Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Anthropologist specializing in lemurs and monkeys; first full-time female vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, and former provost of Yale.
On the island
Eight records
This Miles Davis album reminds me of who I was as an undergraduate trying very hard, and I think probably not very successfully, to be very grown-up. And listening to Miles Davis struck me at the time as the height of sophistication.
Concertgebouw Orchestra and Chorus Amsterdam, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt
I don't sing well, but I love to sing. I sing lustily. I have always loved to sing. I was admitted to my school choir, I think not I know, not because I sang well, but because I had a low voice, and I sang fourth, and they were short of fourths.
In my early days at Yale, I lived in this wonderful great Victorian house... Bob Dewar... always started it with Sympathy for the Devil. Well, this was the man that I then went on to marry. And this sort of memorializes that and our continuing love of dancing together in all forms and our love of each other.
Hab' mir's gelobt (Trio from Der Rosenkavalier)Favourite
This is I think one of the most exquisitely beautiful moments in opera. It's so beautiful, just as music and voice. But it is also beautiful in terms of what is being sung about. It's the Marchalin letting go of her love, giving her love and giving this young man to Octavian, to Sophie...
I remember vividly the surreal experience of being in a packed, very old Land Rover on an appalling road in a swarm of locusts so dense that you couldn't see the sky, and there was a kind of awful biblical terror to it all. But there we were listening to Credence Clearwater Revival at Fall Glass, and I thought to myself, it doesn't get odder than that.
Ah, the Goldberg variations for me. Sunday morning on the Upper West Side in New York, eating scrambled eggs and bagels and cream cheese and lox, 1973. If Miles Davis made me feel that I was somehow suddenly sophisticated and cool, well, doing this was my I'd never eaten I'd never seen a bagel before and I'd never heard of lox and and I'd never heard this music.
Spurn Point (No. 1 of Six Studies in English Folk Song)
Laurence Perkins, New London Orchestra, conducted by Ronald Corp
Going right along with having been co-opted to sing fourth in the school choir for want of any fourths, they needed a bassoonist in the school orchestra. And I brought to the task about as much, i.e., very little, raw talent as I did to the question of singing. But again, I brought great enthusiasm to the task.
Choir of King's College, Cambridge, conducted by Sir David Willcocks and Philip Ledger
It's the music with our girls and my husband that we decorate the Christmas tree by. And before I get too lyrical, it's mainly sort of arguing about which ornaments should go where. But what better arguments to have in front of a fire with Once in a Wild David City? This evokes all of that.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:03Which is easier, to win the confidence of Madagascar lemurs or Cambridge academics?
I think that I would say that there are challenges on both fronts. ... Perhaps a closer parallel is between my colleagues in Cambridge and the leaders of the villages with whom I work in Madagascar on the conservation activities there, because again, that's about sort of human dynamics of developing a shared sense of purpose, of trying to move things forward together with people.
Presenter asks
5:41You felt you were at Cambridge by mistake, that you weren't worthy of being there. Can you explain that?
Oh, absolutely. It was such a remarkable thing to be accepted by Cambridge, and I could only assume that somehow the admissions office had made a mistake. And I spent the whole of my first term completely convinced of that. And at the end of the first term, discovered that the people that I'd got to know and become friends with had all quietly been nurturing the same view of things.
Presenter asks
15:10You said that you felt untouched by life until you lost a child. Can you tell me about that?
Our wonderful daughters were born in nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty two, and then our son Gavin was born in nineteen eighty seven. And at the age of six weeks he died. It was a so called cot death and inexplicable, inexplicable. ... It plunged me and my husband to the bottom of a deep, deep, deep black hole. ... I do think of my life as sort of life before Gavin and life after Gavin. And we have worked very hard to to give meaning to his life and to sort of the meaningless tragedy of his death.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Having hot water pouring over you at the end of a day restores the body and the mind and the soul.
Presenter asks
18:39Why is Madagascar so special for the purposes of your study?
Well, it's been described by Alice and Dolly as a kind of Noah's Ark floating out in the Indian Ocean. It's been isolated from the mainland for between 80 and 120 million years, something like that. ... in a very real sense, evolution has taken its own unique path to the present in Madagascar.
Presenter asks
26:39How serious is the funding problem at Cambridge, and does it threaten its position in the front rank of the world's universities?
I think the real question is what ought the expense base to be to support the excellence and the scale of one of the finest universities in the world. And my own strongly held belief is that our expense base needs to be higher because we need to be able to provide adequate bursaries for students, but we also need to be able to reach at the high end because we are competing globally to recruit and keep the finest minds at Cambridge.
“I have an insatiable curiosity about more or less everything. I always have had.”
“I spend my days surrounded by people who are brighter than I will ever be and more knowledgeable on many things than I will ever be on any particular thing. That is the nature of the kind of job that I am now doing. If you're not comfortable with that, then you've got a real problem.”
“I do think of my life as sort of life before Gavin and life after Gavin. And we have worked very hard to to give meaning to his life and to sort of the meaningless tragedy of his death.”