Music review: Dresher, Neuburg team up on densely layered cycle

“They Will Have Been So Beautiful,” the wonderful group-collaborative song cycle premiered in Berkeley over the weekend by the Paul Dresher Ensemble and composer-vocalist Amy X Neuburg, has a fondness for layering.

Neuburg’s voice — by turns soaring or sublimated, bright-toned or coolly breathy — gets fed into electronic processors and emerges superimposed on itself in rich patterns. The instrumental textures are similarly varied, a dense weave of electric and acoustic sonorities that dart beguilingly in and out of focus.

There’s layering in the underlying concept as well. Dresher was originally motivated by a 1962 Guggenheim Foundation grant application by the photographer Diane Arbus, which he’d hoped to set to music. Instead (since the rights were unobtainable), he and Neuburg enlisted eight other composers along with themselves to write a song inspired by a particular work of photography.

So what came through in Saturday’s performance — the second of two presented in Zellerbach Playhouse by Cal Performances — was the spectacle of musicians looking at pictures while keeping one eye on the writing that those pictures had elicited.

And still, in the most eloquent of these 10 selections, the multiplicity of perspectives produced a winning directness that was both plainspoken and elusive. Amid swirling clouds of harmony — sometimes gently tonal, sometimes fierce and chaotic — Neuburg’s vocalism served as a shimmery thread.

The tone was established from the outset by “17 Reasons Why,” a luminous and lovely meditation by Pamela Z on an enigmatic sign that was a longtime Mission District landmark. Built from plush repetitions both verbal and melodic, the song cast a winning spell that lingered throughout everything that followed.

The two artists behind the project contributed splendid offerings that seemed to sum up what the undertaking was all about. In “A Picture Screen Stands in Solitude,” Dresher constructed a hauntingly dramatic scene out of a young San Quentin inmate’s essay about two contrasting photographs.

And Neuburg’s final offering — a whimsical and exuberantly witty four-song suite titled “Is It Conflict-Free and Were Any Animals Harmed in the Making of It?” — managed the treacherous task of connecting the mundane details of daily life with glimpses of the sublime (in this case, a photo of a vast, snowy mountain range in Wyoming).

But there were many other delights scattered through the program as well, including Fred Frith’s exquisitely lyrical “If I Could” and the rapid-fire textural fractures of Jay Cloidt’s “What Is Missing?” And for gritty tenderness and emotional power, it would be hard to top “Blood Bolero,” Guillermo Galindo’s raucous setting of texts by Juvenal Acosta, based on Maya Goded’s forceful photographs of the Mexico City demimonde.