Happy Birthday, Radio 3? In his Radio Review in this paper on Monday, Robert Hanks complained, "Essentially, it's concerned with perpetuating one quite narrow musical tradition, with little sense of the contexts that make this tradition important - that makes it more than a matter of taste." With all due respect, this, in turn, seems a rather narrow description of a network that actually strives to encompass the entire surviving repertoire of Western music over the past 1,000-odd years from vernacular medieval dance to five-hour Romantic music-drama, together with a range of contemporary activity both notated and, sometimes, improvised (Hear and Now), a fair sampling of Jazz (Jazz Notes, Impressions, Jazz Record Requests), a weekly selection of more esoteric developments in Pop (Mixing It) and fitfully, but occasionally in concentrated bursts, at least some note of the classical musics of India, Africa, Latin America, the Far East and so on (for instance, in the Traditional Music series presented this month by Brian Eno). One might well argue over the relative amounts of time Radio 3 devotes to each of these vast musical areas. Yet one will hear precious little of any of them on Radio 1.

Harold Budd, ambient's forefather, has been composing for 20 years. He can't play - but that doesn't bother him. He's in it for the joy. By Matt Smith

The master of ambient music is pioneering a concept that takes computerised sound into an atmospheric new dimension.

n the back cover of A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno's diary of 1995, he supplies a handy guide to some of the things that he is: "a mammal, an Anglo-Saxon, an uncle, a celebrity, a masturbator". Further insight into the mind of the enigmatic 47- year-old more often referred to as musician, record producer and artist is furnished by his diary entry for 26 August of last year. "Pissed into an empty bottle so I could continue watching Monty Python and suddenly thought 'I've never tasted my own piss', so I drank a little. It looked just like Orvieto Classico and tasted of nearly nothing."

How does evolution produce a Masaccio fresco? That, or at least a slightly more sophisticated version of the question, is the mystery that preoccupies Professor John D Barrow in his book The Artful Universe. He isn't alone in his curiosity. Brian Eno, responding to my column about his speech at the Turner Prize dinner, puts the quest this way: "Why do we evolve culture? Why are we so interested in style? What does it do for us?"

CHILDREN OF WAR APPEAL

The performance

Mention Radio 3 and most pop youths will squint at you like you're some crusty old slipper-wearing square. They'd be in for a surprise if they ever thought to tune in to The Music Machine (5pm R3), a breezy daily music magazine which encompasses all sorts of genres, from classical through pop to world music and beyond. "People think they know what Radio 3 is," Tommy Pearson, presenter, says. "We're trying to prove them wrong."

A series of passport photographs by Iggy Pop reveals a cheery side to the godfather of punk and author of the song 'No Fun'. Taken this year, they appear in 'little pieces from big stars', an exhibition at Flowers East, London E8, curated by Brian Eno in aid of War Child, the charity which provides treatment and therapy for the children of Sarajevo. For a report on the show, see Cries & Whispers, Review, page 32

It was called 'Perfume, Defence and David Bowie's Wedding', but you only found that out at the end. All the tickets said was 'Brian Eno Illustrated Lecture', which sounded intriguing enough to draw a sizeable proportion of London's intelligentsia on the wettest night of the year. The slide-lantern lecture is a form that has long since lapsed into disuse, but a mind as restlessly wide-ranging as Eno's seemed the perfect cause to revive it.

Brian Eno (Sadler's Wells, 071-278 8916, tomorrow). Musician, non-musician, video painter, record producer, installationist and conversationalist, Eno also gives 'illustrated lectures'. This is his first in Britain and looks, among other things, at curatorship, which he feels is an art form of the future. The subtitle is 'Three Studies in Confusion'. The title will be revealed on the night. If this makes it sound a bit dry, it won't be.