The music is plush, cinematic and animated, with Minimalist stirrings and Impressionist-tinged harmonies in the orchestra, and text delivered in vocal lines that shift between stern chant and elegiac melody.
The three-opera bill features "La Machine de l'?re," by Mr. Zorn, a 10-minute wordless monodrama for singer and orchestra without text or story based on the drawings of Antonin Artaud; "Erwartung," Schoenberg's early-20th-century masterpiece; and "Neither," by Morton Feldman to a libretto by Samuel Beckett, a 1976 work never staged with orchestra in the United States.
Operas and concerts are being projected live in movie theaters; music has been written for cellphone ringers and laptops; concert audiences are seeing more and more multimedia presentations; orchestras use text messages to stay in touch with audiences; long-distance musical instruction through high speed Internet2 is common; YouTube videos are used for auditions.
His "grandly ambitious" (Opera News) third symphony, Poems and Prayers for mezzo-soprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra, interweaves texts of Arab poets Fadwa Tuqan and Mahmoud Darwish, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, and prayers such as the Aramaic Kaddish.
The incident pointed to an increasingly common practice by orchestras: soliciting texts for marketing purposes, in what they consider a new way to connect with audiences.
Next came Virgil Thomson's "Collected Poems" (1956) for soprano (Pamela Armstrong), baritone (Gordon Hawkins) and orchestra, to a text by Kenneth Koch.
Titled "August 4 , 1964" it is an evening-length music drama for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra with a text assembled from diaries and historical documents by Gene Scheer.
This nine-minute work for soprano, male chorus and orchestra sets a text of repeated lines from Anaïs Nin's "House of Incest," with Varèse's made-up syllables ("wa ya you you") folded in.
The grandly scaled, quasi-operatic hybrids that result can be gripping and dramatic, but there is often a drawback: since the music's primary impulse is symphonic and the singers have to share the stage with the orchestra, sections of text slip into the ether unheard.
And so the orchestra works on the text even before the soloist puts the words in place.
