The number 10

The BBC's Contains Strong Language Festival has been celebrating poetry and the written word for ten years, so this Words and Music, recorded with an audience in Salford, features a range of readings performed by Christopher Eccleston and Julie Hesmondhalgh all linked by the number 10.

Lewis Carroll's lesson plan for the Mock Turtle starts with ten hours and lessens each day, whilst Candice Carty-Williams' Queenie feels she is carrying and dropping ten balls of wool. Poet Billy Collins reflects on turning ten, and Dickens' Mr Bounderby from Hard Times remembers his tenth birthday; we hear William Shakespeare's Sonnet No 10 and ‘The Story of Patient Griselda’ from the tenth day of Boccaccio's Decameron. And we reflect on why, for Pythagoras, ten was a mystical number.

Music includes Bach's Prelude and Fugue No 10, Chopin's Études Op. 10, Mozart's Symphony No. 10 and ten orchestral variations by Tchaikovsky performed by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson; with solo piano items performed by William Bracken. The programme also gives an orchestral nod to some of the various ‘counting songs’ with the help of pupils from St. Andrew's C of E Junior School in Hadfield, North Derbyshire.

Produced in Salford by Chris Wines

Readings:
Billy Collins - On Turning Ten
Charles Dickens - Hard Times
Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
Dante - 10th Canto of Inferno
Zadie Smith - Grand Union
William Shakespeare - Sonnet 10
Kapilar – ‘Pathuppāttu’ (The Ten Lays) tr Vaidehi Herbert
Lang Leav – Rouge Planets
Boccaccio - Day X Story 10 – The Story of Patient Griselda from The Decameron, tr John Payne
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Neil deGrasse Tyson – Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
George Sand - Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand
Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret tr John Oxenford
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust, and the Urfaust
Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie - the Pythagorean Sourcebook: The Tetraktys
BJ Murphy - Moore's Law
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Candice Carty-Williams – Queenie
Erich Maria Remarque – All Quiet on the Western Front
Seamus Heaney - Mid-Term Break
Su Shi – Song of River City
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.