THE PROMS LISTENING SERVICE Radio 3’s Tom Service proposes onward sonic explorations inspired by the music of tonight’s Prom

SIR HARRISON BIRTWISTLE ELGAR Deep Time Symphony No. 2 Time. The essential stuff of music. And an The shattering cortège of its Larghetto is, investigation of musical time – timing, rhythm, supposedly, a memorial for King Edward VII, pulse, metre, strata and much more – has to whose memory the whole symphony is defined all of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s music. dedicated. But I don’t know: while there is a Music has always been the best medium sense of some grand public rite passing in for manipulating time – that’s what every front of us as this movement plays out, it composer has been doing since the dawn of, feels more deeply personal than some staged er, time! – but few have done so as thrillingly lament for a monarch, doesn’t it? For Elgar as Birtwistle. He composed an earlier piece himself, this national loss becomes a way for Daniel Barenboim which is a half-hour to express a much more personal grief: as exploration and explosion of a moment: well as his king, Elgar had recently lost two Exody 23:59:59 amplifies the final second of his closest friends. Memorial music on the of the end of one day, or year, or millennium, grandest of public stages has a strange power into an experience that at once stops time over us, and can become a lightning rod for in its tracks – it’s 30 minutes about a single us to process our own griefs and losses, on moment – and releases it into new the most intimate scale. That’s what Purcell’s dimensions. A more recent piece, Theseus Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary was doing Game, needs two conductors to co-ordinate for an earlier era, at the end of the 17th its different streams of musical time century; and it’s what John Tavener’s anthem (there are many more than two going on Song for Athene did for so many millions simultaneously), while one of Birtwistle’s first watching the funeral of Diana, Princess of orchestral masterpieces was the haunting Wales, in 1997. And whatever its origins, a ritual of The Triumph of Time. That’s a good piece of music can come to bear the weight place to start your adventures in Birtwistle’s of memorial through the way it’s used during labyrinths of musical time; but so too is times of national tragedy – or through the Gawain’s Journey, music that turns the seasons way it’s mediated and given meaning in in its original context in his opera Gawain, cinema. I’m thinking of the slow movement and which is transformed into an existential from a 20th-century which is orchestral experience as a half-hour piece in now freighted with images and associations, its own right. from the announcement of JFK’s death to the final scene of Oliver Stone’sPlatoon , along with countless other uses: ’s Adagio for Strings. Join Tom Service on his musical odyssey in The Listening Service on BBC Radio 3, Sundays at 5.00pm, from 3 September. Go to The Listening Service on the Radio 3 website to hear clips, watch animations, download previous episodes and listen to Listening Service playlist.

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