Dmitri Tymoczko: Fools & Angels

In 2015, surreal images produced by AIs as they learned to parse objects launched an internet frenzy. These fever-dreams of thinking machines have entertained and disquieted ever since. Composer Dmitri Tymoczko could hardly have seen this coming when he wrote the pieces on his new album Fools and Angels. Flawlessly recorded by Andrés Villalta and Christopher Ericson for New Focus Recordings’ Panoramic label, these compositions preceded DeepDream. The record nonetheless finds Collide Trio, Newspeak, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, and others conjuring robot subjectivities and psychedelic soundscapes–right on trend. Marc Wolf’s jacket art skews reality starting with the cover, a Renaissance illustration of a jester with a world map in place of a face. The picture gels with the algorithmic bizarreness of our own era, inviting hilarity, confusion, and dim horror all at once. So does Tymoczko’s music.

“Fie my Fum,” the first movement of the title piece, opens with the noodling of a fantasy stadium-pop band, drums crashing and synths agleam. Later, sopranos Anne Hege and Mellissa Hughes wind willowy vocal lines around vague sets of instructions. In “Strawberries and Cream,” a recorded voice delivers Jeff Dolven’s text over the musical equivalent of a desolate Salvador Dalí landscape. Humming from tenor Neil Farrell and baritone Gabriel Crouch adds eeriness, and New Focus label head Daniel Lippel completes the picture with quiet strums on guitar. Saxophonist Geoff Vidal, pianist Pascal Le Boeuf, and drummer Jason Treuting seize chances to groove in “Bop Lyrics,” another Ginsberg setting, and “The Dressing Room,” another from Dolven. “Who” yields tight performances from all, integrating electronic squeals, birdsong, and beeping with live sound.

Sheila63 stands at the heart of the album in both running time and aesthetic. The Illinois Modern Ensemble, a group from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, here excels under Stephen Andrew Taylor’s direction. Martha Cluver and Caroline Shaw of Roomful of Teeth join Hughes, voicing sentient robot Sheila63 plus various humans. An update of 2001’s HAL for the online retail age, the power-tripping AI delivers fantastic and horrifying items to unsuspecting customers. The soprano trio gives her soul, singing with both coolness and vibrancy as Dexter Palmer’s tale unfolds. The Ensemble delivers on both cinematic sweep and subtler, stranger textures.

Four Dreams features Tymoczko as narrator of his own visions, with music courtesy of Collide Trio. After a dramatic opening, the first dream condenses into a cloud of quasi-jazz, lit from within by Jonathan Sanford’s saxophone. David Skidmore’s vibraphone figures establish a mood of unreality in the second dream, and poet Christian Bök supplies both text and unhinged declamation for the third. In the finale, Jade Simmons plays swelling, sentimental piano in deadpan while a ridiculous marriage scene plays out. In places, Tymoczko’s 2004 scenarios (“is this a gay dream?”) show their age. However, the piece epitomizes his approach to narrative.

After all this absurdist doodling in reality’s margins comes a sobering closer. Let the Bodies Hit the Floor samples a harrowing 2005 interview from This American Life, in which a matter-of-fact Marine describes the violence of the second battle of Fallujah. Backed by funk grooves from massive speakers as he crossed the breach, the soldier felt uninspired; he would have preferred the nü-metal hit “Bodies.” Tymoczko lets the man’s speech hover out of sync for most of the piece. However, he aligns the sentence “uh – ‘Let the Bodies Hit the Floor?’” with crashing sonorities for guitarist Taylor Levine and percussionist Yuri Yamashita. The other members of Newspeak, Hughes included, help make a whole out of this devastating collage.

One promotional blurb for Fools and Angels compares it to 1970s progressive rock. The (platform) shoe fits, but this hardly gives Tymoczko and collaborators due credit. Fools and Angels gathers lovingly engineered syntheses of the art forms that inspired each piece. Tymoczko draws from forms such as spoken-word poetry, free improvisation, and notated ensemble music, and shuffles the deck. Many of the musicians whose work appears in Panoramic’s small but growing catalogue have won acclaim by following comparable paths. Neural nets can mince reality and put it back together the wrong way, amusing and terrifying their putative masters. Yet from map-faced jesters to acid poetry, Fools and Angels reminds us how far good old human imagination can take us.

-Nick Stevens, 11.29.18, I Care If You Listen

Fools and Angels is a different musical statement altogether, featuring vocals, electronics, and, often, an art rock aesthetic. Indeed, there is a Zappa-esque zaniness afoot, in which the composer juxtaposes repurposed madrigals, faux bebop slinkiness, and even risque monologues, amid persistent changes of meter, bellicose soloing, and sci-fi synthetic soundscapes. A who’s who of youthful contemporary classical performers — Mellissa Hughes, Caroline Shaw, Martha Cluver, Gabriel Crouch, Jason Treuting, and Pascal LeBoeuf, to name some — supply earnest and accurate performances of Tymoczko’s kaleidoscopic construction.

-Christian Carey, 12.24.18, Sequenza21

Name: Dmitri Tymoczko
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer/musical theorist
Current Release: Fools & Angels on New Focus
Recommendation: Eunoia by Christian Bök. Five chapters, each using only one vowel, not repeating the larger words: “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman …” It is very musical, as structured as Milton Babbitt but much funnier.

When did you start composing - and what or who were your early passions and influences?

I started composing in high school, by way of progressive rock and jazz. I loved the Rite of Spring and a few other twentieth-century pieces. I was a fan of Yes and Mike Oldfield. When I was a freshman in college someone played me a Brahms intermezzo and I was blown away. I had a similar feeling a few years later when I first heard Art Tatum; and then again Nancarrow when I was in grad school. Basically, my home turf is complex, kinetic tonality—music where you feel like you’re chasing a train that is always just a little out of your reach.

For most artists, originality is first preceded by a phase of learning and, often, emulating others. What was this like for you? How would you describe your own development as an artist and the transition towards your own voice? What is the relationship between copying, learning and your own creativity?

One of my first pieces is a string quartet called “This Picture Seems to Move”. It appeared on my second CD, Crackpot Hymnal. When I wrote it, I felt that composers had moved on too quickly from the early twentieth-century sweet spot: that magical moment when modernist ideas collided with more traditional music; when many composers had mastered both languages.

I like that piece but it is much more “in the pocket” than some of my other music. I wanted to prove to myself that I could really write tonal music, that I could use familiar chords and rhythms to express something sincere that didn’t sound like quotation.

What were some of the most important creative challenges when starting out as a composer and how have they changed over time?

There was a social and aesthetic challenge. I am old enough that when I started out, atonal composition was still the dominant language: many of my teachers were twelve-tone composers, and there was not a lot of interest in the music I was most drawn to. Even in graduate school, many of my professors were open about their belief that my music was too tonal.

Coupled with this was an intellectual challenge, which is that the mechanisms of sophisticated tonal music were not well understood. In many ways, tonality is an embodied language, a matter of non-theoretical know-how. I think a lot of that knowledge got lost over the course of the twentieth century, to the point where my generation (and the generations after) were in the position of reinventing the wheel, rediscovering techniques that were once widespread. This is one reason I wrote my book (A Geometry of Music).

Tell us about your studio/work space, please. What were criteria when setting it up and how does this environment influence the creative process? How important, relatively speaking, are factors like mood, ergonomics, haptics and technology for you?

I usually compose at home, at a large, old, wooden schoolteacher’s desk with a digital piano next to it; it’s what I’ve used for about 20 years. Actually, now that you ask, I have suddenly started thinking that it might be time for a studio makeover. I am relatively insensitive to environment, and have composed in a variety of places (e.g. the airplane). In general, though, the feeling of being at home is helpful to me – so I’ve never really understood the idea of an artist’s colony.

In terms of mood, it is helpful to get into one of two psychological states, more about that below; though when you have kids you don’t always have that luxury. I remember hearing a story about how the creators of the “Loony Tunes” cartoons would have “yes meetings” where only positive feedback was allowed. Ever since then I have tried to have days that I declare to be “yes days”: days where I am relentlessly positive and compose very quickly, sending the critical faculty on a small vacation. I have to constantly remind myself that I can always fix things later. So, I generally have “creation days” and “fixing things days.”

Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

My work time is basically divided into teaching, composing and thinking about music theoretically. These activities all tend to reinforce each other, with theory suggesting compositional directions, and compositional interests helping to direct my theoretical ideas. I mostly work in the morning and early afternoon when my brain is fresh—I am a bit of an insomniac and so if I work too late I have trouble sleeping. Fortunately, I have a job that leaves me a lot of time for research and creative work.

The actual day itself is pretty boring: coffee, get the kids to school, answer emergency emails, then start composing …

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

Honestly, the best state of mind for me is blind panic. Deadline coming, no ideas, too much procrastination … sometimes this is enough to dampen the critical faculties just long enough to allow fresh ideas to flow.

My colleague Paul Lansky once said to me “you have to find a way to have fun when composing,” and that is something that has stuck with me. I tend to make a lot of jokes in daily life, and I am correspondingly interested in humor in music—not silliness or zaniness, but genuine humor that has a serious edge. I hear this in a lot of popular music, but it is hard to create this effect in purely instrumental contexts.

One thing I like to say to myself is that musical composition is a logical deduction from absurd premises. To me, that captures the way rigor and fantasy are both essential to the enterprise. As I said, I tend to separate these two, so I have days when I am free and spontaneous, balanced with days that are rigorous and logical.

Could you take me through the process of composing on the basis of one of your pieces that's particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?

It is a hard question, because I often take months writing a piece and it is difficult to compress that much time into a short description. As a general rule, I tend to start by getting as many ideas as I can onto the page: I’ll end up with twenty little snippets of music, all individual files on my computer, that have nothing to do with each other. During this time, I am trying to be as uncritical as possible, just amusing myself with ideas I find funny or intriguing. Often, the ideas are generated, at least partly, by computer: little Max patches where I explore a texture or melodic process, typically in an interactive and improvisatory way.

The next stage is thinking about how these ideas might belong together: it might be that ideas 1, 7, and 13 seem to resonate and relate, while 2, 4, and 5 form a similar group. Some of the ideas get thrown away or saved for a different piece. At that point, I have some idea for where I am going: my job is to get from idea 7 to idea 1 for example, or to rework idea 13 so that it uses the same harmonies as idea 9.

The third stage is continuity and narrative, making these various snippets work together to form a dramatic statement. Here is where rigor is important. Often it is at this stage that a title occurs to me—sometimes with a dramatic clarifying effect, a little communication from myself to myself: “oh, so that’s what this piece is about!” Once I realize what I have been doing I can finish the piece.

I have a piano piece called “Missed Connections,” where the middle movement began in a really odd way: I programmed a Max patch to generate random little piano melodies with the sustain pedal held down. Some of these I would save by assigning them to a key on my laptop keyboard, others I would throw away. I could recall the saved ideas by pressing “Q” or “W” (or whatever) on the laptop, layering them on top of themselves.

This struck me as a pretty silly way to spend my time, so I put that “project” away for a while. A little while later, Barbara Montero (who is both a philosopher and a dancer) mentioned that she was looking to create a dance piece about what it was like to be a bat (the subject of a famous philosophy article), and I realized that my strange compositional process was a kind of metaphor for both natural selection (with me alternately saving and killing off these randomly generated ideas) and for the bat’s method of “seeing” by way of echoes. And so, this brought me back to the piece, which I called “echolocation”—a short little etude where all the music is generated by a small number of randomly-generated ideas. The result is a weirdly biological spin on rigorous Webernian counterpoint, the Bauhaus as redone by Gaudi.

How do you make use of technology? In terms of the feedback mechanism between technology and creativity, what do humans excel at, what do machines excel at?

A lot of my sketching starts with Max patches: instead of writing notes on a score, I will imagine a process or texture and turn it into a computer program—usually one I can interact with in a spontaneous and improvisational way. Sometimes this electronic component survives into the final product and I make an electroacoustic piece, but sometimes it is incorporated into notation, computer music without computers.

I also use technology for visualizing and manipulating harmonic structures, for teaching myself to use new kinds of scales, and in many other training-type contexts.

Right now, I think computers (or more broadly: algorithms and theory) are helpful in generating material, leading us to new musical possibilities. Humans are much better at developing material into meaningful narratives.

Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives, including the artists performing your work?

I have had great collaborations with a number of writers—including Jeff Dolven, a poet and professor here at Princeton, who has written texts for several of my pieces. When I write vocal music, I feel like the words are in charge—I just read them and suddenly music pops into my head. For me, it’s totally different from instrumental composition. I don’t even think about evaluation: it’s not about good or bad, it’s about finding the music that belongs to the text. It’s not my fault if that music is defective in some way!

How is writing the music and having it performed live connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?

I am really interested in improvisation, where the performer is acting as co-composer. Recently the Sirius quartet recorded Strawberry Field Theory, my improvisational string quartet, and it was an amazing experience—the players added to the notation in ways that I never could have imagined, making the piece much better! It’s hard to write this way because you have to learn to leave space for the improvisers.

I confess that sometimes I feel more conventional performance is less collaborative than it could be. Improvisation was hugely important in the 18th century, but we gradually evolved to a place where composers write down exactly what performers should play, and performers strive for 100% accuracy. A really great performance is magical, but my music is so hard that I often find myself just hoping that my notes and rhythms are played accurately.

Time is a variable only seldomly discussed within the context of contemporary composition. Can you tell me a bit about your perspective on time in relation to a composition and what role it plays in your work?

That is a great question. Time and rhythm for me are both very intuitive phenomena. I have so much to say about pitch, but rhythm and time and form are things I have almost no useful theoretical ideas about—and yet I am really interested in them.

I really like the way different composers can convey different understandings of time: the tautness of middle-period Beethoven vs. the expansiveness of Mahler. Lately, I feel that musical time has slowed down: I hear so much minimalist and post minimalist music that older pieces, like Schubert, sometimes feel like they are moving too fast.

One thing I am very aware of is the difference between the composer’s sense of their own piece, and the listener’s. By the time we let a piece go we have heard it (or imagined it) 1000 times, and this puts us in a different relation to the music. It is important to be able to imagine what it will sound like to someone hearing it for the first time.

I wish I had something more useful to say about this, but the best I can manage is that it is a matter of taste—and developing your taste is one of the hardest and most important things you have to do as a composer.

How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?

Another great question that I can’t answer! We’ve all had the experience where you’re at a cocktail party and someone says “oh, you’re a composer? What instruments do you write for?” And that sometimes feels like “oh, you’re a writer? What font do you write in, Geneva or Times?” Because we’re taught to think of instruments as inessential, and because our whole ecosystem depends on composers being willing to write for whoever asks them to write. “I write for whoever asks, whether it’s a bassoonist or a rock band.”

But in reality, that question is not so naïve: genre is really heavily determined by instrument. So, if you write for sax people will start to hear jazz; and electric guitar with distortion means rock; and violins will convey classical music; etc. So, in some sense, the most important compositional decision is what instruments you write for. In a way, the folks at the cocktail parties are onto something: instrument is more like content than like font.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: the distinction between musical and non-musical sounds has completely evaporated—in no small part due to popular music (where even in the 1960s you could hear alarm clocks and animal noises in songs) and sampling. Or we could talk about how the very dissonance of a harmony depends on timbre and register. Or about how the classical composers were experts at building redundancy into their music, so that it sounds incredibly good even on first reading …

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?

When I was younger I was really inspired by poets like Stevens and Ashbery, whose poetry creates the impression of sense without ever settling on definitive meaning; that was a feeling I tried to recreate in my music, typically by alluding to multiple styles … a kind of liquid musical surrealism where you move from one place to another without ever realizing that it’s happening.

Recently, my theoretical work has led me to think about the relation between musical structures and the visual realm; it turns out that a lot of our implicit knowledge of harmonic relations can be translated into a more explicit geometrical form. The most overt use of this idea is my orchestra piece, The Thousand Faces of Form, where live visuals (provided by the artist Nathan Selikoff) mirrored the geometry underlying the harmonic structure. So, what you see and what you hear are in some sense the same.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I am not a composer who gets a lot of performances or public attention, so I have had to come to terms with that emotionally. This has led me to a view of composing as something like a monastic activity—a kind of private devotion or meditation that I pursue for its own sake. Sometimes I think of it more mathematically, as an active way of contemplating (or interacting with) musical structures that are actively beautiful.

I would probably be more interested in politics if I felt more people were listening.

It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?

People once thought that we were surrounded by habitable planets easily accessible from Earth: in science fiction like Star Trek, the air of other planets is always breathable, and the aliens are always basically human—though maybe a little green. And then we learned that we were stuck on Earth for the foreseeable future if not permanently.

I think that the dream of other musical planets is in some ways similar. In A Geometry of Music, I make the case that there are only a small number of ways to satisfy basic musical constraints (e.g. harmonies that sound similar or melodies moving by short distances). So that might be taken as a reason for shifting focus from discovery of other musical planets to something like conservation of this one: just as we’re stuck here on Earth, so too might we be stuck with music that is broadly similar to what we know. In which case our job is to be good stewards of our inheritance.

Maybe that’s avoiding the question though … if you want a prediction I would say that in 50 years there will be serious, well-respected composers who write music that sounds a lot more like Beethoven than anything being written today.

Tymoczko is an American composer and music theorist — and certainly Fools & Angels feels more like an exercise in conceptual possibilities than anything one would listen to for kicks. Central to the project are male and female operatic voices delivering texts ranging from Allen Ginsberg poems to work by the science fiction author Dexter Palmer. Truth is, if you didn't enjoy the stiffly mannered speech-singing in Frank Zappa's 200 Motels, you're unlikely to warm to it here — and the accompanying hyperactive mix of drily recorded jazz and contemporary classical does little to spice it up. On "Four Dreams" Tymoczko narrates his own oneiric adventures with backing from piano, saxophone and percussion. It's uptight and unsettling, like a pissed off John Zorn soundtracking David Lynch — but less fun..

-Joseph Stannard, 12.2018, The Wire Magazine

Compared with the works on ROCO’s collection — and, for that matter, heard on their own without reference to other recent pieces — the four scores on Dmitri Tymoczko’s Fools & Angels (Panoramic/New Focus) sound radical mainly because Tymoczko’s sound world embraces chaos in brief stretches, and his texts are consistently pointed and seemingly current, even when they are drawn from time-honored sources. Yet beneath Tymoczko’s idiosyncratic surfaces, you find levels of traditional structure, melodic shape, and orchestrational acuity that keeps the music accessible and gripping.

Tymoczko, born in 1969, has enlisted a starry ensemble (in new-music terms) for the project, with Jason Treuting from Sō Percussion and members of Roomful of Teeth and Newspeak among the performers. The title work, a five-movement setting of poetry by Allen Ginsberg and Jeff Dolven composed in 2006, begins as a cacophonous explosion, and maintains a veneer of being out of control, or just past the edge of decorum. In two of the three Ginsberg settings, “Fie my fum” and “Bop Lyrics,” Tymoczko emphasizes Ginsberg’s rhythmic drive, adding other elements as well — jazz figures, prominent electric guitar, and atonal keyboard bursts — in the latter. The last of the Ginsberg pieces, “Who,” takes a more mysterious tack, with slithering, bird-like sounds, jangling percussion, and a mysteriously hazy backdrop, against which the vocal quartet (Anne Hege, Neil Farrell, Melissa Hughes, and Gabriel Crouch) offers a pointillistic, melodically wide-ranging reading of the heady poem, which puts forth Ginsberg’s notion that the universe is a “manifestation of One Mind.”

The Dolven settings, “Strawberries and Cream” and “The Dressing Room,” are more freewheeling, with speaking voices and percussive sounds set against amorphous ensemble textures, beautifully etched vocalise passages, and lightly dissonant choral settings. Together, the Ginsberg and Dolven movements offset each other as parts of a wildly varied, yet strangely coherent whole.

Sheila63 (2013), the disc’s second and most memorable work, is an eight movement, partly comic, partly dystopian look at artificial intelligence, with instrumental interludes interspersed among the five vocal settings (the text is by Dexter Palmer). The attractions of Tymoczko’s vocal writing in Fools & Angels are magnified here: both its vocalise sections and the chordal writing are more expansive, and as performed here by Martha Cliver, Melissa Hughes, and the Pulitzer-winning composer and singer Caroline Shaw, the text comes through with consistent clarity. And the Illinois Modern Ensemble moves easily through the constantly shifting textures, deftly juggling the undercurrents of menace and quirkiness.

In Four Dreams (2004), the texts, by Tymoczko and Christian Bök, are spoken rather than sung (the authors are the narrators), with a spare instrumental trio — the saxophonist Jonathan Sanford, the pianist Jade Simmons, and the percussionist David Skidmore — weaving a colorful fabric around them. And the closing work, Let the Bodies Hit The Floor (2008) has Melissa Hughes singing a text about war, compiled from writings by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Frost, Jack Hitt, Rob Miller, and Tymoczko, along with fragments from traditional songs. The setting is rich in irony: even where the text imagery is harrowing, Tymoczko’s vocal writing is as sweet, shapely, and languid as a child’s song. It is the backdrop — overlaid speaking voices (the authors Hitt and Miller), shimmering keyboard textures, assertive electric guitar figures, abrasive percussion, rhythmically jagged passages — that provides the sense of terror that drives the score.

-Allan Kozinn, 1.8.19, San Francisco Classical Voice

Dmitri Tymoczko's wild, uncategorizable music draws on disparate influences, from Renaissance madrigals to modern jazz, '70s progressive rock, collages of electronic music and spoken voice, spiky contemporary classical and a good bit in between. A professor of composition and music theory at Princeton, Tymoczko shows what these seemingly irreconcilable genres have in common. Though he's clearly serious about what he does, his pieces are infused with a cheerful, nihilistic quality. Frank Zappa seems to be a guiding spirit, and the aesthetic that brought us The Beatles' "Revolution 9" also hovers over the proceedings, but make no mistake—Tymoczko is a genuine American original, and this is a dizzying, astoundingly creative release.

Fools and Angels, the title compilation, offers settings of five poems, three by Allen Ginsburg, and two by Jeff Dolven, a colleague of Tymoczko's at Princeton. The first track starts out with an exuberant electronic instrumental that could have come from The Who's Tommy, then launches into a setting of Ginsburg's cheeky "Fie my Fum" for four vocalists (Anne Hege, Mellissa Hughes, Neil Farrel, Gabriel Crouch) and instrumental quartet (sax, guitar, piano and drums) in a driving five-eight meter. Vocals and instrumentals coexist in both natural and electronically processed forms, colliding and eventually disintegrating. One senses that Ginsburg would have approved.

"Strawberries and Cream" is Dolven's gloss on Alan Turing's famous musings about whether a computer could ever be taught to enjoy that delicious dish. The overlapping declamations of the spoken text flit in and out of an amorphous, mostly synthesized instrumental texture with ghostly backup "oohs" for good measure. Ginsburg's "Bop Lyrics": is, appropriately, much jazzier, starting out with evocations of Coltrane and Monk, then mellowing out into Manhattan Transfer-style swing, just slightly less tonal. The final piece in the set, Ginsburg's "Who" contains the line "I realized entire Universe was manifestation of One Mind"—that would appear to be a good summary of Tymoczko's all-encompassing approach to composing.

SHEILA63 is an eight-part set with texts by novelist Dexter Palmer, who holds a PhD in English lit from Princeton. SHEILA63 seems to be a latter-day, slightly more evolved cousin of the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a quasi-intelligent super robot struggling to achieve human consciousness. The off-kilter vocals for soprano trio and murky, improvisatory-sounding electroacoustic instrumentals combine to place the listener in an ambiguous, disorienting world that hovers between the mechanical and the human. It's quite a remarkable cycle, but you definitely need to follow the libretto to fully appreciate Palmer's penetrating explorations of this unique, evolving entity, despite the obvious skill of sopranos Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes, and Caroline Shaw.

In Four Dreams, with texts by Tymoczko and Canadian poet Christian Bök, the authors take turns delivering the spoken narratives with deadpan comic flair. The First Dream begins with "I'm the Queen of England and, um, my Ladies-in-Waiting are showing me around the Castle." Best line: "And the King of England are these two gay guys." The rhythmic, jagged and colorful accompaniment for piano, alto sax and percussion is perched at the edgy juncture of dissonant jazz and modern classical. In the Second Dream, the music turns slightly dangerous when the narrator refuses to strip naked and start singing an old McDonald's commercial, as the voices in his head are insisting he do. The last one ("This dream starts with a sound. It's a long, low sound. Stretched. To the tempo of the universe") is appropriately cosmic-sounding at first, but later coalesces into an ecstatic meditation on happiness.

Tymoczko describes the twelve-minute Let the Bodies Hit the Floor as a mashup of songs and poems from World War I; it also includes the recorded voice of an American soldier speaking about the 2004 siege of Fallujah. The piece seems to have rock 'n roll at its heart, with a distorted rhythmic guitar providing a driving beat, but a lyrical, soaring melodic line for Melissa Hughes gives it a timeless, haunting quality.

-Joshua Rosenblum, 1.8.19, Opera News