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The scene was a vibrant pastorale, rendered in thousands of shimmering sequins and beads that filled a nine-foot-wide canvas with a red tasseled border.

He scored the opening scenes, which paint a portrait of the vibrant, thriving Dahomey village, with African pastorale — bouncing a string orchestra along with a gentle groove on regional instruments including kalimba and kora.

A cinematic pastorale swells around his earnestly nasal voice: a muffled tom-tom beat, a spaghetti-Western guitar line, a gathering horn section, all eventually subsiding back to patient resignation.

“Including 55 serious operas, 6 cantatas, 53 comic operas, 17 operettas, 6 sing-spiele, 4 ballets, 4 vaudevilles, 2 oratorios, one each of fares, pastorales, masques, ballads and buffas.”

With the Friends’ full cooperation, he helped carry “The Wheel” far from its usual country-ish territory, toward a kind of extraterrestrial pastorale with glimmers of Terry Riley’s Minimalism and Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way.”