In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art. It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said, “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened”. The composer Samuel Andreyev shows how composers and artists in New York in this period went about the difficult business of wrestling with a new abstract language, often at great cost to themselves, to produce ..read more

"For the next hour, I need your ears". It's 1974 and someone is trying to recruit you for a listening experiment on public radio in Canada. Pioneering Canadian composer and soundscape maestro, R Murray Schafer really wants you to commit: "if you're just listening to this programme casually, you'd better turn it off right now". This audio experiment was part of a series on the CBC - the Canadian Broadcasting Company, called Soundscapes of Canada, consisting of ten hours of soundscape montage, field recordings and lessons in listening. From Church bells, to birdsong, to car horns and an entire e ..read more

Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance ..read more

Denton Welch lived the last years of his short life in Kent during the Second World War. His writing career took off in 1943 and in the same year he met his companion, Eric Oliver. His writing is mostly autobiographical and carries his readers from a childhood in Shanghai, boarding school in 1930s England, a near-fatal bicycle accident while he was in art college, a slow convalescence and, finally, to his years travelling about the Kent countryside, picnicking, exploring churches and observing rural life with an artist's eye. And a queer eye. His subtle and gently subversive descriptions of sa ..read more

Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Famed for his soulful voice and perfect Yiddish pronunciation, he performed in synagogues and theatres across the Eastern United States and toured Germany, Poland and Palestine. But after his death in 1954, LaRue Jones disappeared from memory, leaving behind only one recording, made in 1923. Drawing on research by the veteran musician and producer Henry Sapoznik, Maria Margaronis unpacks the mystery of LaRue Jones' care ..read more

Allyson Devenish uncovers the remarkable story of an African American composer and musician who made his life in London and Paris in the early twentieth century. Edmund Thornton Jenkins was a composer, musician and band leader from Charleston in South Carolina who travelled to London in 1914. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music for seven years and became a sub-professor. In 1919, at Wigmore Hall, he conducted his own work, A Folk Rhapsody, which incorporated themes from spirituals and songs of the Gullah fisherman of his native Charleston. As well as composing some of the earliest music i ..read more

Over a century ago, in 1881, the city of Birmingham purchased a copy of Shakespeare's first folio. It was to be the crown jewel of their new Shakespeare library, the brainchild of the first librarian George Dawson. From the outset it was to be the People's Folio, the property of the city's Free library. You can find the evidence stamped in red ink on many of the pages. That might seem like a defacement to some, but to Shakespeare scholar Islam Issa and members of the city's 'Everything to Everybody' project, it shows a profound commitment. In this feature Islam draws together the passion and b ..read more

Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life ..read more

One day, three decades after the event, the German poet and man of letters, Heinrich Heine, stood on the site of the battle of Marengo, one of Napoleon's earliest and most important victories and had an epiphany - or he invented one for his readers: ""Gradually, day by day, foolish national prejudices are disappearing; all harsh differentiations are lost in the generality of European civilization. There are no more nations in Europe, only parties; and it is marvellous to see how these parties, for all their varying colouration recognize one another and how they understand one another, despite ..read more

American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was willing to track down songs in unlikely places, once writing "I don't scare easily." She spent a night riding in a hearse in Wisconsin just to question the driver and hear his songs, walked up mountains to record lumberjacks and traditional Appalachian singers and poled three miles downriver after dark on a makeshift raft to find a famed fiddler in his goldmine in California. Liste ..read more