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Bach Walks: Oderwald to Wolfenbuttel Apr 23, 2019

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Episode 3/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude.

In the third of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for Bach's footsteps - and his ghost - the route takes us through the beeches of the Oderwald and on into the town of Wolfenbuttel.

Sounds of the Earth Mar 22, 2019

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Welcome to another Slow Radio podcast.

In this episode, there are the mesmerising sounds of storm Erik tearing through the rigging and halyards on the boats in Blyth harbour, Northumberland.

We glide to Ouse Washes in the Fenland country where Bewick's swans, coots, lapwings, reed buntings and skylarks fill the air with song.

And in the evening heavy seas of Gossabrough on Yell Island, Northern Shetland, there are eiders, Arctic terns, fulmars, skylarks and wrens.

The music includes Tom Waits’s No One Knows I’m Gone performed by The Unthanks, Troyte (Elgar’s evocation of a thunderstorm), Hoagy Carmichael’s Skylark, Alan Hovhaness’s Prayer of St. Gregory and Jim Ghedi’s folk masterwork Fortingall Yew.

Three Gardens in Trinidad Mar 08, 2019

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Radio 3 transports listeners to Trinidad, just off the coast of Venezuela, immersing them in the sounds of the Caribbean island, with writer and actor Elisha Efua Bartels as a guide.

Through the sounds of three Port-of Spain gardens - her home by the river in Diego Martin, a garden in the lush valleys of St Ann’s, to a house up in the hills, Elisha reflects on the rich tropical sounds of the island. Frogs, hummingbirds, parrots and occasional rainfall form a slowly shifting, vivid soundscape. We pass through cycles of warm sunshine, then heavy tropical rain, each change reflected in the types of calls we hear from the birdlife and frogs. These aren’t rarefied idylls though - on a warm evening parrots noisily flock through, disturbing the peace. Sometimes a radio or the sound of a party drifts up from the valley below; dogs bark, cockerels crow.

Elisha describes the extent to which she’s both sustained by, and living at the mercy of, the wildlife around her – the parrots so loud she can’t hear the TV, the frogs soothing her to sleep at night - and how the sounds evoke a strong sense of 'home' for her.

Sounds of the Earth Feb 25, 2019

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A montage of music and natural sounds from ravens on the Norwegian tundra around Tromso; upwelling of cold water currents at night in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean off the Galapagos islands; a MacGregor’s bowerbird in a New Guinean rainforest displaying its vocal talents to attract a mate, and the splashes of ice laden water moving and lapping on the shore of a river on Hokkaido Island, permeated by distant calls from goldeneye and whooper swans passing overhead.

Sound Walk: Winter Wanderer Feb 14, 2019

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Travel writer Horatio Clare walks in the Black Forest in Germany, thinking about the Romantic tradition of the Wanderer, and observing the sights and sounds of the forest

I Have Walked by Sweet Streams Feb 08, 2019

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The slow build of a midsummer dawn chorus in Snowdonia, North Wales, interwoven with the sounds of the brooks, streams, and rivers that creep through the hillsides down to the lake by the village: this programme is a tribute to the landscape and past poets of the heart of Snowdonia.

An isolated farmhouse near Trawsfynydd was the birthplace of the iconic Welsh shepherd-poet Hedd Wyn. But there were hundreds more like him in this mountainous corner of Wales: the sons and daughters of tenant farmers, artisans and workers, who left school at 14 but were nurtured by the community, the chapel and the eisteddfod system, and emerged as writers skilled in the craft of strict metre poetry.

They left behind englynion – short poems in restricted syllables (like haiku), that often describe the landscape. Punctuating the serene Trawsfynydd soundscape, we intersperse englynion, by poets from the area, hearing them first in Welsh, and then in English. The poems, written a century ago and further back, draw on ancient traditions, and distil visual images into gems. Hedd Wyn’s most admired is translated as: “I have walked by sweet streams in the nervous wind of the hill pastures, the sunlight a white arm about the old neck of the mountains.”

The impression is of a landscape haunted and re-populated by the poets that were moved during their lifetimes to write about their extraordinary surroundings – land they often worked hard on and tended themselves, and knew intimately.

With readings by poet and musician Gwyneth Glyn

Sounds of the Earth Feb 05, 2019

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A montage of music and natural sounds from a nightingale singing in a reforested WWI battlefield in Belgium, a sunrise over Wolverton Creek in north Norfolk with curlew and pink-footed geese, the Ngorongoro mountain crater in Tanzania with tropical boubou and weaver birds, and a national park Karnataka, India where you'll hear croaking frogs and wild gaur bellowing to one another.

Into the Forest - Squam Lake, New Hampshire, USA Jan 25, 2019

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A montage of sounds from the forests around Squam Lake, New Hampshire during the Fall, including the songs of the Carolina wren, red-breasted nuthatch and rufous-sided towhie; a Northern flicker tapping insistently on a tree trunk; red squirrels and chipmunks foraging for food, a pair of loons calling distantly from the misty lake and a barred owl hooting as it begins its nocturnal hunt.

Cattle Blessing on the Burren Jan 24, 2019

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Irish cows make their way up to the winter grazing grounds high above Galway Bay

Bach Walks: Schierke to Brocken Summit Jan 24, 2019

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Episode 2/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude.

In the second of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for his footsteps - and his ghost - the putative route takes him into the Harz Mountains and up to its highest point, the Brocken Summit.

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