How I had a whale of a time listening to Why Music?
It’s usually bad news when a radio network decides to embark upon an ambitious season themed around one thing or another. Radio 4 listeners know this better than most, having been dealing with a challenging World War One season since 2014 – which was recently joined by an enterprising Russian History season, and will presumably be supplanted by a Roaring Twenties season once the decade is out.
But there was a notable exception to the rule this weekend, as Why Music?
– a three-day festival of programmes about music and the mind – went out on Radio 3. Made in collaboration with the Wellcome Collection, a London museum which explores the intersections of science and art, this was a season with imagination, variety and brevity on its side – and it that didn’t feel like a doleful homework assignment for the ears.
Animal Memory (Radio 3, Sunday) was foremost among the highlights. Presented by the wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson, it was a stirring, deeply informed reflection on the music that animals make – and the windows that this music opens into their interior lives. Watson delved into his own archives, and we heard grey seals wailing like bereaved humans, ravens cawing with unmistakable intelligence, starlings uncannily
imitating the sound of a two-stroke engine. The loudest and most affecting of all were humpback whales in the Atlantic Ocean, whose songs sent a shiver straight down the spine. Watson, who is an Attenborough-class communicator as well as a great recordist, explained that every one of these whales sings the same song – but that it evolves, year on year, in a feat of composition and memory that remains mysterious to us.
The Listening Service (Radio 3, Saturday), another gem, explored a mystery of a more earthbound kind. The Germans, masters of the judicious noun, called them ohrwürmer; we translated this as “earworm”. Everywhere you go, the phenomena is the same: We hear a song, it gets into our head and refuses to leave. Tom Service played a medley of them at the top of the programme, including Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen, the theme from Indiana Jones by John Williams, Abba’s Mamma Mia and Land of Hope and Glory. Even writing their names down here, I find myself humming. But why?
As is so often, the programme deftly threw some light into the shadows. Kelly Jakubowski, a specialist in the psychology of music, was interviewed. She’d led a wide-ranging study of earworms, and had reached some interesting conclusions. It turns out that they often take their melodic lead from nursery rhymes; that they may have evolutionary roots that predate written language; and that an unexpected leap in pitch (think My Sharona by the Knack) is particularly earwormy. Jarvis Cocker, Service’s guest, listened on in wonder. So did I.
St Pancras Pianos (Radio 4, Friday) wasn’t part of Why Music?, but it ought to have been. Recorded entirely on location in the London station, its subject was the pianos that are dotted around the concourse, freely available for anyone to play. If you’ve been through St Pancras in the past five years, you’ll likely have heard them in passing. The beauty of this documentary was that it paused to listen, and to meet some of the people who take pleasure from them.
There was Jackson, a hearteningly upbeat college student whose dream is to play jazz in hotel bars (“if you’ve seen La La Land, that’s literally exactly what I want to do”); Sebastian, who goes to the station a few times a week to play jazz standards and unwind; and Sigi, who was off to see her ailing parents in Belgium, stopped to listen, before suddenly opening up about something from her family’s past. Music was a golden thread for all of them. Producer Sophie Sparham, for Overtone, did a wonderful job of weaving it into a radio programme.
Iapproached the autobiographical sitcom Liam Williams: Ladhood (Radio 4, Thursday) with trepidation. It’s in its second season now, but I’d not heard the first, and assumed from the billing – which mentioned youthful misadventures at Cambridge University – that it was another one of Radio 4’s bland university comedies, in which a recent Oxbridge graduate makes selfcongratulatory jokes aimed squarely at other Oxbridge graduates. I was wrong. Liam Williams, the writer and star, is a rare wit, with an outsider’s perspective and a gift for keen social observation. Thursday’s episode followed his attempt to straddle the opposing worlds of laddish drinking society and bohemian poetry circle. Disaster ensued. Evelyn Waugh would almost certainly have approved.
Gillian Reynolds is away