From Churchill to the 'Turkish Five' at the BBC’s Broadcasting House

In this essay, Emre Aracı reflects on the evocative power of radio, from Churchill’s wartime address at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in 1939 to his own appearance in 2025 on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week, dedicated to the Turkish Five. Weaving personal memory, historical insight, and musical scholarship, Aracı charts a journey through sound—across decades and continents—linking Adnan Saygun and Béla Bartók’s Anatolian folk expeditions, the legacy of George Orwell and Prospero’s ship, and the continuing resonance of music as a force of cultural identity. With rich detail and quiet lyricism, this essay celebrates radio’s enduring role in preserving memory, bridging civilisations, and illuminating the past through the art of listening.

When Sir Winston Churchill stepped through the doors of London’s Broadcasting House on 1 October 1939, he cut a characteristically dignified and assured figure, in spite of the tension and foreboding that hung heavy over the capital. Dressed immaculately in evening attire, his black bow tie carefully knotted and a pocket watch fastened to his waistcoat, he exuded composure. Not a crease could be detected in his starched white shirt. That day, he would address the nation from behind a microphone—nothing more. Barely a month had passed since Britain’s entry into war with Nazi Germany, and the country stood on the threshold of a long and arduous struggle that would define its fate.

Sir Winston Churchill at the BBC’s Broadcasting House on 1 October 1939

Broadcasting House, which stands on Portland Place just north of Oxford Circus, had opened its doors only seven years earlier. Designed in the Art Deco style by architect George Val Myer, it was more than a mere broadcasting headquarters—it symbolised the modern age and the ever-increasing power of mass communication. At the time, even radio announcers donned dinner jackets as a mark of elegance and gravity. Though the gloom of war had spread across the land, a certain order—rooted in discipline and tradition—still reigned within the studio walls. Churchill’s address that day was intended to inspire not only with words, but through the steadfastness of his bearing. His relationship with the BBC may have been uneasy, but he recognised all too well the potency and reach of radio.

The first time I glimpsed the Broadcasting House from a distance, it reminded me of a flustered ocean liner, uncertain of its bearings and trying to change course. The aerial rising from its roof resembled a ship’s mast, while the statue of Prospero above the entrance—a nod to Shakespeare’s The Tempest—stood like a majestic captain, presiding over his vessel. It was only years later that I learned the reason for the building’s curious, almost awkward asymmetry. In accordance with Britain’s historic Right of Ancient Lights, new buildings could not obstruct their neighbours’ access to daylight. Thus, Broadcasting House had been designed to yield and contort, like a sail buffeted by the wind, so as not to infringe upon that ancient entitlement.

On a biting December morning in 2024, I once again found myself walking along Oxford Street, my steps leading me inevitably towards the BBC. I had previously been to the Radio 3 studios for a number of interviews, including In Tune, and had observed music come to life within the echoing quiet of those corridors. This time, however, I felt a different kind of excitement—for I had not come to make an ordinary recording, but to appear as a guest on Composer of the Week, a programme I had followed with youthful fervour during my music studies in London nearly forty years before. But I was not there to speak of my own music: I had been invited to discuss the Turkish Five, those pioneering composers who helped shape the soundscape of the young Turkish Republic.

Listen to the BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week "highlights version" podcast

Looking back, the very idea that such a programme might ever be dedicated to these figures would have seemed fanciful in the 1980s—an unattainable dream. But times had changed. Despite the growing fractures between nations and peoples, a deepening intellectual dialogue had taken root among certain circles, nourished by the vertiginous pace of the information age. Fantasies of the past were gradually becoming realities.

Eighty years on, the visit from wartime London to an era of peace was not without its ironies. The very building Churchill had entered with stately grace in the 1940s had now become a place where one might expect to be received in bulletproof vests. Barricades surrounded the inner courtyard; the new reception area, part of a more recent extension, resembled the security zone of an international airport. Now, Prospero, the captain of the ship stood boarded up, awaiting its protective screen, and the structures once sheltered by the Right of Ancient Lights had long vanished, replaced by a glass façade glinting in the neon haze of the twenty-first century, indifferent to the past it had displaced. The statue of George Orwell by sculptor Martin Jennings stood not only as a reminder of the dystopia foretold in 1984—a vision fast approaching reality amid the dizzying rise of artificial intelligence—but also of Orwell’s own tenure at the BBC from 1941 to 1943, when this building inspired his notion of the Ministry of Truth. All these reflections seemed to echo within the historic walls of the Broadcasting House on that wintry London day when we had come to speak of the Turkish Five. Professor Mine Doğantan-Dack of the University of Cambridge joined me as the programme’s other guest.

Composer of the Week—one of BBC Radio’s most venerable and respected series—was first broadcast in the darkest days of the Second World War, on 2 August 1943. Its purpose was simple: each week, to present the life and works of a single composer in depth. Mozart was the inaugural subject, and the programme, initially titled This Week’s Composer, assumed its present name in 1964. Over time, it became a cornerstone of music education for the general public. The earliest episodes aired at 7.30 in the morning and ran for 25 minutes. That first week, Yehudi Menuhin’s recordings of Mozart’s violin sonatas K. 378 and K. 526 were featured. In the weeks that followed came Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Haydn, Schumann, and Dvořák. Classical music, in its timeless universality, continued to inspire and provide solace, even amidst the hardships of war.

Curiously, that same year, a similar initiative appeared on Turkish radio. The Ulus newspaper’s 14 November 1943 issue advertised a programme entitled Explanatory Music: Let Us Get to Know the Masters, which aired at 09:45 in the morning. Variations of this format would persist across both public and private radio stations into the present day.

Bartók and Saygun in a hay cart in Toprakkale in 1936, during their folk song collecting expedition

In those years before television—an invention which, in my view, never surpassed the quiet dignity of radio—this medium held a central place in people’s homes and lives. The Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun learned of Béla Bartók’s death in New York through a radio bulletin. Writing in Ulus on 26 October 1945, he recalled: “When the radio announced Béla Bartók’s death on 26 September, my eyes fell upon the photograph on the wall. Wearing a black hat and a black cape, he and I were seated in a hay cart in Toprakkale, climbing the hill towards Tüysüztepe. One of us carried an Edison phonograph, the other, bundles of wax cylinders; our pockets were filled with papers and pencils. For a month, we had been collecting folksongs. Despite the cold and rain, we travelled from village to village.”

Eighty years later, there we were at Broadcasting House in London, discussing these very memories of Saygun and Bartók with Donald Macleod in the Radio 3 studios. Radio, I realised, is just such a miracle—a miracle that preserves the memory of sound and defies time itself. And how familiar was that voice! The very voice that had once transported me from Purcell’s London to Beethoven’s Vienna was now helping me narrate the story of Saygun and the musical journey of the Turkish Republic.

Distinguished musicologists such as Robert Layton and Richard Osborne helped shape the programme’s tradition of in-depth analysis. Their episodes went beyond biography to place each composer’s output in its broader artistic, historical, and cultural context. Since 1999, the programme has been helmed by Donald Macleod. Born in Glasgow and educated in psychology at the University of St Andrews, Macleod brings a rare sensitivity and natural humility to his role. He is not merely a narrator but a guide, drawing listeners gently into the music’s emotional terrain.

In an interview marking the 70th anniversary of the programme, published in The Guardian on 2 August 2013, Macleod expressed a profound affinity for the past and for the places in which music once thrived: “It's been thrilling for me, with Composer of the Week as my passport, to get into some very special places from which to tell the compelling stories that come my way, week after week. It was truly awesome to stand in the dusty choir-loft of St Mark's in Venice - and I'm talking serious dust, centuries old, and think, might I just have inhaled the same dust that Monteverdi did? It was from up there that he conducted performances of some of my favourite music. I got to handle a recently-discovered letter from him too, in the State Archives in Venice. Now that's my idea of a library: 14 kilometres of shelves around three fabulous cloisters in the heart of the city”. His enthusiasm resonated deeply with me. To feel so closely entwined with the memory of music and place, to brush against the seemingly untouchable fabric of time—this sensation would be familiar not only to historians or musicians, but to anyone still attuned to the voices of the past.

Donald Macleod, Mine Doğantan-Dack and Emre Aracı at Radio 3 (photo © Luke Whitlock)

Preparations for the five-part series, which aired from 24–28 February 2025, had begun months in advance. Producer Luke Whitlock meticulously crafted the programme’s questions and shared them with me over time, offering a glimpse into the programme’s inner workings. The stories of Cemal Reşit Rey, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Hasan Ferit Alnar, Ahmed Adnan Saygun, and Necil Kâzım Akses were explored not merely through their individual musical paths, but as part of the cultural identity forged in the wake of the Turkish Republic’s foundation. The episodes traced their journeys from European conservatoires to the nascent institutions of modern Turkey, and from their engagement with the West to the enduring legacy of their works. Each composer forged a distinct voice, building bridges between tradition and modernity. The series thus became more than a chronicle of artistic lives—it illuminated the dialogue between Turkish and Western music, the transformation of artistic identity, and the impact of modernisation on musical expression.

Saygun’s 1946 visit to London and his encounter with the English composer Michael Tippett was among the topics we discussed. After London, Saygun travelled on to Paris, where he conducted his Yunus Emre Oratorio on 29 March 1947 at the Maison de la Radio. While in Cornwall, Tippett had strained to hear the broadcast through the static of a crackling wireless, but it had eluded him. When I later showed Tippett his letter to Saygun, in which he described this failed attempt, he admitted he had no recollection of it. That Yunus Emre might one day be featured on Composer of the Week would scarcely have crossed his mind. Yet it would take seventy-eight years for that thought to find fulfilment. And therein lies the enduring power of creativity—and of radio, its most resonant vehicle. Churchill understood it. And so do we.

Emre Aracı's article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘BBC Radyoevi'nde Churchill'den Türk Beşleri'ne’ in the April 2025 issue (No. 222) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

Listen to the BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week "highlights version" podcast

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