IF EVER traditional Radio 3 listeners were looking for confirmation that their dearly beloved station had gone to hell in a handcart, then the sound of the “noise artist” Puce Mary on Late Junction (Radio 3, Friday) would surely suffice.
Introduced by Verity Sharp, in a tone that teasingly suggests that she herself doesn’t quite believe in all of the material that she presents, Late Junction anthologises the maddest, baddest, and, occasionally, most brilliant offerings from the international avant-garde. Last Friday was dedicated to Dante, on the 700th anniversary of his death (Features, 10 September); which meant a good deal of purgatory to endure along with glimpses of paradise.
What Hildegard of Bingen did to deserve inclusion in this particular circle of hell is not clear. Her ethereal sequences have undergone all manner of degradation since the advent of the digital audio age, but serving her up between an electronic ensemble from Taiwan and a Canadian Inuk throat singer represents programming of the most egregious cruelty.
We are now, in our musical appetites, supposed to be omnivorous: as happy to devour Beyoncé as Beethoven. But the gluttonous consumption of such exotically diverse dishes ends you up in Dante’s third circle with a dicky tummy and no hope of relief.
As an aural emetic, you could do worse than the music of Arvo Pärt: not the early stuff, which, as we learned from Tom Service on The Listening Service (Radio 3, Sunday), is steeped in 12-tone modernism, but the holy minimalism of his later years: a style that has made him the world’s most performed living composer.
This is a programme that isn’t afraid to throw in some low-level music theory; and Service was here, as ever, an excellent guide to the ways of tintinnabulation, the compositional technique that Pärt invented for himself as a means of structuring his harmonic language.
But the musical nuts and bolts are the mere acoustic symbols of spiritual truths, through which, as explained by the theologian Dr Peter Bouteneff, the divine and human are understood as plural and united. Or, as Pärt himself wrote, “My melodies are sins, the chords are the forgiveness of those sins.” The theology might not make an impression on all his fans, but it lends to the musical brand a powerful sense of authenticity.
After all, we take from our heroes what we want, and ditch the rest. For Dorothy Byrne, who, for Great Lives (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), chose Catherine of Siena, it was the medieval saint’s “staggeringly rude” letters to the potentates of her day which were most admirable. Byrne — who, as head of news at Channel 4, has torn strips of many a media magnate — sees in Catherine a kindred spirit: she called out the mendacity of her age and, for her courage, earned a place at the side of Pope Gregory XI.
Alternatively, as Matthew Parris would have it, she was a fantasist and a screwball, who starved herself to sainthood. And one might legitimately wonder whether, reinvented today, Catherine would be regarded as a seer or a troll. Byrne was unmoved: “Nobody’s perfect.”