Prof. Paul Whitty was interviewed by BBC Radio 3 as part of the ‘Sunday Feature’. This edition looked at music historian Charles Burney, notions of popular and classical music, and chanting on the terraces:
Should the soundtrack of the 2026 Football World Cup be full of Classical music? British fans have been chanting to Verdi, humming along to Puccini and Handel – so why do we resist to label this music popular? Oskar Jensen, a historian of song, discovers how the eighteenth-century composer and travel writer Charles Burney might help explain how we define and label the music.
Dr Oskar Jensen, who leads a major project on mainstream song from 1520 to the present day at the University of Newcastle, speaks to Dr Katherine Hambridge, Associate Professor of Musicology at Durham University, and to Professor Paul Whitty, composer and sound researcher at Oxford Brookes University.
The programme is available on BBC Sounds (Link).