Last week, when I heard that WNYC, New York’s flagship public radio station, was canceling its music program “New Sounds” after 37 years, my mind went back to a night more than a decade earlier, when a friend called to tell me that the show’s host, John Schaefer, was about to play a song from my band’s new album. I raced to the radio and listened in disbelief to the opening bars of “Conversation in the Mountains,” a piece I had written that incorporated spoken passages of a prose poem by Paul Celan about a missed encounter between two wanderers on an alpine road.

As the show unfolded, it quickly became apparent that Mr. Schaefer had done what made “New Sounds” so invaluable: he stitched together a riveting and enlightening program — this one, called “Poetry and Music,” featured pieces that used only spoken, not sung, text — out of wildly disparate music. With its mixture of theremin, violin, clarinet, marimba, lap steel guitar, spoken text, and rock rhythm section, “Conversation in the Mountains,” had, I thought, existed in its own isolated musical world.

Yet as Mr. Schaefer’s selections during the show unspooled (the Scottish singer-songwriter Robin Williamson played harp while half-speaking a Dylan Thomas poem; the avant-garde cellist Frances-Marie Uitti played luscious drones, accompanied by the writer Paul Griffiths reciting randomized words from Ophelia’s speeches in “Hamlet;” the bassist Bill Laswell and his collective, Material, fashioned an ominous groove as the canvas for narration by William S. Burroughs) it seemed to me that the host had forged a new genre out of nothing more than an astonishing memory and a boundless musical curiosity.

“It’s hard for me to hear music and not think what it could go with,” Mr. Schaefer explained to me recently over the phone. “My desk is littered with little scraps of paper with the beginnings of ideas for shows.”