The works seem built around declamations, brief statements and counterstatements. The wide intervals between voices, the passing consonants, the arching melodies, evoke a space at once interior and public. The music alternately proclaims and withdraws. Themes themselves are less developed than displayed in different contexts. The works are ruminations.
Dramatic patterns shift within a static vision.
The music is always on the verge of reverie. The music seems to dramatize the conflict between the vernacular and the personal, between the great public and the isolated individual. These are not songs of the self in the traditon of Whitman. But these are distinctly American works, moving inward and outward with unsystematic spaciousness. They suggest the self-absorbed individual.