KFAI's MinneCulture Presents

Abiyoyo by Pete Seeger One night while singing lullabies , Pete was begged by   his children  for a story instead. As a compromise, he wrote this story-song  based on an old South African folk tale  to quiet them. We begin with a  boy and his father who are banished because folks find them to be nuisances. However, one day a fearsome giant, Abiyoyo , suddenly appears in the village, and all the townspeople run for their lives -- and the lives of their children ! Nothing can stop the terrible giant, nothing, that is, except for a pair of misfit rejects . How I Hunted the Little Fellows read by Pete Seeger Mr. Seeger recites Boris Zhitkov 's children's tale " How I Hunted the Little Fellows ," an account by a small child of his fantasy about tiny people living in a model boat owned by his grandmother and his attempts to discover them.

Fake City, Real Dreams Produced by Zak Rosen Word got around about Neil Greenberg’s crazy huge fake place project. Rumor was that he was mapping a really expansive, detailed metro region on  giant poster boards . Zak was intrigued. He  began to think about how cool it might be to climb into Neil’s head, to get an idea of what he sees when he looks at his maps. Zak found  Neil’s vision so specific, inspiring, and creative  that he set out to do a radio profile , an audio   rendering of this imagined near utopia.  A city  that could be real -- but isn't... at least not yet. The W orld Within the World from The Memory Palace A NYU PhD candidate 's studies go off the rails sending him on a lonely quest to prove the world is hollow . An idea based on ancient legends that there are entire civilizations which thrive in subterranean cities . Of course these dwellers of the world beneath are more technologically advanced than we are on the surface. H...

Song of a Troubled Heart  from Radio Netherlands After a series of tragic events in 1907, Gustav Mahler composed “ Das Lied von der Erde ” (The Song of the Earth), a symphony in six movements for tenor, alto and orchestra. With texts based on 8th century Chinese poetry, he called it his “most personal composition.” We'll hear the story from the summer of 1910 when Mahler, still suffering from deep depression, traveled to Holland to meet wit h Dr. Sigmund Freud . Unfortunately,  psychoanalysis proved even  less able to ease his troubled heart than poetry had. He would die  the following year - having never heard "Das Lied von der Erde" performed.

Epic Tales   from Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening In 1933, a young classics scholar called Milman Parry made a journey through the hill villages of the Balkans to record poets and singers. He captured an oral tradition that's all but died out - peasant performers who recited epic tales over days from memory without any form of prompt.  We'll learn how these ancient tales were  remembered  and passed down, and travel to the ancient Theatre of Epidaurus in Greece. Featuring archive extracts of traditional stories from the Balkans, Kyrgyzstan, West Africa, and India. Persuasion   from Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening From Cicero to Martin Luther King, Jr. , over the centuries, great orators have changed our minds, given us hope , and sent us to the barricades. Professor  David Hendy  of the University of Sussex  reveals their rhetorical tricks, and explains why President Obama 's sharp ear for dialogue is on...