: their history and culture on October 6th. This book is a major contribution to the knowledge of cantors and ministers who have served British Jewish communities in a musical capacity over the centuries fro…

LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby goes on a personal journey to find out why it divides critics and audiences. Stockhausen was the most gifted composer of the post-war European avant-garde. In the 1950s, his early works - including some of the …

Opportunities for women to enter the cantorate are relatively recent in its 200+ year history. While women in the cantorate are more established now in progressive communities in the United States, what are the opportunities and challenges for cantors in such synagogues in the UK, Europe and Israel in the coming years, in a societal framework of gr…

In the penultimate session in our series, we look at the resurgence of cantorial art in Europe in new or revived communities since the Holocaust, a renaissance which has established since the end of the Cold War and the creation of the European Union. What challenges have the cantors in these communities faced and how have they dealt with them. Wha…

European Jewry has had a choral tradition for 200 years. But has the conventional choir outlived its usefulness? Do we need a new agreed model for congregational singing? If we keep our choirs, should they be community assets or staffed by professionals (or a mix)? What role has the choir in keeping old traditions going and teaching new music? Or s…

What do we mean by Nusach and wherein lies its importance? Is this centuries-old tradition, the immutable structure for the music of prayer? Or is the melody of the synagogue more changeable and less constant than we think? Is it OK to use modern Israeli or Yeshivah tunes instead? Or even secular songs ? Nusach Part II examines these issues from a …

What do we mean by Nusach and wherein lies its importance? Is this centuries-old tradition, the immutable structure for the music of prayer? Or is the melody of the synagogue more changeable and less constant than we think? Is it OK to use modern Israeli or Yeshivah tunes instead? Or even secular songs ? In Nusach Part I, we join a panel of Cantors…

In 'Voice of the Cantor' the series to date has primarily considered the cantor as the chief singer of the Ashkenazi synagogue. But Sephardi and Oriental communities have their cantors and leaders too. Their roles and styles are sometimes quite similar to those of the traditional Ashkenazi cantor, but often very different as well. What are the core…

During the 1980s and 1990s, DJ Andy Kershaw travelled around Africa and the Americas searching out great music and taping it on his Walkman Pro, a new broadcast-quality cassette recorder that was bringing about a revolution in mobile recording. He also used it to capture his celebrated Kitchen Sessions, held in his small flat in Crouch End. In this…

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 trave…

In “The Carlebach Conundrum” we examine the issues presented by the type of music used in services in the genre of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, focusing on the phenomenon of the music, which might be described as neo-Hasidic or 'easy singing music'. Leaving aside any view as to the subjective musical merits of Carlebach’s own compositions, we s…

Does the Modern Orthodox agenda leave room for the conventional cantor? A discussion with Michael Goldstein, President, United Synagogue UK Cantor / Minister Alby Chait, United Hebrew Congregation, Leeds UK Cantor Steven Leas, Central Synagogue, London UK Rabbi Cantor Danny Bergson, St Annes Hebrew Congregation, St Annes UK Cantor Adam Caplan, Pres…

How have we adapted after a year of the modern plague? Three experienced ministers from UK orthodox communities talk with ECA's Hirsh Cashdan about the special challenges of the pandemic for their communities and how they have negotiated a second 'Passover in Pandemic'. Recorded live on 31st March 2021.…

Three experienced cantors Cantor Benny Rogosnitzky (Orthodox, NYC); Cantor Jason Green (Conservative, Ottawa); and Rabbi Cantor Gershon Silins (London), who've practised in UK and North America discuss, if the nusach's the same and the music's similar, what's different for them and their congregations working either side of the Atlantic? In convers…

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.The landscape in question is bordered on the north by the M56 motorway. Commuters making their way into Manchester see it to their right for all of …

As a curtain-raiser for European Cantors Association's innovative programme Voice of the Cantor, we presented internationally renowned cantor and star of the musical theatre, Dudu Fisher, in conversation with the ECA’s Director Alex Klein, exploring his amazing trajectory and how he has managed to balance a career on the bimah and the stage. This e…

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…

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 typi…