2. Crossing Over

Over the past three decades, Goldie has helped pioneer a crossover that has reshaped British music, one between classical composition and the popular music of Black Britain. In this series, he traces how it happened and finds the traffic running in both directions. Artists who came up immersed in drum and bass, garage and grime have moved from borrowing classical textures to writing symphonies of their own, while classically trained composers have brought the rhythms of the street into the concert hall.

Each episode covers a distinct stage: the first reach for the orchestra, the crossing over that followed, and the musical fusions made by a current generation for whom there is no longer a line to cross.

A composer drawing on the music of the street is nothing new. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor built whole works out of spirituals in 1905, doing for his own people’s music what Brahms had done with Hungarian folk tunes. What is new is the vernacular being drawn on and who is doing it.

No-one is better placed to tell this story than Goldie. As he has said, the point has always been to put the power of culture into people's hands. The ambition to give drum and bass the mood and depth of classical music took hold early on and shaped his 1995 album Timeless; by the follow-up, Saturnz Return, Goldie had a full string section playing on the record. He learned to conduct in 2008 for the BBC's Maestro, and a year later his first orchestral composition, Sine Tempore, was premiered at the Proms by the BBC Concert Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir. This autumn Goldie returns to the South Bank with his live band and an orchestra.

Music featured in this episode: Errollyn Wallen, Mighty River; Goldie, Sine Tempore; Joan Armatrading, Love and Affection and her Symphony No. 1; Shirley J Thompson, New Nation Rising; Anna Meredith, HandsFree; Gabriel Prokofiev, Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra, and his own Medasyn remix of it; Soweto Kinch, Dawn from White Juju; and Sault, Heart.