Staging the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass’s new opera about pointless torture and a lost war on terror in Austin, Texas, might seem like a left hook aimed at the jaw of Bush Country, except that there’s little disagreement with its message in this cosmopolitan university town.

Philip Glass’s Orion gets rock-star treatment.

Henna Chou’s strangest collaboration began when she answered an ad on Craigslist for a composer willing to write for toy instruments. Soon she was sucked into the Vortex—Austin’s experimental theater group, though the directors of Holes Before Bedtime resist that term.

Preview of the 2005 Texas Music Festival.