Soon after the launch of Classic FM in 1992, the then controller of Radio 3, Nicholas Kenyon, asserted that his high-minded station was not in any competition with its commercial rival and certainly not lurching into ‘some ghastly descent into populism’, even as he hired Classic FM’s presenters and fiddled with the programming to create ‘access points’ for novice listeners.
Classical music once had a higher calling than to be this subdued
That argument is now over, the pretence dropped. The current controller of Radio 3, Sam Jackson – appointed last year – was previously the actual boss of Classic FM, as well as Smooth and Gold. Earlier this year, he radically rejigged Radio 3’s schedules, shifting Record Review, introducing Jools Holland, bringing over Friday Night is Music Night from Radio 2 and so forth, upsetting many listeners.
But the results are in. Radio 3’s audience is up 11.2 per cent to 2.04 million, while Classic FM’s is down to 4.42 million – still more than double Radio 3’s, but a fall of 19.5 per cent from its high point of 5.48 million in 2020. And Jackson has just created an offshoot channel, Radio 3 Unwind, launched on 4 November. For now, it’s effectively a streaming service available through BBC Sounds and smart speakers, but he hopes it will soon become a digital channel in its own right.
Unwind is an artful name. It implies that the listener is already wound up, tense and stressed, in need, above all, of calming down. Classical music here is frankly conceived of as a tranquilliser, a paregoric, a soporific, a narcotic, even an outright anaesthetic. The whole history of art music has been repackaged as background sound, although that term seems to have been carefully excluded from the schedules so as not to give the game away. Radio 3 Unwind is not just an intensification of the doziness of Classic FM, all calm classics and relaxing evenings, one adagio after another, it marks the triumph of Brian Eno’s 1970s invention: ambient music.
Recovering from a collapsed lung after being knocked down by a taxi, Eno was at home listening to some 18th-century harp music on a hifi, with only one speaker working at a low volume, almost inaudible against the rain pattering outside, when he realised such dimness had potential. His pioneering effort, Discreet Music, was released in 1975; Ambient 1: Music for Airports soon followed. In the sleeve notes, Eno cleverly observed: ‘Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.’
Radio 3 Unwind fondly embraces an even more intense form of stupefaction. This is not so much music for airports as for the intensive care ward, if not the morgue. The day starts with Classical Unwind, three hours cosily presented by Dr Sian Williams (always called so, to emphasise that it is as good as medicine). Then there’s a podcast brought over from BBC Sounds, Piano Focus (lollipops), followed by the Mindful Mix (‘mellow classical music to create moments of calm’).
In the evening there’s another three-hour segment, Classical Wind Down, with the rich Irish brogue of Niall Breslin, his approach shaped by his studies in sociology and mindfulness, we are assured. All the pieces on Radio 3 Unwind are short and soft and include many little-known young, contemporary composers. There’s an emphasis on diversity: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price and Zenobia Powell Perry regularly feature, as well as sweet familiar melodies by Liszt, Chopin, Grieg, Brahms and Bach. No distraction is created by giving any details or saying who is playing.
Then comes another podcast transfer, Ultimate Calm, with Icelandic pianist and composer Olafur Arnalds, who speaks like a well-trained medic trying to reassure somebody fatally injured. Each show is themed: flowers, rivers, mountains, the stars and so forth. It was the many trailers for this on Radio 4 promising complete peace of mind that first attracted me to the strand.
The presenter speaks like a well-trained medic trying to reassure somebody fatally injured
It is in the night, as consciousness fades, that Unwind comes into its own. In The Sleeping Forecast, also formerly a podcast, Neil Nunes slowly intones the shipping forecast over trickling tunes for an hour. If that fails to sedate you enough, there is then a show running from 12.30 a.m. to 6.30 a.m., Sleep Tracks, in which harmless music is heavily interspersed and overlaid with natural sounds, different each night: birdsong, rain, forest life, waves, wind, crickets, underwater gloopings and whale song and the like. Not quite up to the standard of Max Richter’s dozy masterpiece Sleep, eight hours long, first broadcast in 2015, but never mind.
Classical music once had a higher calling than to be thus subdued. These are, after all, the sounds also on offer from sundry white-noise sleep machines, for babies and adults alike.
But then again we are all mad in the night and need all the help we can get. Xanax, Temazepam and Zolpidem might work better, but in their absence Radio 3 Unwind is worth a try. It’s just to be hoped that its creation alleviates, rather than exacerbates, the pressure on Radio 3 proper and that it stops it from further degrading its musical offering.
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