In my first year of college, my father gave me a CD player for Christmas. Eager to explore my new toy, I trekked down to the public library and checked out Pietro-Antonio Cesti's opera Orontea on a whim. It turned out to be a contrast to the “serious” music of Palestrina and Schoenberg to which I felt most connected at the time. In high school, in reaction to panic over homoerotic desires, I had taught myself ways of using such serious classical music to treat my body as superfluous to my soul. Keeping my body and soul separated, an approach I found in Augustine's Confessions and medieval mystical writings, was the best way I knew to evade the implications of my attraction to men. I approached music through the conceptual grid of absolute music, which posits music as a bridge to a realm of Platonic forms. The Tallis Scholars' recordings of sixteenth-century polyphony corresponded especially well to the purity and otherworldliness I sought in music. Their emphasis on settings of classical Christian texts, clear singing with minimal vibrato, and perfect intonation made for the ideal repertory to make my absolute musical ideals come to life. In other words, the Tallis Scholars were a “sensual” medium through which I explored a conceptual stance.

Orontea was quite a bit more playful than the asceticism I had come to crave in music. The opera opens with an allegorical prologue that proceeds through a cat fight, in which Amore (Love) pokes fun at high-minded Filosofia (Philosophy).