The idea of musicians acting as more than musicians in a dramatic production has always intrigued me: Hornsmoke, written for the Canadian Brass, is a one-act horse opera in which, ideally, all the members of the quintet wear costumes and act out their parts in a set that includes a cow and a cactus; Bestiary, composed for the Renaissance quartet Calliope, uses mime, singing, and at times the shapes of the instruments themselves to portray various animals; and in Better Dead Than Red, written for the classical/rock group The Open Window, one of the vocalist/keyboard players is the pilgrim John Smith, another is Pocahontas, and the third is her father, Powhatan (towards the end of the piece, a teepee that had been sitting on stage all along flies up into the wings, revealing an Indian [from India] snake charmer playing to a woven basket in front of him).

So I was delighted when I was contacted about writing something off the beaten path for chorus. Ever since hearing Vecchi’s 16th-century madrigal opera L’Ampfiparnasso, I had been intrigued by the concept of a chorus fulfilling the roles of both narrator and individual characters in the story. I wrote the work in such a way as to maximize the intelligibility of the text — counterpoint is used only when the text has first been made clear in a solo or homophonic setting, or a contrapuntal setting in which the accompanying voices are not singing text (for instance, they might be humming or singing nonsense syllables). Go For Broke has serious as well as comic sections, and one of the advantages of the latter is that you can usually tell by the laughs whether the audience is understanding the words.

I made up a very basic, fable-like story about a man who wins the jackpot, squanders his fortune, and yet finds happiness in the end, and made it possible for the work to be performed with different degrees of dramatization, from a purely concert presentation to a fully staged operatic presentation.

The commission came from a consortium involving Chanticleer (San Francisco, the Dale Warland Singers (Minneapolis), and Musica Sacra (New York City). One of the pleasures of the consortium arrangement was enjoying the differences among the groups in terms of both presentation and interpretation. Chanticleer staged the piece, with minimal costumes and set, whereas the other two groups did it simply as a choral piece; I was happy to feel both worked (what one group lacked, perhaps, in hipness was more than made up for by luscious larger chorus tone).

Although it is not one of my best-known pieces, Go For Broke is one of my favorites, partly because the narrative aspect and the special attention to intelligibility create an especially direct link with the members of the audience. I have since heard it performed by other choruses, and it makes me happy to think that the madrigal opera, a comparatively populist genre more than 400 years old, is still viable.