Music is high on the 2012 agenda at the moment. We've been debating with our external partners what the right song is to mark the One Year To Go celebrations next month; and today we're making public a huge array of classical music-making to complement the Hackney Radio 1 event that we announced in May.
You can read more about Music Nation - which will take place on the first weekend of March 2012 - here.
Hackney was unashamedly targeted at the Olympic boroughs: we want to create a fantastic weekend for 100,000 young people in East London that's then shared by TV and radio.
But Music Nation is, as the title suggests, about offering everyone in the UK a chance to take part in something near them - so it takes in Land's End as well as Shetland.
It's not fair to single out one event, but I'm going to. The one I most like the sound of is the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's concert for the Clyde Auditorium on the night of Saturday March 3rd.
It's because it explicitly aims to link music and sport, saying it wants to celebrate sporting and musical heroes; and it combines new music - an essential part of the 2012 legacy - with familiar pieces that people can simply enjoy.
I'm not one of the school that thinks culture is only good for you if you feel some pain.
I know from Gavin Reid, the SSO's director, that he has two out-and-out Olympic pieces in mind for the evening.
One is John Williams' Olympic fanfare and theme from Los Angeles 1984.
Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caball� singing Barcelona
It's unmistakably Williams but it sounds like a composition that goes back to the birth of the modern Olympics in Athens in 1896 if not to Ancient Greece: just part of the Olympic heritage.
The SSO will also be performing Ravel's Bolero, as skated to by Torvill and Dean and watched by 20 million Britons during the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.
It's one of those pieces that's become overfamiliar in excerpt form and on "Dancing On Ice", but I heard it in full at a BBC Prom three or four years ago and it repays listening with a fresh pair of ears.
This set me thinking about what music we believe is essential to celebrating the Olympics. I know from past comments here that "Barcelona" performed by Montserrat Caball� and Freddie Mercury as a meeting of classical and rock has its fans, and BBC title sequences picked up the theme.
Or there is, of course, Vangelis's score for Chariots Of Fire which was an official song for LA and was again used by the BBC in both 1984 and 1988. I wouldn't be surprised if it's heard in the Clyde Auditorium next March.
If you'd like it to be part of Music Nation's repertoire, do let us know - as I'm sure you will if you think I've missed anything.
We'll be returning to pop and contemporary music before too long because I think One Year To Go will move in that direction, but in a whole year of events the pledge remains there will be music for every taste - and some pieces, we hope, that will become new classics.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/rogermosey/2011/06/music_nation_on_track_for_spor.html
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