Radio 3's Fifty Modern Classics

Writer and musician David Toop celebrates Toru Takemitsu's soundtrack for Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 chiller Kwaidan, based on Lefcadio Hearn's retelling of Japanese ghost stories; film scholar Peter Grilli describes how the composer worked closely with the director and recording technicians to create a soundworld that was integral to the drama of the film.

Theatre director Katie Mitchell describes her first encounter with the music of Italian composer Luigi Nono and her subsequent staging of Al gran sole carico d'amore, an operatic work which interweaves stories from the 1871 Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution. Conductor Richard Bernas highlights the lyrical and communicative aspects of Nono's music and its place in the world of post-war serialism.

Jazz pianist Ethan Iverson nominates Milton Babbitt's Philomel for soprano and tape, "a classic record that should be owned by all fans of the avant-garde"; Paul Griffiths explains how Babbitt used the timbral and rhythmic resources of the Mark II RCA Sound Synthesizer to help realise his own brand of twelve-tone music. And we hear the voice of the composer himself from recordings made by the BBC in the 1960s.

Film director Barrie Gavin selects Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, an electroacoustic piece made from the sound of the largest bell at Winchester Cathedral and the voice of the composer's chorister son. Commentator Gillian Moore describes how Harvey used technology at IRCAM in Paris to manipulate and integrate these two sounds, and we hear from Harvey himself on the significance of the bell's inscription and the qualities of its tonal spectrum.

Finnish conductor and music director of Ensemble InterContemporain Susanna Malkki pays tribute to Stockhausen's 1950s masterpiece Gruppen for 3 orchestras, and highlights some of the challenges to conductors in performing it; commentator Paul Griffiths places the work in the context of Stockhausen's early output, and explains how the shape of a mountain view in Switzerland dictated the work's tempo patterns.

Conductor Richard Bernas recalls his momentous first encounter with Berio's Sinfonia, a work which reflected and commented on the events of its time, from the Paris riots to the assassination of Martin Luther King, and whose third movement is an extraordinary assemblage of musical and literary quotations. Commentator Gillian Moore explains the significance of the texts which include Levi-Strauss's Le Cru et le cuit and Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable; and we hear from the composer himself, speaking about the work in 1991.

Roxanna Panufnik nominates Arvo Part's Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten, "beautifully simple and spiritual" music that she feels a strong connection to; while Paul Griffiths tells of Part's early struggle to find his own voice in Soviet Estonia and subsequent breakthrough with a radical new style he called Tintinnabuli.

Howard Skempton singles out Extensions 3 by the American composer Morton Feldman, a piece he found "liberating, inspiring, and radically different". Paul Griffiths places the work in Feldman's early output and highlights the challenges to performers of music which is both very slow and very quiet. Plus excerpts from a BBC archive interview in which Feldman himself describes his approach to composition.

Stephen Fry describes his delight and bewilderment at first hearing Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 21 - also known as Canon X - for player piano. Nancarrow devoted his composing life to creating futuristic canonic studies for his custom-altered 1920s Ampico instrument, combining elements of jazz, Bach and Stravinsky, as we hear from the other voice in this episode, pianist Joanna MacGregor.

Percussionist Steven Schick recalls how a chance meeting with Brian Ferneyhough led to the commission of Bone Alphabet, the composer's only piece for non-pitched instruments; and writer Paul Griffiths describes the work's physicality and rhythmic complexity.

Artist Tom Phillips on Howard Skempton's Lento for orchestra, a completely tonal piece that he admires for achieving "content with simplicity"; Gillian Moore puts it in the context of the English experimentalist tradition; and the composer himself explains in detail the process by which he developed his initial sketches into the finished work.

Composer and former Battles frontman Tyondai Braxton nominates Poeme electronique by Edgard Varese, whose soundworld has been a continuing influence on his own work; while Gillian Moore tells the story of Varese's long struggle to create a futuristic music that he finally achieved in this piece, composed for an array of hundreds of loudspeakers inside the Le Corbusier-designed Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.

Artist Tacita Dean on John Cage's legendary 4'33" and how it provided an inspiration for Stillness, her 2007 project with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Conductor and Cage collaborator Richard Bernas underlines some important but often neglected aspects of the score and draws a parallel with the visual arts scene of 1950s New York. And we hear the voice of the composer himself from a 1970s BBC interview with critic Frank Kermode.

Pianist and Scratch Orchestra member John Tilbury speaks up for The Great Learning by the radical British composer and political activist Cornelius Cardew. Paul Griffiths explains its place in Cardew's musical and political thinking, and the composer suggests musicians abandon ‘individual choice’ and join together to orchestrate social change.

Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy explains how Iannis Xenakis uses the symmetry of a cube to determine musical parameters in Nomos Alpha for solo cello; Paul Griffiths highlights the composer's innovations in the fields of sound and instrumental writing; and we hear an archive interview in which Xenakis credits his teacher Olivier Messiaen in helping him to find his own compositional voice.