interviews

Composer Nathalie Joachim sees her childhood memories in May Flowers. The photograph also evokes the uniquely spiritual experience of recording a church choir in her family’s Haitian village. Joachim has lovingly woven their song into her composition. 

Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/nathalie-joachim-carrie-mae-weems-may-flowers.html

Subscribe directly to Sound Thoughts on Art from the National Gallery of Art on Apple Podcasts (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nati…rt/id1552618916), Google Podcasts (podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly…AAAAAHQAAAAAQBA), Spotify (open.spotify.com/show/7cyalz9GPgP…8nTY6xdrUUGHn46A), Stitcher (www.stitcher.com/show/sound-thoughts-on-art), or your favorite podcast app (https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NGAT6207729686).

Nathalie Joachim and Carrie Mae Weems’s “May Flowers”

Welcome to “Un Cafecito with a Woman in STEM”, a sub-series of SWE’s Diverse podcast. In this Diverse episode, Marissa Doyen, Hispanic Heritage Month Lead within SWE's Latinos Affinity Group, speaks with Melanie Weber, a structural and mechanical design engineer at the Boeing Company working on the CST-100 Starliner Spacecraft.

EP 138: Un Cafecito With a Woman in STEM: Melanie Weber

Episode 6: Talkin' Talking Books at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Books Library

Ira Glass, creator and host of “This American Life,” talks to composer Nico Muhly, who has composed a wide scope of work for ensembles, soloists and organizations including the New York Philharmonic, the American Symphony Orchestra, and the Paris Opera Ballet. In this colorful conversation, Muhly and Glass discuss music, anxiety, and their image of the first Christmas.

Nico Muhly & Ira Glass on Composers & the Internet

Core member of Arcade Fire, Richard Reed Parry, visual artist and two-time Sobey Award-nominee Diane Borsato and choreographer Christopher House discuss the relationship between artistic practice and slowing down in an accelerated world. Moderated by Dominic Girard. #banffcentretalks

Richard Reed Parry, Diane Borsato, Christopher House on Slowing Down in an Accelerated World (Panel)

Well known for novels such as Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace, the MaddAddam Trilogy, and the Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood has been in the news recently due to the appearance of her international bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale as a television series – some say, just in time for the age of Trump.

In this one-time London appearance, Margaret Atwood reads from her work; then, in conversation with Gaby Wood, journalist and Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, she discusses not only her career, but the past, present and future of her best-known novel and the real world it reflects.


This podcast is part of London Literature Festival 2017 at Southbank Centre southbankcentre.co.uk/londonlitfest
For more of biggest and most influential names in modern literature southbankcentre.co.uk/literature

Margaret Atwood in Conversation with Gaby Wood

Visionary and pioneering Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performed for us recently and talked about Bach, Chopin and his rare condition called synesthesia which means he associates colours with pitch.

"I have this thing from when I was like five or six… I have perfect pitch or absolute hearing so when I would you know think about F minor that would be blue for me, I mean A major would be yellow, B major is purple."
VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON

If you missed our Vikingur Olafsson pre-concert talk watch here and to hear more from great pianists see our International Piano Series - https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/festivals-series/classical-season/international-piano-series

Vikingur Olafsson

On August 17, 2017, an alert went out. 

Gravitational wave detectors in Louisiana and Washington state had detected a disturbance from deep space. 

The effect was subtle — these detectors and a sister site in Italy measure disturbances smaller than a proton. But the evidence was dramatic. And the story they told was truly cataclysmic: 

A pair of neutron stars had spiraled to their deaths.

That apocalyptic collision of two super-dense stars bent the very fabric of space time — just as Einstein had predicted. It sent Gamma rays out into deep space. It created an immense cloud of gaseous gold.

And, 130 million years later, astronomers on earth witnessed the final 100 seconds of these two stars’ dance of death.  It’s taught us where gold came from, and helped humans understand other intractable mysteries of the universe.

In this episode of Orbital Path, Dr. Michelle Thaller speaks with two astronomers who watched this cosmic death tango from the best seats in the house. 

We’ll hear from Dr. Vicky Kalogera. She’s Director of CIERA — the Center of Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics at Northwestern University. Kalogera was a lead author on a journal article on the neutron star collision co-authored by close to 4,000 scientists.

We’ll also hear from physicist Mike Landry. He’s Head of LIGO Hanford — one of the sites that, in collaboration with Italy’s VIRGO detector, measured the neutron stars’ characteristic gravitational waves.

 Orbital Path is produced by David Schulman. The program is edited by Andrea Mustain. Production oversight by John Barth and Genevieve Sponsler. Hosted by Dr. Michelle Thaller.

Support for Orbital Path is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science, technology, and economic performance. More at sloan.org  

Image credit: CALTECH/NSF/LIGO Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet
Audio chirp credit: LIGO/University of Oregon/Ben Farr

For more about the show, visit orbital.prx.org

Star Death Tango

Hi Fast Company listeners! Please enjoy this sneak peek of our new podcast, Creative Conversation. In the first episode best-selling author David Sedaris explains how he spins the seemingly mundane into gold, the challenges of being a humorist in the P.C. age, and why he finds criticism so hard to process.

For the full episode and series, please subscribe via:
Apple Podcasts (iTunes): https://goo.gl/wUSWwf
Google Play: https://goo.gl/yKHHLx
Stitcher: https://goo.gl/L6P8pC

Preview: Creative Conversation with author David Sedaris

Ahead of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Southbank Centre welcomed the six shortlisted authors for an evening of live readings and discussion, hosted by writer columnist and playwright Damian Barr.

The Man Booker Prize is a byword for the finest literary fiction, with its list of past winners containing some of the greatest writers of the last five decades. In the running for this year’s award are the following authors, who joined us on Sunday 14 October, to read from their shortlisted novels.

Anna Burns (UK) – Milkman (Faber & Faber)
Esi Edugyan (Canada) – Washington Black (Serpent’s Tail)
Daisy Johnson (UK) – Everything Under (Jonathan Cape)
Rachel Kushner (USA) – The Mars Room (Jonathan Cape)
Richard Powers (USA) – The Overstory (William Heinemann)
Robin Robertson (UK) – The Long Take (Picador)

The 2018 Man Booker Prize winner is revealed on the evening of Tuesday 16 October at a special dinner at London’s Guildhall.

2018 Man Booker Prize Readings

To make a black hole, you need to think big. Really big. 

Start with a star much bigger than the sun — the bigger the better. Then settle in, and wait a few million years for your star to die.

That should do the trick, if you want to get yourself a garden-variety black hole. But there’s another kind of black hole. They are mind-boggling in size. And deeply mysterious:

Super-massive black holes. 

Last year, in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers reported finding one with the mass of 800 million suns. It’s the most distant black hole in the known universe. And it’s so ancient, it dates to a time when it seems light itself was only just beginning to move.

On this episode of Orbital Path, Dr. Michelle Thaller talks with astrophysicist Chiara Mingarelli — Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York. Using a special gravitational wave observatory, Dr. Mingarelli is part of a cadre of astronomers hoping ancient super-massive black holes will soon reveal mysteries dating to the dawn of our universe.

Orbital Path is produced by David Schulman. 
Our editor is Andrea Mustain. Production oversight by John Barth and Genevieve Sponsler.

Support for Orbital Path is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science, technology, and economic performance.

For more about the show, visit orbital.prx.org

Black Holes from the Dawn of Light

How could I resist and not "kidnap" Ira to tell me Why he feels Radio is beautiful. This was recorded in Barcelona, at the biggest European Radio Conference RADIO DAYS EUROPE 2012. 

Ira Glass interview: "Why is radio beautiful!"

Inspired by the forthcoming Soundstate festival, Harriet Fitch Little is joined by Southbank Centre's Music Director, Gillian Moore; Susanna Eastburn, CEO of Sound & Music; and Dai Fujikura, composer of contemporary classical music. 

They discuss the trouble with genres, how writing music will never be the same and why they don't use the word 'classical'.

Think Aloud: Modern music – composing, curating and cl***ical

In this episode, Harriet Fitch Little is joined by paralympian, TV presenter and children’s author Ade Adepitan, and children’s book critic Imogen Russell Williams to talk about the lack of diversity in children’s literature.

“I suddenly started to get a perception that certain people did certain things, that main protagonists, that strong characters, that hero characters were all white, middle class.”
ADE ADEPITAN

They discussed why children’s literature is so behind, why we can’t eliminate the past and who should be dealing with this - the authors, the publishers or the parents?

Also, children's author and illustrator Nadine Kaadan answered the burning question: how do you create a character for children?

To see all the events at Imagine Children's Festival and to buy tickets, go to https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/festivals-series/imagine-childrens-festival

Think Aloud: Children's books – why literature for the future is stuck in the past

Lark Cato was born in Taiwan to Taiwanese parents but was shortly thereafter adopted by an African American mother. Growing up Lark knew her mother was eccentric but only later in life did she learn the reason why. Lark joins host Olubunmi Bakare to discuss her struggle to deal with the care of her aging mother and her mothers recent diagnosis.

DCPL Radio -- Episode 64 -- All Things Local: The Taboo of Mental Illness

This Sunday Ira Glass visited the J-school to impart his wisdom on thinking, writing and stories worth telling. Act 2: Ira glass j-schools us on thinking, writing and stories worth telling. 

Ira Glass speaks to UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Join poet Holly Corfield Carr, exploring human and non-human ways of looking at and listening to trees, in this podcast from Hayward Gallery's Among the Trees exhibition.

Holly considers artworks by Giuseppe Penone, Robert Smithson, Roxy Paine and Mariele Neudecker, and interweaves her own words with poems by Vahni Capildeo, Emily Dickinson, Sasha Dugdale and Alice Oswald.

A fly’s-eye-view of Among the Trees

Malala Yousafzai's activist work championing the educational rights of girls led to her being shot by a Taliban gunman in 2012, when she was just 15 – but she refused to be silenced.

She came to the Southbank Centre to launch her memoir I Am Malala on Sunday 20 October 2013, appearing in conversation with former Southbank Centre Artistic Director Jude Kelly. The following year, Yousafzai became the youngest ever Nobel laureate. 

In our recording of that talk, hear Yousafzai speak about sibling rivalry, her love for the landscape of her home in Pakistan's Swat Valley, and, of course, her belief in the power of education.

'We need to change the ideology. We need to tell people what the real power is. You are not powerful if you have a gun, because through guns you can only kill. You are powerful when you have a book, when you have a pen, because through pens you can save lives. And that's the change that we want to bring in our society.'

Malala Yousafzai In Conversation with Jude Kelly

In 2019, Jean Paul Gaultier brought his Fashion Freak Show – called a 'fabulous fiesta of fabric and flesh' by The Guardian – to the Southbank Centre. 

But before his extravaganza exploded onto the stage at Royal Festival Hall, the designer himself appeared here in conversation with TV presenter Anita Rani, reflecting on his decades in fashion.

Born in a Paris suburb in 1952, Gaultier started his career at Pierre Cardin at the age of just 18. He has gone on to rise to the top of the fashion world with his own label, ruffling industry feathers and dressing huge stars – including Madonna in the now-infamous bustier – along the way. 

Hear him discuss his childhood inspirations, his love of British eccentricity and his vision for the future of the fashion industry in our podcast.

Jean Paul Gaultier in conversation

Nam June Paik used Ommah, Korean for “mother,” as the title of his final video sculpture. For composer and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon, this evokes the mother tongue and the motherland. Through the concept of cultural blood memory, Yoon explores whether we carry the sounds and memories of our people within us. She responds to Paik’s work by bringing together traditional Korean instruments and her own eclectic electronic music.

Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/bora-yoon-and-ommah.html.

Subscribe directly to Sound Thoughts on Art from the National Gallery of Art on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/national-gallery-of-art-sound-thoughts-on-art/id1552618916), Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmdhLmdvdi9jb250ZW50L2RhbS9uZ2F3ZWIvcG9kY2FzdHMvc291bmQtdGhvdWdodHMtb24tYXJ0LnhtbA?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwjo6LeS5-HuAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBA), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/7cyalz9GPgPLAsjy4rJ4hQ?si=4jMH4x8nTY6xdrUUGHn46A), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/show/sound-thoughts-on-art), or your favorite podcast app (https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NGAT6207729686).

interviews

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