The Soft Machine

Nothing is at once so familiar and yet so strange as the body. For most of the time this soft machine we inhabit is invisible, weightless even, but the slightest turbulence serves as an intimation of mortality. Suddenly we feel the pull of gravity …the burden and bounty of being human…and of course we sing and write about it. Words and Music this week takes its cue from this moment…the moment when fleshy mechanics and consciousness seem to collide or separate….when the fifty trillion cells from which each of us is apparently composed fall into novel, self aware shapes. The programme is about the human body when it emerges from the shadows. As you might expect it begins with an overture – Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” and hauls itself up from all fours until its features are, I hope, all too recognisably human…from Tchaikovsky’s tip-toeing Sugar-Plum Fairy to Alvin Lucier’s journey into the brain’s inner space….. from pas de deux to double helix and yet with still enough time to catch the warm, scented pulse of a princess. If you hear voices they will probably be the actors Anna Maxwell Martin and John Rowe breathing life into the words of Ezra Pound, Vicki Feaver and W.H.Auden amongst others; if its sounds and sweet airs then the culprits are likely to be Handel, Beethoven or Charlie Mingus…in other words the surprise of recognition and the shock of the new.

Producer: Zahid Warley