Curious about how creativity can shape a better future? Come along and take part in an afternoon of collaboration and conversation at Radical Curiosity on Tuesday 11 February. Below is a personal invitation from Erica Whyman, our Visiting Fellow who is leading the event. Her words capture the heart of what this gathering is all about:
A personal invitation from Erica Whyman
If you’re reading this, thank you for being curious about what I’m up to. I’m a theatre maker, and have spent a few decades finding ways to ask difficult and sometimes simple questions about the world, in a way that invites a conversation.
I’ve known Oxford since 1988. My first impression was of a place of privilege the like of which I did not know existed. And then I explored just a little further and realised it held the diversity of the whole world in one small city, the industry of car manufacturing, the history of dinosaurs, the energy of carnival, the birthplace of Oxfam. Since then I’ve loved the contradictions and the endless possibilities of this place.
This year I’ve been given a gift by the Cultural Programme at the University of Oxford, to spend a little time thinking about how we tell stories, why we make art, and how any of it can make the world a little more democratic. Our world seems to me to be in a state of rapid change, making many of us feel untethered and untrusting, and yet we also face into amazing possibility, technological and human, to organise ourselves differently. Artists of all disciplines have always been at the forefront of change, but I think that in this country we mostly think of them (us) as a nice-to-have, not essential.
I believe that artists (we) are completely necessary to make sense of our fears and our potential. And I think universities and cities can invest in culture and creativity in transformative ways.
If you have something to say about any of the above, please come along. For however long you can spare. Your voice matters to me.
Erica
Feeling inspired? Don’t miss this chance to join Erica and others in reimagining how creativity can help us navigate and respond to the challenges of our time. Radical Curiosity takes place on Tuesday 11 February from 1-5pm at Holywell Music Room, Oxford. Find out more and reserve your free ticket
Date: Wednesday 22nd January, 14.00-15.00
Location: Second Floor Lecture Theatre, Radcliffe Humanities (and online via MS Teams) (Light refreshments provided from 13.30)
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Level 2, Radcliffe Humanities Building
Site address: Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG
This is an invitation to attend a session to brainstorm ideas for a Cultural Programme Season on Planetary Health. Prof. Alan Bernstein (Director of Global Health), Prof. Erica Charters (History) and Associate Prof. Venus Bivar (History) are already collaborating with the Cultural Programme on possible opportunities for the season and we are keen now to extend an invitation to others to join the conversation.
The aim of the session is to explore and test the potential for the season and bring together researchers who could be involved in shaping and delivering it.
The focus of the season will be on cultural work which engages with the intersection between human health & wellbeing and environmental & planetary health. The season will take place in Trinity Term 2027 and will be one of the first major seasons of cultural programming in the new Schwarzman Centre. We would like the season to be ambitious and international while also engaging grass-roots, local communities, especially schools and young people. It will be wide-ranging, inclusive, accessible, innovative, and fun.
We are keen to open-up the very many potential threads in the season, which include environmental anxiety and grief, climate justice, worker health and the role of protest in improving environmental and human health.
We are calling out for researchers from the across the University to join us as we develop the season. We are keen to learn about research projects in the University which connect to this theme, and explore the potential for cultural activities which are inspired by or connect with this research.
Please come along to this initial group meeting for all interested parties, which will be structured around the question: What has cultural and creative activity got to do with planetary health?
We also invite you to pass the invitation on to other Oxford researchers who you think might be interested to contribute to this workshop.
If you have something you would like to share or discuss in advance, please reach out to the researchers who are already involved above, or contact Holly Knights at the Cultural Programme with your suggestion.
If you are able to attend please RSVP to the culturalprogramme@humanities.ox.ac.uk with ‘Planetary Health Workshop’ in the subject line by 14 January 2025.
As anticipation builds, we invite you to explore the upcoming programme for Castalian String Quartet’s concert on Tuesday 26 November at the Holywell Music Room. Featuring three captivating pieces, each with its own unique character and story, the evening will be a journey through pieces both familiar and new. For those wanting to go deeper, we’ve prepared a sneak peek into the programme notes, offering insights into the stories and history behind the music you’ll experience:
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 – 1912) 5 Fantasiestücke for String Quartet, Op. 5
Edward Elgar always had an ear for talent. When the 1898 Three Choirs Festival committee asked him for an orchestral work, he declined, but made a recommendation: ‘I wish, wish, wish you would ask Coleridge- Taylor to do it. He still wants recognition and he is far and away the cleverest fellow going among the young men’. Elgar had a point. Coleridge-Taylor had been born in Holborn, the son of a farrier’s daughter and a medical student from Sierra Leone, who’d returned to Africa, unaware, before his son was born. If the mixed-race, illegitimate Samuel experienced prejudice on the streets of Victorian London, his early talent as a musician won him welcome and acclaim at the RCM. ‘Indisputable!’ scribbled his teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford under the column headed ‘Progress’ on his 1895 end-of- year report. As well he might. On the 13th March that year a mixed-sex student quartet had premiered Coleridge-Taylor’s Fantasiestücke in a concert at the college and it had been reviewed in the national press – then as now, a striking accolade for a nineteen-year old composer. The anonymous critic, writing for The Era, was disappointed by the German title (it seems to have been borrowed from Schumann) but he was delighted with the music, in which the great chamber music patron W.W. Cobbett heard the influence of Dvořák. That’s certainly the case with the bittersweet opening Prelude, though the flowing Serenade has a warmth that is all Coleridge-Taylor’s own. The Humoresque is a brilliant scherzo, while the Minuet was a particular hit at the first performance – The Era noted that there was ‘quite enthusiastic applause at the close’. And by way of finale, there’s a restless headlong Dance over a growling rustic drone. ‘The audience at the end recognised the talent of Mr Coleridge Taylor by summoning him twice to the platform’, recorded The Era – before adding that ‘it is one of the best efforts we have heard from a student for years’. Coleridge-Taylor dedicated the score to Stanford when it was published, the following year.
Credit: Richard Bratby
Francesco Antonioni (b.1971) Surfarara, String Quartet No. 2
Folk influences have long permeated classical music, inspiring the likes of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, Liszt, Sibelius, and most notably Béla Bartók. However, whereas Transylvanian villages were Bartók’s gold mine, a sulphur mine in Sicily served as the central inspiration for my second string quartet. In 1881, near Caltanissetta, a grisou explosion claimed the lives of 65 people, including 19 ‘carusi’, boys aged 6 to 14. Two years later, in a gallery nearby, 36 workers died of suffocation. It was in this fraught context that, in 1953, ethnomusicologists Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella recorded an intense and heartbreaking song, Surfarara, from a singer in a small Sicilian village, where another 23 miners were soon to die. ‘I forget; I forgot; I’ve forgotten; I’ve forgotten my very own life,’ says the singer in a raw, piercing voice, without any hint of whining. It is a song of despair and solitude. The miner has lost everything dear: family, friends, even the saints, and the recollection of his lover, the sole memory left, adds to his grief. And yet he stands still and sings out loud, along with a Jew’s harp. The ‘Surfarara’ string quartet was commissioned by the Wigmore Hall as one of their ‘lockdown commissions’ and was premiered by the Castalian String Quartet last June. That song of unfading sorrow and relentless courage resounded deeply throughout the pandemic and served as a backdrop for a dialogue with the vibrant, raucous voice of the singer–the bearer of the message. The song weaves itself into the fabric of the quartet, emerging fleetingly in the first movement and more extensively in the last one, and appears in sudden epiphanies, amidst a tapestry of heterogeneous materials. But it is the reverberation of that ancient song of sorrow and the voice that articulated it that give meaning and purpose to the abiding disquiet weaving throughout the piece. From the first notes, which reflect the way out of the cavern with open strings and transparent harmonics, to the backward descent down the shaft through micro-intervals, combination tones, white noise, and sul ponticello sounds, every aspect of the composition reflects the organic, vital pulse of the popular music that inspired it. Through a kaleidoscope of musical gestures—from slow glissandos to repeated aggressive gestures—the quartet tries to bring back to life the unwavering song of sorrow with its timeless echoes of human resilience.
Credit: Francesco Antonioni (abridged)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) String Quartet No. 12 in E flat, Op. 127
‘Dear Beethoven! You go to realise a long- desired wish…By diligent study, receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.’ That was the plan, anyway. Late in 1792, Ferdinand, Count von Waldstein sent this message to his 22-year old protégé Beethoven as he set out from provincial Bonn for Vienna – where Waldstein had arranged for him to study with Haydn. It didn’t quite work out. Haydn’s mind was elsewhere and Beethoven was a recalcitrant pupil. And so the legend was born of Beethoven the rebel and outsider: a vital component of the myth of the Beethoven string quartets as works that stand outside of tradition and convention. As ever, the reality is both more interesting, and more extraordinary. Beethoven was just 54 years old when he completed this “late” quartet, composed between March 1824 and January 1825 to a commission from the Russian Prince Nikolai Galitzin. And every bar illustrates just how comprehensively Haydn’s transformation of the quartet into an instrument of absolute expression – in which tone-colour and instrumental texture play as vital an expressive role as melody, harmony or counterpoint – had become part of Beethoven’s musical language. The very opening makes that point – the way the first violin, with a bird-like trill, breaks clear of the dense, double-stopped Maestoso introduction, as the whole texture opens out into the free-flowing Allegro. The formal process is less important than the sense of emotional release. ‘All things flow clear and pure from the Maestoso’ remarks the musicologist Birgit Lodes. You don’t have to read too much into the Maestoso’s frequent returns to feel that something of the utmost emotional significance is being communicated in this quartet, conceived while Beethoven worked on the Missa Solemnis. Or, for that matter, to feel that the pianissimo low note with which the cello begins the second movement is more than just a bass note – or that the third variation’s sudden, transfiguring move into E major is more than a mere key change. A miniature pizzicato introduction offsets the rigours of the Scherzo that follows, and the last-minute transformation of the bustling, rough-cut Finale into a lilting half-whispered coda shows just how profoundly Beethoven had assimilated the lessons of Haydn – the supreme master of musical fun and games. The first performance was led by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh on 6th March 1825, and it left its audience confused. ‘Few were moved, it was a weak succès d’estime’ reported the violinist Joseph Böhm, who, at Beethoven’s request went on to play the quartet twice in a single concert on two separate occasions: 23rd March and 7th April 1825. And as ears began to acclimatise to these new sounds, it’s significant that the metaphor reached for by the critic of the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung Wien was one of colour – of light. “The misty veil disappeared, and the splendid work of art radiated its dazzling glory”.
Credit: Richard Bratby
You can now book your tickets for the Castalian String Quartet’s upcoming concerts and pre-concert talks on Tuesday 26 November and Thursday 30 January with a special offer if you book both concerts at the same time. There will also be a two celebration concerts on Friday 9 May with a special offer if you book both concerts taking place on this date.
Presented by the Cultural Programme in association with the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, where the Castalian String Quartet are The Hans Keller String Quartet in Residence. Made possible thanks to The Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust.
As the nights draw in and temperatures drop, the Castalian String Quartet promises to bring warmth to their upcoming concert on Tuesday, 26th November. The evening will feature a striking contemporary piece inspired by Sicilian sulphur mines, symbolised by the lighting of a match. Amid their current North American tour, we caught up with violinist and Castalian Quartet member Daniel Roberts to learn more about the remarkable performance ahead later this month:
At the heart of this recital will be one of the first performances of Francesco Antonioni’s Surfarara. Composed during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we premiered Surfarara at the Wigmore Hall earlier this year before taking it to July’s Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. It was there, in the light-bound stretches of northern Europe, a far cry from the sunless Sicilian sulphur mines that give the piece its title, that the Castalians first played atop a fire blanket; picture a wood-clad concert hall embraced by endless pine forests, buckets of water by our sides, health-and-safety officers up in arms and fretful stage-hands on standby. You see, this might be the only string quartet that requires its performers to light matches on the concert platform—a sensory masterstroke that immediately plunges the audience into the mysterious, often disconcerting depths of Surfarara. Amidst torrents of extended techniques and quick-fire passage work, soaring melodies quote from a Sicilian folk song of the same name, of which Antonioni writes: ‘It is at once both desperate and full of pride. The line ‘I have forgotten about my own life’ resonated deeply with me during lockdown.’
Alongside Francesco’s powerful work, the first half features Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s infectiously charming 5 Fantasiestücke, Op.5: succinct character pieces that showcase their composer’s invention, wit and ingenuity, while nodding with affection to his beloved Dvorak. Before bringing it to Oxford, we’re touring this work in the USA, a country where London-born Coleridge-Taylor was celebrated enough to earn the moniker ‘The African Mahler’ (his father was from Sierra Leone, his mother English) and an invite to meet President Roosevelt at the White House. Tragically, despite international fame, he would die, poverty-stricken, in Croydon at the age of 37. The Times obituary read: ‘The sudden death of Mr Coleridge-Taylor will be felt as a serious loss by all who are interested in musical matters.’ Delve into this music, and it’s hard to disagree with such sentiment.
The final piece in the programme needs little introduction. Op.127, the earliest of Beethoven’s fabled late string quartets, is one of the great achievements in Western Art—monumental in scale and with the grandest of openings, but thereafter unexpectedly intimate, especially in comparison to its E flat major cousins, such as the Eroica Symphony. This will be our first performance of the work—what feels a landmark moment in our quartet life—and the ideal way to mark the extension of our residency at the University of Oxford!
Daniel Roberts
2nd violinist, Castalian String Quartet
You can now book your tickets for the Castalian String Quartet’s upcoming concerts and pre-concert talks on Tuesday 26 November and Thursday 30 January with a special offer if you book both concerts at the same time. There will also be a two celebration concerts on Friday 9 May with a special offer if you book both concerts taking place on this date.
Presented by the Cultural Programme in association with the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, where the Castalian String Quartet are The Hans Keller String Quartet in Residence. Made possible thanks to The Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust.
Many people across Oxfordshire joined us at the Metamorphosis-inspired tent, Jitterbug, over a blustery weekend to mark Kafka’s centenary. Nearly 3,000 people joined a free programme of talks, yoga, crafting, storytelling, circus, cabaret, spoken word and the culmination of a dance programme for a group with Parkinson’s.
Created by Trigger and co-produced by Trigger and the Cultural Programme, the events included workshops with local artists and organisations like Oxford’s Story Museum , bringing their own unique approach to share with the general public. They were joined by academics from the University of Oxford who provided an insight into Kafka’s work and how this still has relevance today.
Highlights across the three day event included our very own costumed buzzy bee and fuzzy fly characters who entertained the children, who were also encourged to have their face painted, chase bubbles and make their own buzzy bee costumes. This was followed with an exclusive evening performance by the ‘rebel chantreuse’ and international superstar, Meow Meow, who wowed the audience with her Kafka-esque performance of classic show tunes from the likes of Kurt Weill through to the more contemporary ‘Itsy Weeny Yellow Dot bikini’ number on Friday.
Our costumed characters were on hand again when a fashion show took centre stage on Saturday, judged by the team at Dragademia, who also almost brought the tent down in the evening with an outrageous cabaret performance followed by a debut collaboration between local aerial artiste Julia Sparkle and MC RAWZ.
These were interspersed by panel sessions across the three days, hosted by resident Kafka academics from the University of Oxford. around such topics as Kafka’s influence on contemporary art, his approach to his work and his enduring legacy. A final panel session on Sunday also discussed the fascinating world of insects and their pivotal role in shaping our future.
The Bodleian’s printing press also worked hard on Sunday and produced almost 500 insect images. A further 2,000 people stopped by to see Jitterbug and take photos and more than 500 took away a copy of the Bodleian’s special edition of Metamorphosis.
Our thanks to our creative partner, Trigger and all the artistes, academics and organisations who helped make this event such a success, and to the crowds who joined us to make it all worthwhile. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!


















Iconoclastic composer Steve Martland (1954-2013), known for crossing musical boundaries, inspired an exciting project to explore and revive his ground-breaking music and introduce local audiences to his work who may have been unfamiliar with contemporary classical music.
At the Bullingdon Club in Oxford on 14 June 2024, composer, arranger and editor, Luke Lewis, also Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at New College and Komuna Collective, an interdisciplinary group of artists, musicians and DJ’s, performed some of their favourite works by the composer along with a selection of music he inspired.
These included Steve Martland’s Danceworks . Luke comments: ” I don’t think there’s a work by any composer that quite manages to fuse pop music and minimalism. It’s music that sounds familiar, but you’ve never actually heard before.”
This was followed by Luke Lewis own composition, Gardening Tips. A new string quartet that used audio samples from Martland’s last recorded interview. You can find out more about this here.
In addition, Adam Possener, founder of the Komuna Collective, composer and violist own compositions Time4Tea and 1LOV3YOUL1GeT1 for string quartet and electronics were performed, The first was inspired by old tapes about learning English he found at his Grandmother’s house and the second is an homage to the composer George Ligeti. The evening concluded with works by Julius Eastman and Mahavishnu Orchestra.
As we mark the 11th anniversary of Martland’s passing, his innovative spirit and defiance of convention continues to resonate, making his work as relevant today as it was during his lifetime.
Breaking boundaries in music
Steve Martland was not content with the conventional confines of classical music. His compositions were a unique blend of the classical tradition mixed with the unconventional. He is the only composer signed to the now legendary Factory Records. With them he performed alongside DJs at infamous Haçienda nightclub and released albums under their ‘Factory Classical’ imprint. Factory’s aim here resonated with Martland’s in that it sought to cross boundaries, this time in marketing classical music to their regular post-punk/alternative audience.
Unconventional and informal performances
One of Martland’s most significant contributions was his mission to perform classical music outside the traditional concert hall environment. He wanted his music to be accessible to all and often staged his performances in less formal, more dynamic settings such as clubs, pubs and local arts centres, bringing his powerful compositions to new and diverse audiences.
Inspiring research
The project has developed into a series of concerts in collaboration with the Komuna Collective – a group of young artists, musicians, DJs, and composers committed to an interdisciplinary approach to the arts – bringing Martland’s compositions for string quartet and the Steve Martland Band to bars and clubs in Oxford and London alongside newly commissioned works. Inspired by his experimental approach the performances will see local DJs work in and around the classical works performed.
Newly commissioned works
Whilst Martland wrote a series of works for the ensemble line-up of the Steve Martland Band, with his death in 2013 these works are rarely heard together and few composers have written for this instrumentation which is a great shame given that it crosses many genre and audience borders. You can expect rarely heard performances of these works and newly commissioned pieces inspired by Martland’s approach. The upcoming concert will be a fitting tribute to his lasting influence and a celebration of his enduring legacy.



