BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival promises Music, French Cinema, Englishness, Psychology and Poetry when it visits Gateshead in the upcoming month.
The event will allow Newcastle University Academics to spread inspiration through their speeches and live performances, bringing together a variety of leading academics for a weekend of new ideas, provocative debate, music and performance.
The festival will take place from 17th to 19th March, with all the events being on air during the following months on BBC Radio 3.
The event aims to give academics and artists, from a variety of fields of knowledge and backgrounds, a platform to broadcast their own work and share it with a widespread audience. The weekend’s worth of lectures will be covering a spectrum of topics and contemporary issues, from BBC Radio 4’s Late Night Woman’s Hour to an interview with Formula One racing driver Damon Hill.
Dr Kirsten Gibson, an Early music specialist from the School of Arts and Cultures, will discuss new releases of music by English Renaissance composer John Dowland and his contemporaries. Andrew McGregor, popular musician and presenter of the CD review on radio 3, will be hosting ‘Record Review’ at the event.
Katherine Cooper will share the untold story of British writers and their effort to save their European colleagues during World War Two in the ‘British Barber and the Refugee.’
Chris Petkov, the American professor in Comparative Neuropyschology, from the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, will perform a guitar solo as part of ’Music Matters’. The session will be hosted by Tom Service who aims at developing our perception of music and time in the routines of every day life. It will focus particularly on social media impact and the calming effect of music.
Matthew Sweet will present a live edition of BBC Radio 3’s film music programme. Known as the author of Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema– a history of the British film business, Sweet will be giving an insight into the basics of French Cinema.
Alan Davey, Controller, BBC Radio 3 commented on the BBC website:
“The Free Thinking Festival embodies what Radio 3 is all about. It gives people time and space to contemplate challenging ideas, enjoy diverse often genre-defying music, and to step away from the frenzy of the speed of life.