Tom Service invites you to take stroll around a rogues’ gallery of musical musical fakers, from the perpetrators of innocent pranks, to calculating fraudsters’ deliberate deceptions. As well as the satisfying sight of seeing musical experts consuming humble pie, what are the motivations behind musical hoaxes? How can aesthetic value shift when work, once thought to be by a musical …

Can you imagine a piece of music without its bass line? Or going out dancing with no bass to move to? Whether it’s an epic symphony or a club classic – we love listening to the bass. But what actually is ‘bass’? How is it that we can often feel it as much as hear it? And why is it …

Tom Service looks at music in flight – the miraculous musical form that is the fugue, where melodies chase each other, work against each other and come together in a supremely logical and often exhilarating fusion. How does it work, why is it important and can we learn to love the fugue in the 21st century? Tom tries his hand …

Space. A place few men or women have gone before … but plenty of composers have. The universe has inspired musicians for hundreds of years and consequently we all know what space music sounds like. Or do we? From Holst and David Bowie to John Williams via Ligeti, Thomas Ades and the Beastie Boys, Tom Service dons his spacesuit on …

How can music make us cry? Why does our favourite piece give us the shivers? And why, when we’re feeling down, do we enjoy nothing more than a good wallow in sad music? Is it something in the music – or something in ourselves? From Schubert to Stravinsky and Mahler to Miley Cyrus – Tom Service is joined by music …

Today – repetition. It’s been estimated that in 90 per cent of the music that we hear in our lives, we’re hearing material that we’ve already listened to before, And if you think about the music you love the most – it’s often built on repeated patterns, phrases and riffs. So why do we need our music to be so …

So where do we start? This inaugural programme takes “Beginnings” at its theme – how do you begin a piece of music? Tom looks at a cornucopia of opening bars – from classical to pop, to see how composers grab our attention, and go on to keep us listening. With thoughts from composer Anna Meredith on the terror of the …