Available for over a year
Writer and music lover Amanda Dalton’s childhood was dominated by her love of playing the piano and loathing of the intensive psychoanalytical psychotherapy she underwent for five years. Coupled with her long, personal interest in how the brain and the body work together, this series takes an unusual look at music. The essays focus on human stories exploring interactions between music and a troubled mind, discussing some of the key historical and current thinking regarding the relationships between creative individuals with mental health challenges or damaged minds – and music. Some of these will be well known, some less so – all afford rich material to explore the themes. Always returning to the human and personal story, the series references the research and insights of neuroscientists and psychologists, such as Daniel Levitin, Oliver Sacks and Anthony Storr. As arguably the birthplace of psycho analysis and home to a multitude of iconic classical musicians – the starting point is Vienna. Essay 2: Music, Madness and Unusual Ways of Seeing…. This essay takes a gentle look at aspects of the relationship between musical creativity, mental illness and mood. Woven through with Amanda’s personal story of music as its own form of psychotherapy, the essay references composers Mozart and Schumann and 20th century giants John Ogdon and Glenn Gould as examples of musicians known for their unstable mental health, before opening out to take a look at some of the other ways in which irregularities in the workings of the brain can lead to unusual and creative ways of perceiving the world. Amanda Dalton is a playwright, poet and essayist. She has three poetry collections with Bloodaxe Books, most recently Fantastic Voyage (2024). Smith|Doorstop published a pamphlet of two long poems, Notes on Water, a version of which she re-created for two voices and soundscape for BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears. Amanda writes extensively for BBC Radio 3 and 4 including original drama, poetry-dramas, re-imaginings of silent movies and classic film, lyric essays and adaptations of fiction. Her theatre writing also includes text for outdoor and site-specific performance, and work for young people with commissions from Manchester’s Royal Exchange, Sheffield Theatres and Keswick’s Theatre By The Lake. Until 2019 she was a senior leader at the Royal Exchange Theatre where she also worked as an Associate Artist, theatre maker and project director, in partnership with communities across the North West and beyond. Alongside her work as a writer, Amanda designs and delivers a wide range of writing workshops, mentors a number of poets and playwrights, and regularly curates and co-delivers collaborative cross-artform projects, most recently with Wainsgate Dances, Manchester Camerata and Quarantine. Her website is https://www.amandadalton.co.uk
Writer and reader: Amanda Dalton Producer:
Polly Thomas
Sound: Alisdair McGregor
Exec Producer: Chantal Herbert
A Thomas Carter Project production for BBC Radio 3.
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Aprenda o passo-a-passo da levada básica de samba no Repique.
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Emily Cullen wrote a poem inspired by her son Lee, which appeared on his English exam paper seven years later
When Emily Cullen picked up her son after his English exam, she assumed the smile on his face meant things had gone well.
Instead, the Galway poet was about to discover that a poem she had written seven years earlier, and which was inspired by him, had appeared on the paper.
“He had a big, broad smile on his face and I thought, ‘Oh that’s good. He must have remembered some Shakespeare quotes’,” Cullen said.
But he said “you won’t believe it mum – the poem you wrote about me came up in the paper”.
The poem, Envoi in Chalk, appeared in a Junior Cycle English exam – the Irish equivalent of GCSEs.
It was inspired by Cullen’s son Lee, after she spotted a message he had written in chalk on a pavement when he was eight years old.
Recalling the moment she learned the poem had appeared on the exam paper, Cullen – the Meskell Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick – said she could scarcely believe it.
“It was just the most flabbergasting moment. I kind of thought it felt like I was in another dimension,” she told BBC News NI.
“A lot of things went through my head. Is this really happening? My own 15-year-old son answering a question on a poem that I’ve written?”
She said she and Lee hugged before she phoned relatives to share the news.
“I got quite emotional about it, as you would, and my breath was taken away, really. I was just kind of in a state of pleasant shock,” she said.
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime synchronicity.”
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More:Â https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4gd2eyvp1o
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