If you’re in the mood for a music podcast, try this: the latest episode of my Music for a While. (“Music for a While” is the title of a famous Purcell song.) (That song will outlive my podcast, for a long time.) I have some “conventional” things in this episode — if you can call Mozart conventional. If he is conventional, what is extraordinary? I also have some offbeat things — very.

Do you know that Stravinsky arranged and orchestrated our national anthem? He did. He did it in the early 1940s, desiring “to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” One night, Stravinsky conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in his arrangement of the anthem. He was to do the same the following night. But the local fuzz intervened, saying that Stravinsky was violating a state law against “tampering” with the anthem — which was bunk. In any event, police officers pulled the score from the musicians’ stands.

What else? You know the James Bond theme? Of course you do. Its composer, Monty Norman, borrowed from a song he had previously written, for a musical on the V. S. Naipaul novel A House for Mr. Biswas. That musical was never produced. Norman’s song, “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” is a corny novelty number, with an Orientalist twang and a sitar. His transformation of those notes into the James Bond theme is . . . inspired.

Anyway, you may get a kick out of all this — again, here.

By the way, as I’ve said elsewhere, A House for Mr. Biswas was one of the best reading experiences of my entire life. I told the author this at least twice, possibly three times (on different occasions, I assure you). And it was the last thing I ever said to him.