Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in April are:
3-7 April Hildegard von Bingen and Isabella Leonarda
10-14 April Sullivan
17-21 April Poulenc
24-28 April Joseph Haydn
Away from the kettled crowd, a group awaiting evacuation began tapping a beat on one side of the shipping containers. The rhythm was picked up by others, who mimicked the motif through claps and stamps, creating a surprisingly musical expression of discontent. The outburst took inspiration from Steve Reich’s , the piece that had been performed by the composer and David Cossin at Bloc Festival in London Pleasure Gardens just hours before the ill-fated 2012 event was curtailed due to overcrowding. marvelling over the amount of kit they travelled with, he decided to compose a work that could be played independently, any time, any place – that same percussive piece had been performed shortly before Bloc Festival at a late-night Prom held to mark the composer’s 75th birthday. Last featured in a piano recital at Aldeburgh Festival. Reich’s music is as likely to be heard at an open-air gig with dubious health and safety precautions as in Snape Maltings’s Britten Studio or the Royal Albert Hall. As Radio 3’s Tom Service put it, the 86-year-old American is ‘the most influential composer on the planet’.
