Howard Hanson. Merry Mount. Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Chorale. Gerald Schwarz, conductor. Northwest Boychoir. Joseph Crnko, director. Seattle Girls' Choir. Jerome Wright, director. Lauren Flanigan, soprano. Walter MacNeil, tenor. Richard Zeller, baritone. Charles Robert Austin, bass. Louise Marley, mezzo. Two discs. 2006. Naxos American Opera Classics 8.669012-13.

Once the unruly upstart, John Zorn is now a MacArthur fellow, whose formidable catalog divides easily into early, middle, and late periods. The early period dates from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, when Zorn pioneered the practice of "comprovisation," a term used to describe "the making of new compositions from recordings of improvised material." ultimately, Zorn's comprovisation blurs the lines between active listener and composer, since both create new works when they impose structure on found sonic material. His early structuralist-modernist approach to comprovisation produced esoteric, often severely pointillist music, and evolved into the game pieces of the late 1970s and early 1980s, culminating in the masterpiece of strategy, Cobra (1984), the last early-period work.