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Paul McCartney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lee Renaldo on their debt to classical music.
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Exploring different aspects of history, science, philosophy and the arts.
Listen to The Radio 3 Documentary, a Society & Culture podcast by BBC. Stream 229 episodes in English, follow new audio stories, and play episodes online on Radio and Podcast.
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Paul McCartney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lee Renaldo on their debt to classical music.
In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing...
"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....
Via ports and truck-stops, fulfilment centres and ring roads, Aidan Tulloch follows the supply chain and reimagines the journey an item goes...
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri searches for different perspectives on the idea of balance.
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...
Known in Yiddish as Der Schvartze Khazn--the Black Cantor--Thomas LaRue Jones was an African American tenor who sang Jewish music in the ear...
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...
Lindsay Johns makes the case for writer Rudolph Fisher's portraits of Black American life
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...
American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Trav...
Chibundu Onuzo tells the fascinating story of ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ and artist Ben Enwonwu.
“All Neapolitans were born to be musicians, to be singers,” says musicologist Dr Dinko Fabris, referring to the foundation myth of Naples, a...
Metalworking has been central to the rise and success of Birmingham over hundreds of years. But how has this industry affected the culture o...
From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Afri...
During World War II, approximately 1.6 million Soviet, Polish and Romanian Jews survived the Holocaust by escaping to Soviet Central Asia an...
In 1984, an American harpsichord player called Scott Ross quit a teaching job in Canada and returned to France, the country that since he wa...
Anne Lock, a woman living in 16th-century England, wrote the first ever sonnet sequence in the English language? Impossible, thought Clare P...
London. Tavistock House. 1851. It shaped Charles Dickens’ life and career. Home to The Smallest Theatre in the World, Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage...
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was inspired by an unflinching poem about the ‘Holocaust of Bullets’ at Babi Yar in Ukraine, one o...
Rory Stewart travels across Cumbria and Northumbria from an ancient Quaker meeting house in Brigflatts, to a medieval tower on Newcastle cit...
The remarkable female musicians and activists who helped Florence Price's music to thrive
If it hadn’t been for Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s love of jam, he may never have completed his first large-scale work. After graduating from the Con...
LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby...
During the 1980s and 1990s, DJ Andy Kershaw travelled around Africa and the Americas searching out great music and taping it on his Walkman...
In this episode, Andy meets Kenyan harpist Ayub Ogada on a beach in Cornwall, the Antioch Gospel group in a car park in New Orleans, Cuartet...
Seren Griffiths uses a walk along a sandstone ridge in Northern Cheshire to explore the way a landscape can hold multiple histories, and in...
New Generation Thinker Dr Islam Issa has a strong cultural attachment to the Balcony. In his native Egypt, the place where architectural his...
When he was a boy and returned to the family home from primary school in the afternoon, Carlo Gébler would often hear the sound of typing co...
An exploration of Beethoven’s music through the body that gave him so much trouble.
Why does the image of the forlorn and abandoned poet Thomas Chatterton haunt us today?
Hannah French explores a hidden disability for many musicians: pain.
It's understandable that, with the onset of a global pandemic, commentators have looked to the past for comparisons. But Dr Seb Falk is conc...
John Cage is arguably the most important composer of the 20th century, even though he's perhaps famous, or infamous depending on your point...
New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson on the radical 20th century publisher C.W.Daniel.
Marie-Louise Muir traces her childhood idol Maureen O’Hara’s journey from Dublin's suburbs to star of the Golden Age.
We are used to getting a worldview from the west, but what did the east make of us? Jerry Brotton heads to Istanbul on the trail of one the...
David Bramwell with actors whose lives were transformed by director Ken Campbell.
Daisy Black, Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, investigates the camp villain in history.
At the height of his fame as a jazz composer and band leader in the late 1930s, Raymond Scott was billed as ‘America’s Foremost Composer of...
The unknown tale of cold war communist Poland’s unlikely love affair with electronic music. Robert Worby finds out Warsaw was a beacon of mu...
Carlo Gebler on the role of art in remembrance and reconciliation in Northern Ireland
As East Germany crumbled in 1989, actors were centre stage. Andrew Dickson discovers how had theatre had survived under communist rule, with...
Andrew Hussey journeys through Andalusia searching for the legacy of Muslim Spain
Actor Lily Cole plays Elizabeth Siddall who climbs out of her grave to tell her story.
Golding's classic novel was saved from being rejected by Faber by the luckiest chance.
Jazz and communist East Germany seem unlikely bedfellows. Yet in 1965 Louis Armstrong became the first American entertainer to play jazz the...
Dafydd Mills Daniel investigates Isaac Newton's more obscure studies in Alchemy.
Hetta Howes sets off to find the unicorn of myth in 21st century Britain.
300 years since Robinson Crusoe was published, Emma Smith traces it across the centuries
You can listen to The Radio 3 Documentary episodes online on Radio and Podcast. Open an episode and the site player will stream the available audio.
The Radio 3 Documentary is listed as a Society & Culture show. The show language is listed as English.
This page lists 229 episodes for The Radio 3 Documentary. More episodes are available from the View more button when the list continues.