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Episode details

Radio 3,22 Jan 2023,29 mins

On the March: Pomp, Circumstance and Dam Busters

The Listening Service

Available for over a year

The musical and military features of the march seem pretty unpromising terrain for composers - you’ve got to constrain your creativity to two-time, easy to remember tunes that keep pace in strict time. And yet the form of the march allows for more creativity than those strictures might suggest. Tom falls in with composers including Elgar, Coates, Sousa, Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven to discover how the march can beat the drum for many different ideas and emotions. With historian, Prof Simon Heffer.

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