The Listening Service Folgen

Tom Service examines Dvorak's Symphony No 9, "From the New World", one of the BBC's current "Ten Pieces III". Dvorak told the New York Herald in 1893 that "a serious and original school of composition should be established in the United States of America" which he hoped would have at its foundation black composers, like those he met, taught, and whose music he promoted at the National Conservatory of Music of America. Alongside Dvorak's Symphony "From the New World', Tom explores the lesser known Symphonies of three black composers: William Grant Still, Florence Price and William Dawson and how they realised Dvorak's dream for American music and used the symphony to create new languages and communities of listeners.

Tom service explores the extraordinarily original music of Bela Bartok. This Hungarian composer, who was a contemporary of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, managed to avoid the direct influence of these two giants of modern music and created his own musical style, partly inspired by the folk music that he discovered (and recorded onto wax cylinders) in the Hungarian countryside before the First World War. His six string quartets are unmatched for their intensity and invention, and as a concert pianist himself, he wrote much groundbreaking piano music, including three concertos. Bartok's pedagogical series of pieces called Mikrokosmos is still much used by students of the piano, and Tom discusses the composer's piano music with another virtuoso pianist, Cédric Tiberghien.

Tom Service celebrates The Joy of Bach.