In early 1987 Daniel Asia completed a piano-accompaniment version of Songs from The Page of Swords for bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk and his oboist wife Sara Watkins. Asia shortly set about an expansion for his mixed chamber ensemble Musical Elements, with a commission from the Paul Fromm Music Foundation. The second version backs the singer and oboe player with flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, piano and five string parts played by either single performers or small sections.

The vocal part, setting poems of Paul Pines, tends to be declamatory and angular. All the instruments make essential textural and thematic contributions throughout, rather than just supporting the soloist harmonically.

"Glyph/The Messenger" and "Glyph/The Message" frame the cycle. Asia links them harmonically and by suffusing both with constant instrumental burbling, until the final measures, a coda that in Asia's words "fades to nothing with echoes of the universal rip." The second and third movements, the quicksilver "My Egyptian Sister" and the lugubrious yet rhythmically unpredictable "Mein Bruder," together form the work's second section. The former offers an example of Asia's interest in creating a musical subtext that can be slightly at odds with the words; as in the finale of Pines Songs, the dazzling music creates a sense of displacement. "Reincarnation" and "New Year's, 1979, Ending the Decade at Phebe's" together form the cycle's third section. The spirit is more consistently playful, in a densely Expressionistic way, than in the previous songs. For "Reincarnation," which addresses a self-satisfied, ungrateful cat, Asia has given the oboe a recurring "meow" figure. The second section of the tripartite "New Year's," Asia points out, "hovers in a Kaddish-like recitation of the dead, while the third section recovers the joyful animation of the first, only to sink into a final pathos reminiscent of `Mein Bruder.'"



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