Archives for June 2011

Ian McMillan

I’m just gearing up for an enjoyable Summer reading poems; I know I’d do that anyway, sitting in my hammock devouring new pamphlets and slim volumes, but this year will be even more exciting because I’m judging the Proms Poetry Competition alongside the former Childrens’ Poet Laureate Michael Rosen. He’s not literally alongside me, of course. My hammock isn’t that wide!

I work a lot with musicians (I’m just back from Holmfirth where the new piece I’d written for choir and brass band with my composer friend Luke Carver Goss was performed for the first time as part of the Holmfirth Festival) and I love the way that words have to work hard to describe or illuminate music and, on the other hand, music has to bend and flow to accommodate words.

That’s the idea behind the Proms Poetry Competition, I guess: we want people to have a go at writing a poem based on a piece of music performed at this year’s Proms. The poem could be a description of how the music makes you feel, it could be an exploration of the actual event, it could be a memory provoked by the music. Any of these approaches are possible as long as the poem relates to the music in some way.

I know that, as a judge, I’ll be looking for poems that startle me, I’ll be looking for different approaches and sideways glances and new ways of treating an old favourite. What I’m especially looking for are poems from people who’ve never written a poem before, who somehow feel tickled by the idea of responding creatively to one of the greatest festivals of creativity in the world.

There are three age categories: 7-11, 11-18 and 18 to infinity, and, in a separate initiative, I’ll be running a couple of workshops on the 30th of July for families who fancy having a go at writing something that may well be performed later on by the chorus of the Family Orchestra.

Go, on, have a go. You know you want to. My hammock awaits!

Find details of the Proms Poetry Competition

Interactive Editor Gabriel Gilson gives the what, why and how of the new look Radio 3 website, launching in a few days' time ... 

Every four months, I get an email wrapped in a red bow summarising all the comments we've had from you about the website. Imagine opening up any aspect of your life to a survey, and you can guess the mixture of curiosity and fear with which we open the email. Tomorrow, I'm delighted to say we'll be taking a big step forward to address as many of the comments as we can. Assuming it passes all the final technical hurdles, we'll be launching a new version of the Radio 3 website in the next few days.

Why?

We've known for a while that the current site isn't giving good value for the audience. The features you use most can be hard to find, we're not able to make the best of our best content and, worst of all, no one likes the colour scheme!

What?

Behind the scenes, this isn't as big a change as it might look. All the familiar pages like the Schedule and the Playlists have been given a lick of paint and made easier to find. We've updated the design of the main pages for Classical, Jazz, World and Arts & Drama (renamed from Speech & Drama) to give us better space to get our best content out into the open and make the most of some new features:

• Online archive: Hundreds of hours of Composer of the Week and Discovering Music available to listen or download.
• Composer Index: This is a new page so you can find what programmes and information we have about each composer. From launch it will take you to archive documentaries, concert clips and CD recommendations. Over time, it'll get richer and richer as we add more content.
• Concerts: We'll continue to offer back to back highlights from recent performances, or if you want the full experience you can catch up with any concert broadcast in the last seven days. World class music making at your finger tips.

How?

Deciding what features to improve or add was done by reading all your comments, observing users of the current site and by bringing to the fore the content we hope provides the best experience. Behind the scenes, a lot of the work has been about plugging together 'feeds' of content. For instance, every concert broadcast on Radio 3 gets labelled ('tagged') as a concert when it reaches online. To create a page listing all the available concerts we just show everything with that tag. You can see the result in our current design here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/programmes/formats/performancesandevents

Other pages are constructed from good old HTML as a series of optional panels so we can add or remove content depending on what's going on. We'll release 'how to' guides when it's live and I look forward to being able to show you it in action. I'll also look forward to the next survey. Probably!

Music Nation - In Glasgow, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will be joined by artists including Nicola Benedetti for a celebration of sporting and musical heroes

Susannah Simons, the BBC's Project Executive for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, introduces Music Nation

Music Nation began as a small gleam of an idea - could we in midst of all the actiivity in 2012 create a moment where the nations' orchestras came together to create a noise?! 

Could we use this moment to blow away once and for all the outdated image of orchestras being out of date, old-fashioned and composed of white, middle-aged people in evening dress playing music by dead composers?

Amazingly, too many people who don't routinely come into contact with the UK's great orchestras still tend to cling to this old-fashioned idea of who they are and what they do - day in, day out across the country - while those of us who are fans know that this is simply not true: so how to win over the sceptics?



I began this crusade by recruiting the BBC's six performing groups and then set out to convince as many people as I could to join the party. At the beginning I had no idea what the response would be but in the event it has surpassed my wildest dreams - 45 exciting projects across the UK - some of them creating history, like when the RTE Concert Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra meet that weekend to play together: never mind the rugby at Croke Park, home of the Gaelic games - this is musicians doing for themselves!

And in London, children in Beijing will be linking up with children in London to play together as part of the LSO on Track programme - conducted by the great Valery Gergiev.



The Royal Scottish National Orchestra will journey to Shetland for a wonderful weekend of music-making across the islands, while at the other end of the country the BBC Concert Orchestra will be traversing Devon and Cornwall with up to 60 local musical groups. There will be choirs both amateur and professional joining forces across the country, new compositions in Rutland and Derby, African drummers, folk musicians, jazz musicians, and entire cities and towns like Southampton and Paisley immersing themselves in music.



It will be a wonderful celebration of the richness of our musical life - my only problem is whether to stay at home and listen to Radio 3 or join in one of the many musical moments - do I go to Shetland or Saffron Walden. One thing I do know - wherever it is, it will be great!

• Find more details about Music Nation.
• Find a list of Music Nation events confirmed so far here.
• Read a blog about Music Nation by the BBC's Director of London 2012, Roger Mosey, here.