Discovering Composers on Radio 3

The number of Composer Collections on the Radio 3 website has reached a milestone of 40. Roger Philbrick is the senior content producer behind this long-running piece of in-depth curation, which has led to some 2000 archive composer programmes being made permanently available to listeners. As he prepares to leave the BBC after nearly 30 years’ service, Roger opens the composer jewel-box to show off the treasures inside ….

In 2002 I was working as Science producer for the Radio 4 website when it occurred to me that it might be possible to keep recordings of radio programmes online beyond the normal 7 day limit. This was fairly radical in the days before iPlayer or podcasts, but our audience approved and the idea quickly caught on with Arts and History programmes. Music broadcasts were trickier because we were only allowed to archive musical excerpts, rather than full performances. But this still allowed us to offer music documentaries and features with short musical illustrations.

A few years later, I moved to the Radio 3 online team and revelled in the wealth of music analysis programmes, presented with passion and in-depth knowledge by some of the best communicators in the business. The benefits of preserving these programmes were obvious: they had timeless value and provided encyclopaedic audio guides to the most popular composers and their works, perfectly complementing our concert broadcasts. So we started archiving Composer of the Week and Discovering Music on a weekly basis; later additions included editions of Music Matters, Proms Plus and finally CD Review’s Building a Library, which broadened the core composer/works menu to include comparisons of performance styles.

As I write, we are now able to offer almost 2000 programmes via the comprehensive Composers A to Z, plus less intimidating individual collections celebrating the 40 composers for whom we have most content. The formats range from short, bite-sized reviews of favourite works from Tom Service and Howard Goodall, through to complete biographical guides, delivered by Donald Macleod in his inimitable style. Among my personal favourites are the older, long-format editions of Discovering Music, in which Charles Hazlewood and Stephen Johnson take the audience on guided tours of the crown jewels of classical music, with extracts performed live by the BBC orchestras.

Assembling and curating this unique archive has been a privilege and pleasure, and I hope you find the contents as fascinating and entertaining as I have.

• Composers A-Z
• Discovering the Great Composers
• The Story of Music in 50 Pieces - with Howard Goodall and Suzy Klein
• Building a Library
• Opera Guides
• Roger Philbrick Music (personal website)