Albert Coates circa 1920 (Bain News Service, publisher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons) By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Welcome to another in the occasional series of podcasts showcasing treasures from the classical collection of the British Library Sound Archive. David Patmore, a retired lecturer from the University of…

This week’s selection comes from Andrea Zarza Canova, Curator of World and Traditional Music. Natural history broadcaster and author Dennis Furnell first travelled to Sierra Leone in January 1991 to record wildlife sounds for his radio programme Country Scene, broadcast on BBC Bedfordshire. As an active environmentalist involved with charities…

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. Rhyming slang is a wonderful vehicle for individual and collective linguistic creativity. The expression here a bit Derby [= ‘cold’] was submitted to the Evolving English WordBank by two contributors from Nottingham and captures the playful rivalry between…

This week’s selection comes from Greg Green, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage. Learning to identify bird song can be tricky at the best of times; to the untrained ear it can all sound remarkably similar. To add to the confusion, many birds like to show off by…

This week’s selection comes from Camille Johnston, Oral History Assistant Archivist. Sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) describes how it felt to be an artist in the 1950s. Post-war Britain was changing but there was nonetheless a pervading sense of austerity. Paolozzi says, ‘we were all grey’. This sense of austerity was,…