H&N, Sat 27/8/16; 10:00pm

[french frank]

An excellent idea, ts; links between contemporary, early, and world Musics offer such rich opportunities for exciting programming. I wonder if there is the funding available to R3 for such joined-up thinking to be put into practice regularly.

Would there be an enormous outcry if one suggested an existing edition of Late Junction could cover that? The only problem I see is what kind of presenter would it need? Though if you just want a sort of LJ-style sequence with one piece moving into the next and the presenter not being required to know very much about any of it …

[Bryn]

Feeling a bit of a glutton for punishment this evening, and no longer having the tape recordings I made of the (incomplete) Radio 3 transmission of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, I went in search of a recording on the Internet, and found this. No indication of its provenance. I will have to listen out for the prompter who was so prominent in the Radio 3 broadcast.

[Hmm. Certainly sounds like a recording from an FM broadcast (judging by the occasional crackling EM interference).]

[ahinton]

Yes, but Radio 3 is surely a service which should have 'narrow' specialist slots? The main problem with Radio 3 has been that the 'wider audiences' have been catered for across the entire schedule - which effectively leaves the 'narrow specialists' with the odd crumbs. It should be done the other way round: the targeted content should seek out the audience that it's for, wherever they are (so R1, R2, 6Music for some things) and hope they will then migrate to the more specialist programmes.

In fact, it's an idea which is (slowly) catching on at Radio 3: contemporary music dotted round the schedule. Steve Reich on Breakfast this morning, Sally Beamish on Friday Breakfast, John Cage on Thursday. It should be a sort of wave movement over the whole of BBC Radio, with Radio 3 being at the end of the development, and H & N free to concentrate on the most avant garde/experimental.

That sounds like a good idea in principle but, if H&N's brief were openly to be to "concentrate on the most avant garde/experimental", as you suggest, mightn't it be a good idea that its change to reflect such an agenda rather than maintaining one that merely implies a programme featuring new and recent music by living/working and recently deceased composers (rather as did Music in our Time all those years ago)? - The Cutting Edge, for (a not very good) example?

[Richard Barrett]

Feeling a bit of a glutton for punishment this evening, and no longer having the tape recordings I made of the (incomplete) Radio 3 transmission of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, I went in search of a recording on the Internet, and found this.

Thanks, er, I think. I dipped into it here and there. Pretty insipid stuff. It's happened to me a couple of times when watching a film that I remark "this music sounds like a watered-down imitation of Glass" only to find that he himself had been responsible.

Joined-up thinking: yes. Including perhaps BBC commissions for things not intended to open a Prom as "painlessly" as possible, hopefully without anyone noticing that a new work was being played.