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What’s the appeal, or even the magic of choral singing? How has it endured as a tradition? Do they have a social or cultural value? Is it a declining tradition, are choirs in crisis?
We hope to return to these and other questions in future episodes. Here though we start with singers. We were pleasantly surprised how many friends of the podcast are involved in, and have a passion for choirs! So we invited a cross-section, who very kindly agreed to join us and talk a little about what they love about choirs.
Anna Berry is an artist and lifelong singer. Her favourite choral flavour is small consort-singing and renaissance polyphony, and she’s sung in most of the cathedrals in the UK over the years. She also sings folk and jazz.
Kevin Yuill is a retired academic. He has sung tenor - in Durham Choral Society, Ushaw Choir, and St Edmund's Consort for about 20 years. He has sung everything from Victoria's O Magnum Mysterium to Sting's Fields of Gold - but draws the line at Queen. No. Queen. Ever.
Josephine Margaret is a primary school teacher. She enjoys amateur dramatics and attends the theatre as much as she can. She attends a choir in Cambridge called Out of the Shadows who perform twice a year.
Thomas Deichmann is Communications manager, and a former journalist and author. His passion for choirs started early when he watched his father singing. When Thomas was 40, he started singing in a men’s choir in Frankfurt, become president of the singing club and actually saved it from extinction. Currently he sings in the small men’s choir of his Catholic church accompanying services once a month. And he has a very special passion for singing in Frankfurts biggest "wild choir" - that is on the terraces of Eintracht Frankfurt FC.
Ann Oliver is a former journalist, magazine editor and businesswoman, who has been singing in choirs since she was six. She is currently a member of the London Concord Singers and the Kodaly Choir of London. She says she’s an alto by default.
Niall Crowley is a member of Islington Choral Society.
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Harold Riley, Salford-born artist, is the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Salford's Museum and Art Gallery. Known for his diverse artistic styles and deep connections to his hometown, Riley captured the essence of Salford and its transformation over time.
Joining us to discuss the exhibition are Hilary Salt and Sebastian Moore, presenters of Take Me Home, the regular podcast of the Social Democratic Party. Hilary is Deputy Leader of the SDP as well as a longtime friend of the podcast.
Hilary Salt shares her thoughts on Riley's ability to blend humour and humanity in his work, while Sebastian Moore reflects on the artist’s impressive versatility. Both guests shed light on why Riley, despite his talent, hasn't reached the mainstream fame of contemporaries like L.S. Lowry.
The exhibition brings together all of Harold’s many disciplines and subject matter including painting, drawing, digital fusions, and photography. It tells the story of the man, showing works that portray places and people that were important to him.
Every Line is Me is on display at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery until the end of April 2025.
If you would like to review an exhibition or think there’s something we might be interested in covering, please get in touch.
And if you would like to make a donation to help us cover our costs, we have set up a Just Giving page. Every little helps, as they say.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Sociologist and commentator Frank Furedi’s new book The War on the Past is a powerful and timely analysis of why contemporary Western society has become with attacking and renouncing its own history. From statue-toppling, decolonising the curriculum and the museum, rewriting history to be more ‘inclusive’ of present day identity groups, and even erasing and modifying the words we use, the past is seen as a toxic influence on the present that must be controlled in the name of ‘progressive’ values.
In this episode, Furedi talks with art critic JJ Charlesworth, about how the war on the past has come to affect the arts and culture. They discuss how the orthodoxies of identity politics end up projected onto how the cultural figures of the past are understood, and how developments like ‘colour-blind’ casting reflect the move to affirm today’s identities in narratives about the past.
Frank and JJ discuss the nature of novelty and boundary-breaking in the arts, in a culture which has lost its older commitments to artistic traditions or the idea of the artistic canon. Frank points out that today, much artistic activity poses itself as a transgression of norms and cultural traditions which in reality no longer command cultural authority. Transgression, Frank argues, has become conformism.
They discuss what the future might be for cultural institutions that have become aligned with this new conformist rejection of the past, and whether we should look for a new counterculture that reconnects creatively with the art of the past, experimenting with and developing its artistic legacy.
Subscribe to Frank Furedi’s Substack - Roots & Wings
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Craig-Martin is an influential conceptual artist and painter. He was born in Dublin in 1941, but grew up in the US, studying Fine Art at Yale. He has lived and worked in Britain since the mid 1960s and has been a major figure on the Contemporary Arts scene since the 1970s.
His work, according to Gagosian “fuses elements of Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, his art transforms everyday objects with bold colours and simple uninflected lines.”
From the early 1970s Craig-Martin was a tutor at Goldsmiths College and is widely-regarded as having had a significant influence on the emerging YBA generation, many of whom went to Goldsmiths, including Damien Hirst.
Joining us for this episode is historian and writer James Heartfield, author of numerous books including The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, ‘Britain’s Empires: a history 1600-2020’ and The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society 1838-1956 : A History.
We are pleased to welcome back Rachel Jordan. Rachel is primarily a visual artist, but also one third of ‘naHs’ an experimental performance trio (Nothing’s Alien to me that is Human), which was launched earlier this year with a show in Norwich titled ‘Labour in Vain’, and now stage a regular cabaret in London called World of the Absurd.
James very kindly made this short video intro, where he shares some of his thoughts and observations as he makes his way around the exhibition .
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In this episode, our special guest, Andrew Doyle discusses the abiding genius of Shakespeare with Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, Richard Woolfenden and Jane Sandeman. They point out that Shakespeare has created, in his plays, an expression of how we can better understand what it means to be human.
They take up claims that Shakespeare can’t have written all those brilliant plays, that they must have been written by a well-educated aristocrat, pointing to the elitism within these challenges to the Bard’s unparalleled genius. And they draw out, looking at specific works, how Shakespeare presented the complexity of human beings, without making moral judgements.
At a time when activists in the theatre and in education threaten to turn Shakespeare into an instrument of ‘decolonisation’ this is an important discussion … but is it still worth going to watch a contemporary production of a Shakespeare play?
Andrew Doyle is a successful writer and comedian, and creator of the satirical woke character, Titania McGrath; he hosts Free Speech Nation on
GBNews. He is also passionate about Shakespeare.
Respondents — all passionate about Shakespeare!:
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is Director of Don’t Divide Us and formerly teacher of English
Jane Sandeman, chief operating officer at The Passage charity for homeless people,
Richard Woolfenden, English teacher and filmmaker.
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Podcast host Wendy Earle talks to artist Dido Powell about whether the National Gallery has repeated or avoided the mistakes Tate Britain made in their exhibition about William Hogarth a few years ago, where there was a widespread public outcry against the politicised character of the labels and information panels.
They also take a close look at the painting and what makes Constable one of the great English landscape artists, and The Haywain an icon of British art.
Dido Powell is an artist and art history teacher. She leads the Arts & Society Forum tours of London museums and galleries.
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An Arts Professional survey report published in 2020 showed that eight out of 10 people working in the arts agreed that if you speak out against the orthodoxy in many arts institutions you risk ostracisation. This is a shocking state of affairs given that the life blood of the arts is freedom of expression.
Our guests in this episode are Rosie Kay and Denise Fahmy. They set up the campaign, Freedom in the Arts, after they discovered through bitter experience that a value that is supposed to be at the very centre of the arts’ existence is surprisingly undervalued in the arts world.
They tell us about how their careers in the arts were badly affected by hostility and betrayal from previously trusted colleagues after they expressed views that challenged dominant orthodoxies in the arts world. and why they set up their campaign.
To find out about their stories, their campaign and take their new survey, listen to this podcast and then go to www.freedominthearts.com
Denise and Rosie are also interviewed in today's Times newspaper about their campaign and the launch of their survey in this fascinating interview.
Thank you for listening and subscribing. Please help us grow by sharing our podcast and our substack, and if you would like to be part of Arts First in any way or have ideas for an episode please email [email protected] or message us here.
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Wendy Earle is joined by architecture curator and writer Vicky Richardson, historian Kevin Yuill, art critic JJ Charlesworth and co-host Niall Crowley to discuss Tate Director Maria Balshaw's book on the state and future of museums 'The Gathering of Strangers'.
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Niall Crowley is joined by Art History graduate Agnes Friend and her mother, Vicky Richardson the curator and writer to review MOCO – the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Arts.
MOCO is a new independent arts space that recently opened at Marble Arch in London, started by Dutch couple Kim and Lionel Logchies -Prin.
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In this episode of Arts First, Linda Murdoch, Megan and Daniel Brick review David Ireland’s controversial new play The Fifth Step at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow, with Jack Lowden and Sean Gilder.
With Wendy Earle and Niall Crowley
Please subscribe to our podcast on Youtube, Spotify, Sound Cloud or Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode.
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Freedom of expression is a core theme of this podcast series. Although it is a central principle of western democracy, a censorious climate is undermining it. The arts world should be a space for experimentation and freedom but has become increasingly influenced by an ‘I find that offensive’ mentality, so that artists who express ideas that run counter to dominant tropes in social media find themselves cancelled and blocked.
In this episode Wendy Earle interviews Manick Govinda and Agnieszka Kolek about their experiences in defending and promoting freedom in the arts. Agnieszka Kolek is a co-founder of Passion for Freedom, an organisation founded in 2009 to curate festivals of artists who have faced censorship and cancellation. (https://www.passionforfreedom.art)
It has organised events in London, Denmark, Poland and New York. Manick Govinda is a curator and writer working in contemporary art and also mentoring artists. Since openly supporting the campaign to leave the EU he has found himself increasingly ostracised in the art world.
Agnieszka and Manick talk first about their experience of censorship in the arts in Europe and the work of Passion for Freedom, and then about their work in Warsaw, Poland, where they had an opportunity to put the principles of freedom of expression into practice, as the co-curators of “Culture Tensions” at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art from January 2022 until February 2024.
However, since the change of government in Poland at the last parliamentary general election held on 15 October 2023, the ruling Law & Justice Party (PiS) was eventually defeated by the formation of a new ruling coalition government led by Donald Tusk. The new government began a programme of “settling accounts”, ousting cultural leaders from public sector jobs. This “revenge politics” led to the dismissal of The Ujazdowski Castle’s Director, Piotr Bernatowicz and his three deputy directors this summer.
The new interim director announced that “due to the changes in the programme of the [Ujazdowski Castle], we decided that the Culture Tensions project does not fit into it”. Cancel culture in Poland is not new, many artists were censored, lost their jobs and silenced under Communist rule.
From 2021 until the summer of 2024, the Ujazdowski Castle was a beacon of free expression, reshaping Poland's cultural landscape away from the usual tropes of globalist, social justice oriented contemporary art that has gripped most of the West. Many artists, writers and curators from the UK and USA who were cancelled in the West were invited to discuss pertinent issues around arts, culture and politics, to curate exhibitions and exhibit their art at this prestigious centre for contemporary art. The Culture Tensions programme is online - for now - and can be accessed on YouTube.
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Niall Crowley is joined by David Adam - cultural and economics specialist. Dido Powell - artist and art teacher. Manick Govinda - an independent arts writer, curator and artist’s mentor. Jane Sandeman - chief operation officer at The Passage. Dr Michael Owens co-author of ‘Play the Game: How the Olympics Came to East London’....
As much as we love sports, we are in the business of talking about the arts, so why the Olympics? Quite simply, the Olympics are a global event that put the arts in the spotlight, as well as sport itself. And as we’ve stated previously, we are keen to experiment and try different formats and explore a range of subject-matter.
However, when we first discussed the idea of doing this - a couple of weeks before the games began – we were not entirely sure we would have something substantial and interesting talking about! But why wouldn’t there be? With the Olympics come great architecture and design - grand new stadiums, impressive sporting facilities and so on. Who can forget Ai Wei Wei’s incredible Birds Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics 2008? Or the fluid geometry of Zaha Hadid’s London Aquatics Centre?
Then of course there’s the opening ceremony, where the host nation draws on its best and brightest in theatre, film, costume, music, performance. Then stuffs them all into their breath-taking new stadium for the greatest, most inspiring show on the planet. We, the global and local audience, sit back while they inspire us with the retelling of their national story, remind us of our common humanity and set us up for the world’s greatest sporting spectacle. At least that’s the idea.
In Beijing a resurgent China powered onto the world stage with a polished and awe-inspiring ceremony. The UK tootled back into the global spotlight, as if on an old London bus, apologised for inventing the modern world and then threw the Queen out of a plane. Rio was supposed to put on the world’s greatest carnival but chose instead to deliver a stultifying NGO-style lecture about ‘deforestation’. And just when we were most in need of pick-me-up, Tokyo simply reflected back at us the lonely isolation of Lockdown.
Paris certainly gave us a show the likes of which we’d never seen before. And we’ve been talking, debating and arguing about it ever since. Is it the case that each successive Games comes to crystallise a growing contestation of how we understand our history, our culture and society? Well we may not have come up with all the answers but the Paris Olympics certainly gave us lots to talk about - more than we could have imagined when we originally planned the show. Joining us we have a really great panel.
David Adam is a cultural and economic specialist, whose work was at the heart of the London Olympics, organising exhibitions and cultural exchanges. He was responsible for London’s official Olympic brand at the Beijing Games. He’s an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California and the founder of Global Cities.
Dido Powell is an artist and art teacher who has exhibited widely in London and around the country. She’s regular contributor to Arts First and also organises the enormously popular and brilliant gallery tour series for the Academy of Ideas Arts and Society Forum.
Manick Govinda is an independent arts writer, advisor, creative producer, curator and artist’s mentor. He has worked with many award-winning artists in the field of contemporary visual arts and performance. Jane
Sandeman - is the chief operation officer at The Passage – a homeless charity in Westminster. She is the convenor of the Academy of Ideas’ Parents Forum. Always an insightful commentator on a range of issues, she says her family are ‘made about the Olympics’ and they are just back from Paris, having watched women’s volley ball and women’s rugby 7s.
Dr Michael Owens is a writer and lecturer with a career background in urban development. He co-authored ‘Play the Game: How the Olympics Came to East London’, building on research and his experiences working for the Mayor of London at the London Development Agency. He is a Board Member of Bow Arts Trust.
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Artist Rachel Jordan talks to some artist friends about their expectations and anxieties under the new Government.
Art critic, JJ Charlesworth, leads a conversation with special guests about the Labour Party policies outlined in their document Creating Growth, which asserts that ‘people make art, policies don’t’ — but is this just a cop out from giving the arts needed support?
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This episode’s participants:
Wendy Earle, convenor; Arts&Society Forum; JJ Charlesworth, art critic; Tiffany Jenkins, writer and broadcaster; Niall Crowley, designer and writer; Dido Powell, artist and art history teacher.
Arts First is produced by the Academy of Ideas Arts & Society Forum: Find us on Facebook.
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