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Rethink music with The Listening Service. Tom Service presents a journey of imagination and insight, exploring how music works
Isn’t it great to be able to listen to so much music, to be able to search and scroll and find anything you want…? Or to have tracks suggest...
Tom Service discovers the mighty musical power of needle drop - the use of pre-existing music in film soundtracks. From 2001: A Space Odysse...
"For me, the best music is an impassioned argument". So said one of Britain's greatest 20th-century composers, Elizabeth Maconchy. Who?? Des...
Many of the most instantly recognisable works in classical music are inspired by the Earth’s moon – Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, Beethoven’s ‘...
Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony is given the subtitle "Pathétique", the use of the French word removing some of the negative connotations that th...
It made Pierre Boulez want to vomit: Francis Poulenc thought it was atrocious: and Igor Stravinsky said all you needed to write it was enoug...
Tom Service explores the world of the Ukulele, from the Hawaiian Royal Court of King Kalakaua to Blackpool Pier with George Formby, the Roya...
The word 'resolution' has several meanings. It can refer to something that has been settled or resolved. It can infer a desire to do somethi...
Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it's Tom Service, exploring the musical life of The Big Apple, from its underground scene to John and Yoko'...
At the back row of the orchestra, usually three in number, sit the trombone section, but why three and how long have they been there? Tom Se...
Tom Service explores JS Bach's extraordinary The Well-Tempered Clavier, a series of 48 preludes and fugues for keyboard in all 24 major and...
From Strictly to village fête vegetables, competitions are embedded in our culture. And music is no exception: think of the Pythian Games of...
Tom Service explores the enduring appeal of the tenor voice.
Tom Service explores one of the most popular, played, and performed works of all time - Johannes Brahms's Symphony No 4 in E minor.
The opening orchestral strains of Wagner's opera Lohengrin with its high shimmering strings prompted the French poet Charles Baudelaire to o...
Mozart's famous Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola makes its effect not least through the unusual tuning of the strings of one of the...
Tom Service enters the sublime and joyous world of Poulenc's Catholic choral work Gloria.
What exactly is a symphony, and how can one written in the 18th century by the ‘father of the symphony’ Joseph Haydn (he wrote over a hundre...
Tom Service experiences musical time travel as he listens to "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis" by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with its magi...
Who decides what goes into a classical music concert? What music will there be? What constraints are there on what can be played? And how ha...
England in the 1590s. Elizabeth I is the reigning monarch and the religion of the country is Protestantism. Celebrating Catholic mass is out...
What links baseball, life insurance and American art music? Charles Ives does! Unknown during his lifetime in Connecticut and New York the e...
Tom Service surrounds himself in Tallis's Spem in alium, a colossal Renaissance masterpiece for 40 individual voice parts, arranged in eight...
Tom Service programmes himself into the matrix of musical artificial intelligence.
Tom Service explores Ravel's Bolero – a classical chart-topper, concert-hall-filler and the soundtrack to Torvill and Dean's Olympic skating...
Tom Service assesses the history of the masters of the king's (or queen's) music - a pantheon of 21 names, some brilliant, some average, som...
Tom Service delves into the deep (and often dark) worlds of Judith Weir's fairy-tale and folk-inspired operas, including Blond Eckbert and T...
Inspired by David Attenborough’s Wild Isles series, Tom Service goes in search of music that reflects British wildlife and wilderness, and o...
Tom Service takes you on a journey into the extraordinary world of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka, based on an archetypal puppet myth that sh...
Tom Service with a guide to music written for and performed at weddings.
Tom Service intrepidly explores Bluebeard's Castle - the one-act Symbolist opera by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok first performed in 1918 w...
Tom Service explores Luciano Berio's Sinfonia - an iconic piece of the late 1960s modernism, scored for orchestra and eight amplified voices...
Tom Service examines Mozart's final masterpiece - a work shrouded in mystery, rumour and deception. He’s joined by Dr Kathryn Mannix, a spec...
The Listening Service - an odyssey through the musical universe with Tom Service. Join him on a journey of imagination and insight, explorin...
"I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again." So said child prodigy, virtuoso pia...
The musical and military features of the march seem pretty unpromising terrain for composers - you’ve got to constrain your creativity to tw...
Tom Service delves into David Lang's secular take on the Christian Passion: The Little Match Girl Passion. Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 200...
Made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra which was composed by a young Richard Strauss...
Tom Service delves into the music of Benjamin Britten and explores the unusual stories behind some of his best-loved festive works, includin...
Tom Service plunges into the heady sound world of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. "The flute of the faun brought new breath to...
Tom Service takes a musical dive into the decadent sound world of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's epoque-making The Threepenny Opera.
Tom explores Steve Reich’s 1988 work Different Trains, its use of sampling and speech melodies, and its evocation of the Holocaust. Our witn...
Tom Service explores the story behind the very first orchestral tone poem and one of the best-loved pieces in classical music: Mendelssohn's...
Tom Service explores musical ecstasy from techno to classical, dissecting 'Ecstasio' by the British composer Thomas Ades and talking to the...
Tom Service explores how and why storms and extreme weather events have inspired classical composers from Beethoven to Britten. With meteoro...
The immense power of chant to transform both the listener and the chanter has ensured the survival of this ancient musical form. Starting wi...
Tom Service waves his magic wand to explore the connections between music and magic, discovering how an 18th century German poet, 19th centu...
Tom Service explores television themes with Oscar-winning composer Anne Dudley, who wrote the music for Poldark, Black Narcissus, and Jeeves...
Did music begin in ancient cave systems? How did medieval cathedrals inspire musical developments? What effect does a particular concert hal...
Tom Service is joined at the 2022 Hay Festival by the American pianist, writer and self confessed 'classical music nerd of the highest order...