If you are in the mood for a music podcast, I’ve got one for you: here. It includes a song by Scott Wheeler, setting a poem by Mark Van Doren. I wrote about Van Doren a month ago — specifically, his book on Shakespeare. (That article is here.) Only later did I find out that Wheeler wrote a song-cycle, Serenata, setting five poems by Van Doren. The music and the words match — which is kind of the aim of songwriting, isn’t it?

Langston Hughes wrote one of his most famous poems at 17. It is the poem that launched him: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It begins as follows:

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Several composers have set this to music. In my latest podcast, I have chosen a setting by Margaret Bonds, the Chicago composer who lived from 1913 to 1972. Formidable woman. (Taught Ned Rorem, by the way.)

What else, who else? I have a piece by Arvo Pärt, the venerable Estonian composer (b. 1935). He wrote it in 1984, for two pianos: Hymn to a Great City. The city in question is New York. Commenting on the piece recently, I said, “It is a relatively quiet paean, and so very affirmative — the product of a noble soul.”

Got some jazz for you, too — the Oscar Peterson Trio playing “My One and Only Love” (a pop song from the ’50s). You don’t think Peterson is going to play just the song, do you? Along the way, he interpolates a Chopin étude, some Gershwin, and a Bach chorale.

Amazing musician, and pianist, Oscar Peterson.

I end with Edith Mathis, the Swiss soprano who has died at 87. (For the relevant obit in the New York Times, go here.) As I say, she was an “exemplary” singer, “the kind of singer whom other singers, and other musicians, look up to.” I have her singing a Bach allelulia, just about the most joyous thing that master ever wrote.

Again, my new Music for a While is here.