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Toru Takemitsu "Rain Tree Sketch II" c. 1992
Recorded Live (2006)


Toru Takemitsu - Rain Tree Sketch II

Produced by Bobby Tamkin
Recorded at The Sound Ranch and The Village
Mar Vista, CA

Noir State Beach Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlSLvi2muh0

http://www.xuxufang.com

iTunes

Noir State Beach

An impressionistic feature on the notion of paradise - lost, sought and found.

"Look closer, said the programme ... knitting past to present, visions to realities, opening wide the mind's eye once more to the elusive horizon of human perfectibility." - Daily Telegraph 3.6.08

First broadcast 24th May 2008
Produced by Katie Burningham and Alan Hall

A Map Of Paradise

Blake Morrison presents an edition of the Radio 3 Sunday Feature that considers the life and work of poet, journalist and screenwriter James Agee - Pullitzer Prize winning author of A Death in the Family, collaborator with photographer Walker Evans on the seminal study of sharecroppers during the Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and script writer on The African Queen and Night of the Hunter.

With Agee's son Joel, Hugh Davis of the University of Tennessee, biographer Dwight Garner, Steve Cotham of the East Tennessee Historical Society, Caroline Blinder of Goldsmiths College, Knoxville artist RB Morris, Phil and Jed Burroughs (relatives of the 'Gudgers' in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) and rare archive of Agee himself.

First broadcast 16th September 2007 BBC Radio 3
Presented by Blake Morrison
Produced by Alan Hall

An American Legend: James Agee

Chaos and Creation examines why it is that mankind feels compelled to find explanations for the origins of 'life, the universe and everything', whether through myth, reason or faith.

Contributors include cosmologists Mark Hindmarsh and Kathy Romer, the classicist and Christian minister Teresa Morgan, the politician Phil Willis, the mythologist Sian Hawthorne and an evangelical physicist, Karl Giberson. Their reflections upon the value of seeking an explanation for creation and their challenging of whose purposes it serves are set within an analysis by Sharon Choa of Joseph Haydn's musical depiction of chaos and creation in Die Schöpfung's The Creation.

...this was a glittering, multi-textured feature about myths and concepts of origin, full of boggling questions ("What's the origin of the origin of the origin?") and clever people with minds that twinkle like the brightest stars." - The Guardian, 08 June 2009

First Broadcast 7th June 2009 BBC Radio 3
Produced by Alan Hall

Chaos And Creation

Danish poet and radio producer Pejk Malinovski devises a sequence from people's real dreams about Osama Bin Laden to reveal the impact on the collective unconscious of the 'war on terror'.

First broadcast 24th November 2007 BBC Radio 3
Produced by Pejk Malinovski

Dreaming Of Osama

Third generation southern jazz musician Will Thompson joined the Louisiana National Guard to fund his way through studies at the University of New Orleans. Then, in April 2004, instead of graduating, he found himself deployed to Iraq. 

During his tour of duty Will documented his experiences in recordings of the sound of calls to prayer, radio bulletins, the nightly 'music' of mortar attacks and the gentle conversation of his comrades on the rooftop of the US Military compound. Before his tour of duty was over, he released this collection of music and found sound, calling it his Baghdad Music Journal. 

Shortly before returning to New Orleans hurricane Katrina struck. He's now back, staying in a FEMA trailer park and completing his studies at Ellis Marsalis' jazz department. This is the story of a musician and reluctant soldier.

First broadcast 21st December 2006 BBC Radio 4
Produced by Alan Hall

William Thompson IV's War

In 2007 sound artist John Wynne was artist-in-residence for one year at Harefield Hospital in Middlesex, one of the world's leading centres for heart and lung transplantation. He worked with patients to capture their experiences, recording the sonic environment of the hospital itself and, with the help of medical techinicians, recorded devices such as VADs (Ventricular Assist Devices) both internally and externally.

John Wynne uses these recordings as compositional elements, revealing a world in which aural objects shift and surprise and where the listener is invited to explore deep within sound itself. 

First broadcast 21st June 2008 BBC Radio 3
Produced by John Wynne

Hearts Lungs And Minds

Leonard Cohen's muse when he turned from poetry to song-writing was a beautiful Norwegian woman immortalised in the song So Long, Marianne - this is their story, based on the award-winning programmes made for NRK by Kari Hesthamar. 

"...both of the interviews had a dreamy quality and listening to the two voices of Leonard and Marianne all these years later made for a programme you want to hear again and again." - BBC Radio 4 Pick of the Week 3.8.08 

"...a melancholic and incredibly moving memoir."  - Radio Times

First broadcast on 2nd August 2008 BBC Radio 4
Produced by Alan Hall

Leonard And Marianne

Jude Rogers and Ruth Barnes - both music journalists and pop fans - look at the empowering flipside of pop fandom.

"Presented by pop hacks Jude Rogers and Ruth Barnes, with some excellent and hilarious archive, this was an unashamedly pro-girl show that pointed out the advantages of young ladies going through a ridiculous pop fan stage [...] I liked the presentation style. Rogers and Barnes simply had a chat with each other, and relevant interviewees, including Rogers's mother-in-law, on the topic. Much warmer than sticking to a carefully crafted script." - The Observer, 2nd February 2014

First broadcast on 28th January 2014 BBC Radio 4
Presented by Ruth Barnes and Jude Rogers
Produced by Eleanor McDowall

Mad About the Boy

Elly Stone is a modest 87 year old New Yorker ("born and dragged up"), whose sublime voice will forever be associated with the songs of Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel.

In My Childhood, Song for Old Lovers, The Old Folks and Carousel she brings a new perspective to Brel's familiar emotional intensity and piercing social commentary.

Twenty years after her retirement from the stage, she offers a rare insight into her life and what music has meant to her - in a quiet New York studio, out on the streets of her bustling city and at Sardi's, the famous theatre restaurant.

Running through Elly's own story - from troubled childhood, through Broadway success, to marriage, motherhood and mid-life epiphany - there's a musical counterpoint that can be traced in the songs she famously made her own in the musical revue Jacques Brel's Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

First broadcast on 23rd December 2014 BBC Radio 4
Produced by Alan Hall

The Voices Of... Elly Stone

... a garden never spurns those who enter it ...

For the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, gardens provided both a source of inspiration and a metaphor for his music ... "I can imagine a garden superimposed over the image of an orchestra. A garden is composed of various different elements and sophisticated details that converge to form a harmonious whole. Each element does not exert its individuality, but achieves a state of anonymity - and that is the kind of music that I would like to create."

This portrait of the great Japanese composer combines the words of friends, family and admirers - including his daughter Maki, the conductors Oliver Knussen and Marin Alsop, the composers Dai Fujikura and Joji Yuasa, the pop musician David Sylvian, the film director Masahiro Shinoda and the Tokyo gardener Ryutaro Takahara - with sounds from Takemitsu's favourite Kyoto gardens and examples from his concert music, film scores and a specially recorded performance of his arrangement of Yesterday by the guitarist Daisuke Suzuki. 

"What emerged from Alan Hall's hypnotically calm radio portrait of the composer was a short life lived along dizzingly intellectual principles but also studded with fun." - The Guardian

"Takemitsu's music was interwoven with the voices of his daughter and friends and sounds from nature, creating a beautiful composition - a radio garden." - The Independent 

First broadcast on 22nd April 2007 BBC Radio 3
Produced by Alan Hall

Enter The Garden: A Portrait of Toru Takemitsu

Interview and tracklist: http://thefader.com/2015/04/07/cuushe-fader-mix-and-interview

FADER Mix: Cuushe

Ravel Jeux D'eau

In 1931, during the Depression, an unknown young black woman took her new-born son to a Pittsburgh orphanage. And so began jazz pianist Horace Parlan´s life. At the age of five, he was struck by polio and lost the use of three fingers on his right hand, yet somehow, against the odds, he managed a long career as a professional musician. Now, aged 84, he lives in a nursing home outside Copenhagen, Denmark.

His journey through life was always guided by music – and still is. From the spirituals of his upbringing to his experiences as a musician in 1960’s New York City. Then, in 1972, he moved to Denmark and joined Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Oscar Pettiford and other Afro-American jazz musicians who had found a haven there during those turbulent years. Most of his colleagues left, but Horace stayed, marrying a Danish woman, Norma, with whom he shared his life for 37 years.

Despite his disability Horace found his own sound as a pianist and played with some of the biggest names – Charles Mingus and Archie Shepp among them. But now, blind for eight years, wheelchair-bound and widowed two years ago, he spends his days in a small coastal town outside Copenhagen. His long piano fingers are stiff - he no longer plays - but he spends every day surrounded by music and looks forward to regular trips to Copenhagen’s legendary Montmartre Jazz Club. Rikke Houd presents a portrait of Horace Parlan.

First broadcast 14th July 2015, BBC World Service
Produced by Rikke Houd

A Portrait of Horace Parlan

MIX #3 L'Hiver Moderne

Toru Takemitsu's work for the classical guitar recorded in 2012 as part of my Studio Experience module during my postgrad at RCM.

Engineer: Ben Connellan
Producer: Lily Thornton.

All In Twilight - I (Toru Takemitsu)

Dancer and personal trainer Beck Beverage discusses how to be in a relationship with your body and the idea that we are or are not our bodies.

S1E4: Body Feelings with Beck Beverage

Endgame & Leevisa   (November 28, 2018)

Inhabiting the ideas of author and speaker Charles Eisenstein, this edition of Lights Out explores our current historical moment in the West as a "space between stories". For thousands of years, for many people on earth, The Story of Separation has dominated our way of being, shaping how we consider ourselves and our purpose on earth. But as that story breaks down, a new way of being begins to emerge...

Featuring the voices of:
@charleseisenstein
Dr Chris Johnstone
Sister Lāng Nghiêm
Luci Tapahonso

Lights Out: The Space Between Stories [BBC Radio 4, 2020-03-16]

Philip FM on NTS April 7th 2020

Akria Nakada: A Song of Early Spring
Arranged for solo guitar by Tōru Takemitsu (1977)
Marco Del Greco, guitar

Arr. Takemitsu - A Song of Early Spring (Akira Nakada)

Life is painful and hilarious: Selective bgms for Hyundai card art street 2020 (YBS)

https://hkcr.live/shows/cehryl-with-special-guest-natalie-a-chao-filmmaker--23-12-2020

cehryl with special guest natalie a. chao (filmmaker) - 23/12/2020

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Enter The Garden: A Portrait of Toru Takemitsu

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