music
Hosted by Stephen Rodgers · music · EN-US
Join music theorist Stephen Rodgers as he explores how composers transform words into songs. Each episode discusses one poem and one musical setting of it. The music is diverse—covering a variety of styles and time periods, and focusing on composers from underrepresented groups—and the tone is accessible and personal. If you love poetry and song, no matter your background and expertise, this show is for you. Episodes are 20-40 minutes long and air every couple of months.
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Contact path
Verified email
Booking probability
30%
Guest openness
Selective
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Signup to Generate a PitchJoin music theorist Stephen Rodgers as he explores how composers transform words into songs. Each episode discusses one poem and one musical setting of it. The music is diverse, covering a variety of styles and time periods, and focusing on composers from underrepresented groups, and the tone is accessible and personal.
Resounding Verse is hosted by Stephen Rodgers. The show has published 28 episodes to date.
Recent episodes include "Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Marie Franz" (13 October 2026, 25 minutes), "Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage (The Good Night That I Bid You): Friedrich Rückert and Clara Schumann" (23 September 2026, 23 minutes), and "Evensong: Constance Morgan and Liza Lehmann" (9 September 2026, 22 minutes).
Resounding Verse publishes roughly every two weeks, with episodes averaging 31 minutes across 28 episodes.
Booking probability for Resounding Verse is 30%, and the host is rated Selective on guests. Resounding Verse requires a Pod Score of 80 or higher. Resounding Verse's contact route on record: verified email.
The strongest fits for Resounding Verse are Artists, Writers & Performers. Resounding Verse has a music audience.
Stephen Rodgers hosts Resounding Verse, a music podcast with 28 episodes published.
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Episode #9
In Goethe’s Faust , Gretchen sits alone at her spinning wheel, unable to stop thinking about Faust. Her thoughts circle obsessively around his absence, then intensify into physical longing. In this episode, I explore an...
Episode #8
In Friedrich Rückert’s “Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage,” two people separated at night exchange greetings through an angel who travels between them. In this episode, I explore Clara Schumann’s 1841 setting of the poem...
Episode #7
Constance Morgan’s “Evensong” is a quiet nighttime poem in which a speaker asks the angels to fold their wings around her and “hush me to sleep.” But sleep in the poem carries a darker possibility. In this episode, I...
Episode #6
In Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet , the grieving Ophelia moves in and out of song, singing fragments about death and loss. In this episode, I explore Cheryl Frances-Hoad ’s setting of one of those fragments, “They bore him...
Episode #5
The Minotaur is a half man/half bull from Greek mythology that is often viewed as a monster. Cecilia Livingston and Duncan McFarlane's song cycle hyacinth reimagines the Minotaur as a lonely child, imprisoned because of...
Episode #4
This episode explores the first song in a cycle I assembled from stand-alone songs by Pauline Decker—using curation as a form of advocacy. It features a world-premiere recording of the song by tenor James Gilchrist and...
Episode #3
I head back to university teaching tomorrow—and I know many teachers and students who are already back at it. In honor of this back-to-school season, here's an episode on a wild and wonderful song by New-York-based...
Episode #2
On September 27, 2024, Signum Records will release a recording of Rodrigo Ruiz's cycle of seventeen songs, Venus & Adonis , based on William Shakespeare's poem of the same name. In this episode, I dive into one of my...
Episode #1
The Mass for the Endangered , by Nathaniel Bellows and Sarah Kirkland Snider , appeals not to God but to nature itself and (in Snider's words) takes the "musical modes of spiritual contemplation" associated with the...
Episode #3
The title track from Rhiannon Giddens's recent album You're the One —which was just released by Nonesuch Records —is a love song, but not one about two adults; it's about a moment Giddens experienced with her newborn...
Episode #2
Have you ever felt as though a single moment—gazing into someone's eyes, listening to a passage of music, looking at a landscape—transports you to another realm? Maurice Bouchor's poem is about just this kind of...
Episode #1
Arthur Symons's poem captures a lazy June afternoon, with a fountain burbling and the moon hanging in the sky, waiting for the coming of night. Elizabeth Maconchy transforms the poem into a song of mesmerizing stillness...
Episode #6
The Haitian-American composer Nathalie Joachim transforms a Haitian hymn, and in so doing creates a multi-layered tapestry of sound that evokes the many voices of Haiti—past, present, and future. "Resevwa Li" comes from...
Episode #5
Connie Converse was one of the first singer-songwriters, an uncommon talent who predated Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But she was barely known in her day, and after making a handful of low-fi recordings in the 1950s, she...
Episode #4
We know very little about the German composer Marie von Kehler (1822–1882), who served as a "lady in waiting" to a princess and seems to have been acquainted with Johannes Brahms. But we do know that she wrote over...
Episode #3
Carolyn Forché 's 46-page poem "On Earth" forms the basis for a song cycle called The Blue Hour , which was composed by five women—Caroline Shaw, Shara Nova, Rachel Grimes, Angelica Negrón, and Sarah Kirkland Snider—and...
Episode #2
Francis Jammes's poem depicts two lovers who sit on a bench, alone together under the shade of overhanging branches. But it's not clear if the scene is real or imaginary. In her setting of the text, Lili Boulanger...
Episode #1
Thomas Walsh's poem and Mary Turner Salter's setting of it capture the moment between day and night—and the desire to linger in that moment as long as possible. The episode features the first-ever recording of Mary...
Episode #9
Nathaniel Bellows ’ poem and Sarah Kirkland Snider's haunting setting of it—from her song cycle Unremembered —revisit the site of a childhood trauma and meditate on innocence and the mechanisms of memory. The...
Episode #8
Anne Carson 's poem and Caroline Shaw 's mesmerizing setting of it meditate on the feeling of being in and out of time. The recording of the song, which appears on the album Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part (Nonesuch...
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