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Dreams and Nightmares

Music from Brahms, Max Richter, Debussy and Aretha Franklin and including writings by Sojourner Truth, Franz Kafka, Yeats and Langston Hughes read by Jade Anouka and Brid Brennan.

A programme inspired by the words of Martin Luther King as we mark Black History Month with this selection of readings and music which include Sojurner Truth, Aretha Franklin, Langston Hughes and Florence Price. The readers are Jade Anouka and Brid Brennan.

"Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious" said Sigmund Freud. And the unconscious is a storehouse for unacceptable ideas or desires, traumatic memories & emotions we repress. We all dream - and not just while we sleep. So what can our dreams tell us about ourselves and the society we live in?

Producer: Debbie Kilbride.

Readings:
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Land of Nod
Algernon Charles Swinburne: Love and Sleep
Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis
Audre Lorde: 1984
Willam Butler Yeats: The Second Coming
Sojourner Truth: Ain't I A Woman
JM Synge: Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara
Martin Carter: Looking at Your Hands
Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
Aodhag谩n 脫 Rathaille, translated by Seamus Heaney The Glamoured
Frances EW Harper: Bury Me in a Free Land
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Carol Ann Duffy: Dreams of a Lost Friend
Langston Hughes: A Dream Deferred
Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud: Dora's Dream
Crazy Horse: Upon Suffering Beyond Suffering.

Main image: Portrait of African-American orator and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth (1797 - 1883), 1860s. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

1 hour, 15 minutes

Last on

Sun 13 Oct 2019 17:30
麻豆约拍 Radio 3

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Music Played

Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes

  • 00:00

    Johannes Brahms, arranger Grainger

    Lullaby

    Performer: Nicholas York.
    • SELDD 569.
    • CD2 Tr4.

  • Robert Louis Stevenson

    The Land of Nod, read by Jade Anouka

  • 00:01

    Max Richter

    Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)

    Performer: Max Richter (Piano, Organ, Synthesisers, Electronics), Ben Russell and Yuki Numata Resnick (Violin), Caleb Burhans (Viola), Clarice Jensen and Brian Snow (Cello).
    • Deutsche Grammophon 4795258.
    • Tr1.

  • Algernon Charles Swinburne

    Love and Sleep, read by Brid Brennan

  • Franz Kafka

    Metamorphosis, read by Jade Anouka

  • 00:06

    Bernard Herrmann

    Prelude (From Vertigo)

    Performer: City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, Paul Bateman (Conductor).
    • Britannia Music BMLCD 1181.
    • CD1 Tr8.
  • 00:09

    Aretha Franklin

    Day Dreaming

    • Knight KNCD 22072.
    • CD1 Tr3.

  • Audre Lorde

    1984, read by Jade Anouka

  • 00:12

    Claude Debussy

    搁猫惫别谤颈别

    Performer: Fran莽ois鈥怞o毛l Thiollier.
    • NAXOS 857807778.
    • Tr8.
  • 00:16

    Phil Cunningham

    The Gentle Light That Wakes Me

    Performer: Duncan Chisholm.
    • Copperfish Records CPFCD004.
    • Tr5.

  • William Butler Yeats

    The Second Coming, read by Brid Brennan

  • Sojourner Truth

    Ain't I A Woman, read by Jade Anouka

  • 00:22

    Florence Price

    Symphony in E minor: IV

    Performer: Florence B. Price, New Black Music Repertory Ensemble, Karen Walwyn(piano), Leslie Dunner (Conductor).
    • Albany Records TROY1295.
    • Tr4.
  • 00:24

    John Phillips and Michelle Phillips

    California Dreamin'

    Performer: Bobby Womack.
    • Charly SNAP217CD.
    • Tr7.
  • 00:27

    Phil France

    Dawn

    Performer: The Cinematic Orchestra.
    • Ninja Tune ZEN CD78.
    • Tr3.

  • J. M. Synge

    Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, read by Brid Brennan

  • Martin Carter

    Looking At Your Hands, read by Jade Anouka

  • 00:31

    Bj枚rk, Paul Cassidy (arranger)

    Hyper-Ballad (Brodsky Quartet Version)

    Performer: Brodsky Quartet.
    • One Little Indian TPLP51CDT.
    • Tr2.
  • 00:36

    Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

    Ballade in C minor for violin and piano Op. 73 (1907)

    Performer: Nash Ensemble.
    • Hyperion CDA 67590.
    • Tr5.

  • Jean Rhys

    Wide Sargasso Sea, read by Jade Anouka

  • Aodhag谩n 脫 Rathaille, translated by Seamus Heaney

    The Glamoured, read by Brid Brennan

  • 00:43

    John Cage

    Dream

    Performer: Alexei Lubimov (piano), Natalia Pschenitschnikova (voice).
    • ECM 4764933.
    • Tr1.
  • 00:49

    Bernard Herrmann

    Suite From Psycho: Flight

    Performer: National Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Herrmann (Conductor).
    • Unicorn-Kanchana UKCD 2080.
    • Tr4.

  • Frances E. W. Harper

    Bury Me in A Free Land, read by Jade Anouka

  • Mary Shelley

    Frankenstein, read by Brid Brennan

  • 00:55

    George Gershwin

    Someone to Watch Over Me

    Performer: Liberace.
    • Music Club 聳 MCCD 229.
    • Tr11.

  • Carol Ann Duffy

    Dreams of A Lost Friend, read by Brid Brennan

  • 01:00

    Patrick Cowley

    Mocking Bird Dream

    Performer: Patrick Cowley.
    • Dark Entries Records DE 052.
    • Tr2.

  • Langston Hughes

    A Dream Deferred, read by Jade Anouka

  • 01:03

    Fr茅d茅ric Chopin

    Nocturne Es-dur op. 9 No.2: Andante

    Performer: Daniel Barenboim (piano).
    • Deutsche Grammophon 4151172.
    • Tr1.

  • Sigmund Freud

    The Interpretation of Dreams, read by Brid Brennan

  • Sigmund Freud

    Dora's Dream, read by Jade Anouka

  • 01:05

    B茅la Bart贸k

    Seventh Floor: Bluebeard's Wives

    Performer: Elena Zhidkova (mezzo-soprano), Sir Willard White (bass-baritone), London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev (Conductor).
    • LSO LIVE LST 0685.
    • Tr8.
  • 01:07

    Lance Ferguson

    Evolution

    Performer: Menagerie.
    • Freestyle FSRCD122.
    • Tr1.

  • Crazy Horse

    Upon Suffering beyond Suffering, read by Jade Anouka and Brid Brennan

  • 01:13

    Birds - Dawn Chorus

    • Music Direct 67711.
    • Tr47.

Producer's Notes: Dreams and Nightmares

听

Dreams are like magic, aren't they? 听I think they're gifts. 听I'm writing this on the 50th anniversary of the murder of Dr Martin Luther King Jr 鈥� maybe he had the most important dream of the 20th century.听 Dr King's public retelling of his dream was at the insistence of a musician and friend who was standing behind him onstage in Washington as he spoke on 28 August 1963. 听His speech wasn't going so well. 听'Tell 'em about the dream Martin!' shouted Mahalia Jackson 鈥� and so he did. 听Dr King was 39 years old when he was killed, but his dream lives on 鈥� 55 years later it is just as urgent as ever.听 The spirit of Dr King's speech has been my guide to making this programme.

Dr King came after earlier generations of African Americans who also had that same dream. 听Sojourner Truth, the great abolitionist and feminist 鈥� a freed slave 鈥� delivered her blistering speech with the famous refrain 鈥楢in't I A Woman' at a Women's Rights Convention in Ohio in 1851. 听In this programme, you can hear actor Jade Anouka perform this and many other similar dreams by great artists and activists such as Martin Carter, Langston Hughes and Audre Lorde whose poem '1984' came to her in a dream on April 4 - the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jnr's assassination. 听I鈥檓 proud that this programme features music by the composer Florence Beatrice Price. 听Florence was the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra, on June 15, 1933.听听听

Last night I dreamed of Steve Fabus 鈥� a lovely man, a DJ I know in San Francisco. Steve is a survivor of that generation of gay men almost wiped out by AIDS. 听Many of Steve鈥檚 peers died quickly, in pain and often very young. 听Steve knew Patrick Cowley, a composer whose thing was electronic music. 听Patrick put the blips on Sylvester's 1978 hit disco song 鈥榊ou Make Me Feel [Mighty Real]' and is credited with inventing hi-energy dance music. 听When Patrick died of AIDS in 1982 he was 32 years old. 听This programme features one of Patrick's early compositions as a tiny tribute to his great talent. 听It also features a heart-breaking performance of Gershwin's 'Someone to Watch Over Me' by Liberace. 听I hear yearning in his over-embellished playing.听 Brid Brennan performs Carol Ann Duffy's beautiful poem 'Dreams of A Lost Friend' between Liberace and Patrick Cowley.听听

Freud said 'dreams are the royal road to the unconscious' and I have tried to allow this programme to bubble up from my dreams. 听Looking back now I wonder if the fragility of the Good Friday Agreement has been playing on my mind.听 Could that concern be evident in Brid Brennan's performance of Yeats' unsettling poem 'The Second Coming'? 听If so, then it is also there in 'The Glamoured' 鈥� Seamus Heaney's translation of 'Gile na Gile', an 鈥榓isling' (literally, dream) poem written in Irish by Aodhag谩n 脫 Rathaille. 听It is one of the most famous Irish poems of the early eighteenth century. 听Synge's epic description of turning and encountering the western vista of the Blasket Islands in County Kerry is simply my own idea of heaven.听听

To stick with sweeping metaphors, waking up to find yourself transformed into a human-sized insect is the very stuff of nightmares. In my book, Kafka was the high priest of horror and Jade Anouka's performance from the opening of Metamorphosis displays the precision and clarity of Kafka's terrifying description of shunned isolation. 听I have coupled Kafka's words with Bernard Hermann's music composed for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). 听Brid Brennan said she thought Hitchcock's films wouldn't have had half their impact without Hermann's music 鈥� I think she's right.听听

Famously, Mary Shelley's story of Frankenstein came to her in a dream, an anxious dream I think.听 The screws were on her to come up with a ghost story to share with Lord Byron and her husband Percy Shelley one rainy summer in Switzerland. 听鈥�"Have you thought of a story?鈥� 听I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. 听'No pressure then. Finally, Mary's monster appeared to her one night. 听Having brought him into light 鈥� and eventually into print when she was just 20 years old (initially the novel was published anonymously) 鈥� the monster's story and that of his creator Dr Frankenstein has become, 200 years later, one of the most thrilling and enduring works of gothic fiction 鈥� and one of our most touching moral tales. 听Listen for the monster's tenderness in Brid's reading from Frankenstein.听听

Less than 30 years after the publication of Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre under the male pseudonym Currer Bell. 听Jane Eyre is one of the cornerstones in the canon of English literature. 听Dominican-born British writer Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and it tells the story of Bertha Mason, the 'madwoman in the attic' of Bronte's novel and the first wife of Jane Eyre's husband and our hero Mr Rochester. 听What could have led Bertha to madness and why is she locked away, yet kept close? 听Rhys imagines that the answers to these shameful secrets lie in Britain's colonial past. 听In Rhys' story the wealth which Rochester, and many other people, amassed is accumulated from the spoils of slavery in British colonies such as Jamaica, where Wide Sargasso Sea is set. 听Jade Anouka reads the part of Bertha (a 'creole', we are told) recounting her dream. She speaks over the music of Samuel Coleridge Taylor, known by his contemporaries as the 'African Mahler'.听听

Listen out for two appearances by Sigmund Freud, one which features a dream by perhaps his most famous client, Dora, whom he sadly failed to help. 听Freud had blind spots too.听

The programme begins with a lullaby by Brahms taking us into the 'Land of Nod' by Robert Louis Stevenson and on into Max Richter's 'Sleep 3' and a deliciously kinky Victorian poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne. 听The show closes with an awakening and a call to action by the band Menagerie, featuring the awesome vocals of Fallon Williams. 听The last words go to the Native American Lakota leader Crazy Horse who took up arms against the US federal government to fight against encroachment by white American settlers on Indian territory in the 19th century. His ecological message urges respect for the earth which leads to unity across nations and 'races'. 听These are the hopeful words, the dream this programme ends on 鈥� and after that it's over to the birds singing in a dawn chorus.听听

My gratitude to Brid Brennan and Jade Anouka, to friends from the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London and Birkbeck College, to Suzy Klein, Tim Bano and most of all to Jen Harvie.听听听

This programme is dedicated to dreamers everywhere.听听

Producer: Debbie Kilbride听

Jade Anouka is starring in The Phlebotomist which runs at the Hampstead Theatre 12th April 鈥� 19th May. 听Jade will also be performing her own poetry at the Roundhouse on 19th June as part of the .

听

Broadcasts

  • Sun 8 Apr 2018 17:30
    麻豆约拍 Radio 3
  • Sun 13 Oct 2019 17:30
    麻豆约拍 Radio 3

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