Against a backdrop of financial crisis and disinvestment in New York City, New Music was born. Writer Richard King explores the conditions for musical creativity in New York in the 1970s.

The phrase New Music is today used to describe musical composition that is contemporary and respectfully challenging. But it's a phrase with a distinct history – and a clear beginning, which we can root in a specific time and place.

The place is The Kitchen, a performance space in downtown Manhattan. The time: the mid-1970s, when New York City was coming apart at the seams. At The Kitchen, composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Julius Eastman, Rhys Chatham and their contemporaries debuted their works-in-progress to an audience keen to hear new ideas and forms. Before these artists found international acclaim, they were participants in a street-level avant-garde, the epicentre of which was the Kitchen, where New Music was cooked up.

Ten coastal encounters, presented by Richard King
Not simply town or countryside, the coastline is a place apart – attracting lives and stories often overlooked. In these ten programmes, writer Richard King travels around the UK coast to meet people who live and work there. A sequence of portraits rooted in distinct places, which piece together into an alternative portrait of the UK: an oblique image of the nation drawn from the coastal edge.