Composer of the Week

There are, by my reckoning, eight BBC radio programmes that started in the 1940s that are still on air (see note 1). The second oldest of those Composer of the Week, which started life as This Week’s Composer, was first scheduled on the Home Service on Monday 2 August 1943. It was, according to the BBC “an innovation which proved that lovers of serious music are awake in large numbers as early in the morning as 7.30 a.m.” The first week’s programme featuring Mozart was just a short (only 25 minutes) morning musical interlude. It has now been running for 80 years.   

The running order for that first programme lists the two movements of Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 27, his Violin Sonata in B flat major and ending with Violin Sonata No. 42 in A flat major. The two latter pieces feature the violin playing of Yehudi Menuhin. Subsequent week’s featured all the greats of classical musical (see note 2).

Like many of the gramophone programmes of that time there was no presenter as such and links were provided on scripts to be read by whichever continuity announcer was on duty that day. This was how the programme ran for the next half century. It was only when the role of the Radio 3 announcer was changed in 1992 that named presenters were associated with the programme.

Post-war, in September 1945, the start time was shifted on two hours to 9.30 am and it remained a mid-morning fixture in the schedules until 1995 when it was shifted to its current midday slot. The only exception to this was in the late 40s (September 1947 to April 1950) when it was “promoted” to an evening slot after the six o’clock news “a much more convenient time for most people than the early morning”.

In the early 1960s the BBC was seeking to utilise the daytime frequencies of the Third Programme for “programmes of serious music” in a service that would be called the Music Programme (note 3). It was also a case of use it or lose it with a BBC committee concluding that “the unused time on the Third Network was a standing invitation for as take-over bid by commercial operators”.

 The Music Programme was phased in during 1964 after much discussion with the Musician’s Union, who objected to an increase in needletime to play more gramophone records, and the rejuvenation of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.  Amongst the programmes transferred over from the Home Service to the Music Programme in December 1964 was This Week’s Composer (note 4). The Music Programme title lingered even when it became Radio 3 in 1967 and was finally dropped in April 1970 but The Week’s Composer had found its new 9 am home that it would occupy for the next 31 years.  

In January 1988 the title of This Week’s Composer was flipped over to Composer of the Week. Then four years later changes were afoot at Radio 3 as a third of the continuity announcing team were made redundant (Malcolm Ruthven, Tony Scotland and Peter Barker) with the remaining staff taking on new presenter/producer roles (Andrew Lyle, Piers Burton-Page, Chris de Souza, Paul Guinery, Penny Gore and Susan Sharpe). 

The impact on Composer of the Week was that as well as some of the presentation team presenting the programme a number of voices, many new to the Radio 3 audience, would present a week’s worth of programme depending on their specialist knowledge and interests. So we hear composers, musicians, music critics and musicologists including (in the year 1992/93): Lindsay Kemp, Richard Alston, Stephen Johnson, Adrian Thomas, John Thornley (later one of the producers of the programme),  Richard Wigmore, Michael Oliver, Richard Langham Smith, Jeremy Siepmann, William Mival, David Fanning, John Warrack and Roxanna Panufnik.

In the BBC’s Sound Archives there’s nothing of the 45 year run of This Week’s Composer, probably because it was just seen as part of the daily continuity announcement duties rather than a built or pre-recorded programme. One of the earliest recordings of Composer of the Week dates from 1988 and features Mozart. This clip is one the BBC website but is vague as to exact date and who the announcer is. It appears to be the evening repeat on 27 January 1988 (mention of Mozart’s birthday on that date confirms this) of the previous week’s morning broadcast from 20 January 1988. The announcer sounds like Susan Sharpe.

Another 1988 clip here features Donald Macleod presenting the music of three Hollywood greats, Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa and Erich Korngold.  At the time Donald was part of the announcing team, having joined in 1982. This one is easier to date and comes from Monday 12 December. By co-incidence I recorded much of that week’s programmes but sadly, in retrospect, cut out Donald’s introductions.    

In 1999 Radio 3 decided to give Composer of the Week a dedicated presenter. By now Donald Macleod had left his post as Presentation Editor and was freelance. With the help of the production team he would be responsible for researching and writing his own scripts. Finding the “way in” to a composer’s life is his favourite part of the process. “It’s absolutely not my job to tell people what to think about the music. I’m there to paint pictures and I often start with a visual image”. His first composer, in September 1999, was Edvard Greig and for his script Macleod discovered that “he had a good luck charm that he carried around in his pocket, a little stone frog. I thought it was such a charming image. So I started from there. “  

For the programme’s 70^th anniversary in 2013 the team produced a list of the nearly four hundred individual composers and over a hundred groups or schools of composers featured since 1943. They also reached out to listeners to suggest any overlooked composers though, as Macleod explained “it’s often tricky because if a composer is obscure, there won’t be enough music in good performance to fill the best part of five hours.”   

 Marking the 70th anniversary of COTW
Radio Times 27 July 2013 

Here’s a clip of Donald introducing Composer of the Week on the 70^th anniversary which featured the music of Robert Schumann.

In a Radio Times feature for the programme’s 80^th anniversary a number of programme landmarks were listed:

Composers featured to date Around 1,400

First female composers featured Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann in August 1988

First black composer Duke Ellington in May 1985

First non-European Four Americans: John Alden Carpenter, Samuel Barber, Roy harris and Edward MacDowell in May 1945

First South American Heitor Villa-Lobos in April 1977

First Australian Percy Grainger in November 1996

First Asian Toru Takemitsu in February 2018

This year Donald Macleod, aged 70, has decided to ease off a little and Kate Molleson has joined the programme. For her first Composer of the Week in May the subject was Gyorgy Ligeti. “We decided we weren’t just going to tell the story straight. I had pianist Danny Driver with me, sitting at the piano, opening the music up in a really unintimidating way”.

Radio Times 29 July 2023

For the programme’s 80^th anniversary, last week, Donald Macleod recalled some of the composers he’s interviewed during his 24 year tenure. This is a short clip from the first programme.      

(1) When I write about this I always seem to miss out one programme or another. However, I reckon the other programmes from the 1940s are: Desert Island Discs (1942), Today in Parliament (1945), Woman’s Hour (1946), How Does Your Garden Grow? (1947) which became Gardener’s Question Time in 1951, Round Britain Quiz (1947), Sports Report (1948) and Any Questions? (1948).  

(2) August 1943- February 1944: Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Haydn, Schumann, Handel, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Brahms, Elgar, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Liszt, Verdi, Chopin, Ravel, Cesar Franck, Rossini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Puccini, Mussorgsky, Delius, Bizet, Vaughan-Williams,

(3) At the time the Third Programme only broadcast in the evening. In the daytime and early evening, under the umbrella title of Network Three, the BBC also offered the Study Session, the Sports Service (on Saturday afternoons) and Test Match Special. 

(4) Other transferred programmes included Music Magazine, Talking About Music, Your Midweek Choice and Midday Prom.