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Composers Datebook Podcast Transcripts

American Public Media · 29 episodes with transcripts

Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present.

Spoken has transcripts of 29 Composers Datebook episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 7, 2026.

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Every Composers Datebook transcript in one script

29 episodes of Composers Datebook have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:

archive.sh
curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/podcasts/220075115/episodes \
  | jq -r '.episodes[] | "\(.id) \(.title)"' \
  | while IFS=' ' read -r id title; do
      slug=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cs 'a-z0-9' '-' | sed 's/-*$//')
      [ -f "${id}-${slug}.md" ] && continue
      curl -sf -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
        -o "${id}-${slug}.md" \
        https://spoken.md/transcripts/$id || rm -f "${id}-${slug}.md"
      sleep 0.34
    done

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Latest Composers Datebook transcripts

Jake Heggie's opera 'Dead Man Walking'

October 7, 2026

John Birge (0:04)

This is the Composers Datebook for October 8th. I'm John Burge. On today's date in 1992, one of the strangest, and some would say most strikingly original, violin concertos of the late 20th century had its premiere in Cologne. It was written by the Transylvanian born Hungarian composer, George Ligeti.

Ligeti became famous in the west when some of his music appeared in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film, 2001 Kubrick used Ligeti's music to evoke the eerie and empty vastness of outer space. And in fact, Ligeti was fascinated by the sounds that traditional orchestral instruments make when pressed to the extreme limits of…

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Any Composers Datebook episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.

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  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000630507440

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