"Sailing By" is a short piece of light music

composed Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography *Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include v ...

Ronald Binge Ronald Binge (15 July 1910 – 6 September 1979) was a British composer and arranger of light music. He arranged many of Mantovani's most famous pieces before composing his own music, which included ''Elizabethan Serenade'' and '' Sailing By''.A ...

in 1963, which is used before the late Shipping Forecast on

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...

. A slow

waltz The waltz ( ), meaning "to roll or revolve") is a ballroom and folk dance, normally in triple ( time), performed primarily in closed position. History There are many references to a sliding or gliding dance that would evolve into the wa ...

, the piece uses a repetitive ABCAB structure and a distinctive rising and falling woodwind

arpeggio A broken chord is a chord broken into a sequence of notes. A broken chord may repeat some of the notes from the chord and span one or more octaves. An arpeggio () is a type of broken chord, in which the notes that compose a chord are played ...

Context and usage

"Sailing By" is played every night on BBC Radio 4 at around 00:45hrs before the late Shipping Forecast. Its tune is repetitive, assisting in its role of serving as a signal for

sailor A sailor, seaman, mariner, or seafarer is a person who works aboard a watercraft as part of its crew, and may work in any one of a number of different fields that are related to the operation and maintenance of a ship. The profession of the s ...

s tuning in to be able to easily identify the radio station. It also functions as a buffer: depending on when the final programme before closedown finishes, "Sailing By" (or part of it) is played as a "filler" as the forecast starts at 00:48hrs precisely. In the 1990s the tune was also adopted for the weekly maritime programme ''

Seascapes ''Seascapes'' is a weekly 30-minute Irish radio programme covering maritime matters broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Fridays at 22:30 and formerly presented by the award-winning presenter Tom MacSweeney. The programme deals with all subjects of ma ...

'' on Ireland's RTÉ Radio 1, ceasing at the end of 2009. It has since been reinstated.

Popularity

Besides its intended function, "Sailing By" is thought of affectionately by many British radio listeners as it is considered a soothing accompaniment to bedtime. The lead singer of the Britpop band

Pulp Pulp may refer to: * Pulp (fruit), the inner flesh of fruit Engineering * Dissolving pulp, highly purified cellulose used in fibre and film manufacture * Pulp (paper), the fibrous material used to make paper * Molded pulp, a packaging material * ...

Jarvis Cocker Jarvis Branson Cocker (born 19 September 1963) is an English musician and radio presenter. As the founder, frontman, lyricist and only consistent member of the band Pulp, he became a figurehead of the Britpop genre of the mid-1990s. Following P ...

, chose "Sailing By" as one of his '' Desert Island Discs'', saying for many years he had used it "as an aid to restful sleep". The BBC issued it as a single in 1973 on its own BBC Records label, played by the John Fox Orchestra. The piece appeared on a single recorded by the

Royal Ballet Sinfonia The Royal Ballet Sinfonia is the orchestra of Birmingham Royal Ballet. The Sinfonia appears with Birmingham Royal Ballet in its home town, in London and around the United Kingdom, UK, and frequently appears with The Royal Ballet at the Royal Ope ...

in a quest to save the "

Radio 4 UK Theme The ''BBC Radio 4 UK Theme'' is an orchestral arrangement of traditional British and Irish airs compiled by Fritz Spiegl and arranged by Manfred Arlan. It was played every morning on BBC Radio 4 between 23 November 1978 and 23 April 2006. Th ...

". In 1993 there was a similar reaction by BBC listeners when "Sailing By" was temporarily taken off the air on weekday schedules, leading to it being re-instated in 1995. The recording used by the BBC (performed by the Alan Perry/William Gardner Orchestra) was originally only available as library music, but has since 1997 been available commercially as track 11 on the second disc of the

EMI EMI Group Limited (originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records Ltd. or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At the time of its break-up in 201 ...

CD set titled ''The Great British Experience'' ( EMI Classics CDGB50).Catalogue entry for ''The Great British Experience'' at Warner Classics
/ref> It is also available as track 8 on the CD ''Elizabethan Serenade: The Best of British Light Music,'' produced by Naxos and performed by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. The unexplained crediting of the BBC recording to the "Perry Gardner Orchestra", suggesting the existence of a conductor or arranger by that name, is apt to be confusing; indeed, "Alan Perry" and "William Gardner" are in fact pseudonyms for composers Ernest Tomlinson and Peter Hope. The BBC broadcast the original stereo version for a few weeks in the late 1980s, but soon reverted to a mono version.

References

{{Authority control BBC Radio 4 programmes Classical music in the United Kingdom Radio theme songs Light music compositions Compositions by Ronald Binge

Context and usage

Popularity

See also

References