Main content

How does music convey meaning to the listener? Catherine Coldstream examines this question in the context of classical music and religious faith.

Catherine Coldstream sets out to explore the nature of the powerful connection between music and the soul.

In her second essay asking what it is that connects the soul and music so powerfully, Catherine Coldstream asks how music conveys meaning.

Catherine Coldstream is best known for her memoir, Cloistered - an account of her 12 years as a Carmelite nun. But she is also an accomplished amateur musician.

After leaving her silent monastery at the turn of the millennium (fleeing at night with her viola strapped to her back) she studied Theology at Oxford, then Creative Nonfiction and Life Writing at UEA and Goldsmiths. Combining writing about the overlap between theology and the arts with the intense joy she finds in classical music-making, she has developed an approach that makes connections between the subjective experience of music and its theoretical and historical underpinnings. A fascination with the power of music and the spiritual continue to inform her writing. She is an occasional teacher, an associate editor of MONK arts magazine, and is currently working on a book about her painter father, former Slade professor, William Coldstream.

Written and Read by Catherine Coldstream
Commissioned and Produced by Jill Waters
The Waters Company for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 3

Available now

14 minutes

Last on

Fri 10 Oct 2025 21:45

Broadcast

  • Fri 10 Oct 2025 21:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Podcast