The composer David Del Tredici has written of three times during his career when he felt compelled to reject all he had been taught and rely on instincts — three times he had to, in a sense, come out.

The first was during his mid-20s when, feeling creatively blocked, he dared to compose for pleasure. The second came when he re-embraced tonality, becoming a trailblazer for the Neo-Romantic movement. The third involved integrating his complete personality into his work and celebrating his identity as a gay man.

The signature piece of this latest phase is “Gay Life,” a 45-minute cycle of six songs for baritone and orchestra, commissioned and given its premiere in 2001 by the San Francisco Symphony. On Tuesday night at The Graduate Center at CUNY in Midtown, the work received its New York premiere in a new arrangement for two tenors and piano, here the dynamic vocalists Rob Frankenberry and Dennis Tobenski, with Mr. Del Tredici, an accomplished pianist, at the keyboard. The free event, which included engaging and distinctive song cycles by Chester Biscardi, Darien Shulman, Roger Zahab and Mr. Tobenski, part of the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series, also acknowledged Mr. Del Tredici’s 70th birthday.

In 1996 Mr. Del Tredici received poems from Michael D. Calhoun and W. H. Kidde about an experience the three had shared in an empowering body-focused workshop in Wildwood, Calif. Mr. Del Tredici began setting them immediately, the first texts he had set in 20 years that were not drawn from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books.

These songs, “Ode to Wildwood” and “In the Temple,” open the “Gay Life” cycle. In each the music pulsates with plush tonal harmonies and Straussian lyrical extravagance. Still, an obsessive element makes the music seem disorienting and modern. The piano writing is thick with clashing dissonances and unhinged harmonic outbursts.

The third song, a setting of Allen Ginsberg’s “Personals Ad,” which gently riffs the entries in gay newspapers, is a compact and punchy work that eventually bursts into cascades of chords. “After the Big Parade,” a setting of another Ginsberg poem, describes the specter of disease and hostility that impeded the joy of the 1991 Gay Pride Day parade. The music has a crazed Ives-like energy, teetering between exuberance and terror.

Mr. Del Tredici dedicates the fifth song, his moody setting of Paul Monette’s “Here,” a graveside eulogy, to Paul Arcomano, his partner, who died of AIDS in 1993.

The final song turns the shortest poem, Thom Gunn’s “Memory Unsettled,” into a 15-minute rumination. In the final episode, Mr. Frankenberry and Mr. Tobenski traded the phrase “We remember you” over and over. Though the music is emotionally indulgent, the unflinching excess captivates you.

Though the piano part, adapted from the orchestral score, is awkwardly difficult, Mr. Del Tredici handled it ably to create swirling sonorities. Surely one of New York’s orchestras should present this major work by a significant New York composer as it was originally conceived.

– Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, June 21, 2007

The summer doesn’t officially end until September 21, but it definitely feels like it’s over immediately after Labor Day. For folks in academia, that’s because classes have already started up. For the rest of us, it’s a tad murkier although a drop in the temperature can help alter one’s perception about the season. This year in NYC, however, the weather remained unbearably hot until last night; thankfully today feels decisively autumnal. Nevertheless, I felt like summer had already passed a few weeks ago because my internal calendar is governed by my concert-going schedule. I don’t mean to imply that tons of concerts do not occur here in July and August, because they do. But usually in the summer months I miss a lot of them because I’m either out of town on vacation, or attending festival concerts elsewhere. This summer, even though I stayed in town, I took a hiatus from my typical weekly concert intake to devote more time to my own composing. Yet a few weeks ago the urge to experience live concert performances again got the better of me—so alas, it’s autumn!

I returned to my usual live listening habits a few days before Labor Day, intrigued by an August 29 concert program at the Duplex Cabaret and Piano Bar in Greenwich Village, which paired the solo piano music of Los Angeles-based Nick Norton with art songs by NYC-based Dennis Tobenski. I had never heard a complete piece of music by either composer live or on recording. But based on what I knew about both of them (culled from hearing snippets, seeing score samples, and various conversations), I had harbored the belief that their music shares little common ground. My suspicions proved to be correct. Most of Norton’s pieces (the concert featured his complete solo piano music to date) are visceral sonic haiku which pair modernist sonorities with clever conceptual underpinnings; one—aptly titled 88—is a collection of all 88 of the pitches possible on a standard piano, played once each. On the other hand, Tobenski’s songs are sensitive, deeply personal, and unabashedly tonal; a formidable tenor, he sang them all himself, accompanied by pianist Marc Peloquin. Steven Beck performed all of Norton’s pieces. The program went back and forth between the two composers and the two pianists but there was never any doubt as to who wrote what. Aside from the clear alternation of instrumental and vocal music and the visual juxtaposition of the piano changing hands, their two compositional voices were disparate to the point of almost being jarring. And yet it somehow worked. The only real cognitive dissonance on the program was a piano sonata conceptualized by Norton and composed by him along with 29 other composers, exquisite corpse-style via Twitter and credited to #Armada. A work involving so many different creators, none of whom was aware of what the others had created, ought not to have held together. Miraculously it did, although it was not exactly a sonata since it would have actually been impossible for 30 composers to develop thematic material they knew nothing about.

Why it was able to work at all strikes to the heart both of how we listen to things and how collections of experiences tend to be curated. A slightly different manifestation of the same phenomenon occurred at another concert I attended this past weekend which involved a tiny bit of my own music. My wife, Trudy Chan, is a pianist and she performs in song recitals with a very unusual vocalist named Phillip Cheah who sings in two completely different registers—baritone and male soprano. Most of their concerts to date have focused on art songs from a specific country or linguistic region—France, England, U.S.A., Germany/Austria. Their program this past Saturday, however, was a collection of songs about love from each of these places. As with most classical art song recitals, their program featured a series of song sets meant to be listened to as a whole, and they therefore only elicited applause at the end of each set. As a result, songs by different composers (and frequently different countries and eras) got lumped together and became de facto unified sonic experiences. Two songs of mine from the 1990s (each from larger cycles) were presented like this. One of my E. E. Cummings settings prefaced a Yeats setting by Ned Rorem that was followed by a Jean Cocteau-inspired Kurt Weill song; a movement of my Margaret Atwood cycle was sandwiched between a Walt Whitman setting by Rorem and a song from Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Even though these performers are really close to me and I was delighted to be part of their program, it initially felt a little weird to have my music recontextualized this way. And yet it all worked.

Obviously we don’t create or ultimately listen to anything in isolation; what we make as well as how we experience what others make is always informed by what is around it. I’ve posited before that one of the reasons new music on orchestral concerts can be problematic is that the new piece is often completely different from all the other music on the program so it seems like it doesn’t quite fit in to people who attend these concerts expecting a certain aesthetic trajectory. The occasional anger of these audiences toward new music is really no different from that of the traditionalists who got all bent out of shape (pun perhaps intended) a few decades back when I.M. Pei designed futuristic glass pyramids for the main courtyard of the grandly Baroque-looking Louvre Museum in Paris. Yet at the same time, there are some hard core new music people who complain about new orchestral pieces that do actually fit in sonically, since as a result those pieces don’t match these listeners’ perceptions of what new music ought to sound like. Admittedly I was guilty of the same perceptual framing back in May when I bemoaned a performance of a Beethoven piano trio on an otherwise all new music concert I attended in Hong Kong. Of course when the stylistic gauntlet is thrown to the winds and new music can be whatever we desire it to be and as listeners we can be free to mix the music of any place or any time period however we choose, the notion of fitting in seems quaint and antiquated. Yet, I would dare posit that even among the most open-minded people, certain combinations feel more right than others. Had my two songs involved extensive piano preparations, extended vocal techniques, or an array of electronic processing, they probably could not have convincingly cohabitated with those other composers or any others on the program.

My music could be spliced together successfully with music by others with seemingly different aesthetics from mine because all of our music still shared the same basic parameters. That it came across as seamless as a result got me thinking again about that #Armada Piano Sonata and why it worked even though none of the 30 composers who collectively created it had any idea about what any of the others were composing. The fact that each had the same constraints—solo piano and sonic content of composition fragment which had to be conveyed within 140 characters (since, remember, it was all done via Twitter)—created a framework for at least some degree of consistency. The fact that their 30 contributions were presented together as a unified whole also linked the material together for listeners who were already sympathetic toward the experiment. Whether or not an #Armada Symphony would be appreciated by orchestra subscribers is a completely different question.

– Frank Oteri, NewMusicBox, 10 September 2012

The highlight of Peloquin’s performance was the spiky, bass-heavy “Growl” by Dennis Tobenski (b.1982), who was present for the premiere.

– Peter Matthews, FeastofMusic.com, September 6, 2011

Dennis Tobenski is a NYC-based composer of acoustic new music, an active vocalist, and the host of the Music Publishing Podcast.

If you’ve ever been curious about any aspect of the music publishing business, Dennis should be your go-to guy from now on.

In this interview, Dennis and I discuss:

• Differences between traditional and self-publishing music
• Advantages and disadvantages of each
• What to look for when you are publishing your own works

Watch the interview here »

Case Studies and Professional Guides for Composers, Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, May 2014

Mapping My Musical Twitterverse: Week 10, blog post/profile by composer Garrett Schumann, 5 March 2014

NewMusicBox.org, article by Dale Trumbore, “Competition Fees: How Much Is Too Much?”, 12 December 2013

EzraDonner.com, blog post by composer Ezra Donner, “The Perks of Being a Self-Published Composer”, 1 August 2013

ASCAP.com, pre-premiere profile on Only Air, 24 April 2013

Imaginary Timescapes, profile by composer Karen Siegel, 17 December 2012

NickWritesMusic.com, blog post by composer Nick Norton on “Conspiracy: The Music of Dennis Tobenski and Nick Norton”, 2 August 2012

New ClassicLA, article by composer Nick Norton, “Dennis Tobenski on teamwork and community”, 17 May 2012

I Care If You Listen, interview with Thomas Deneuville, “5 questions to Dennis Tobenski”, 18 March 2011