In the score program note, Young wrote:One hundred years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, it still seems radical that I can have a voice, that women can be heard, and taken seriously as equal weavers of the tapestry of American culture.
Ideas fly rapidly through my head and paint a dreamscape that, despite all language of equality, always risks being thwarted too soon, edited, erased.
[1]The work is scored for a large orchestra comprising three flutes (one doubling piccolo), three oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (crotales, orchestra bells, vibraphone, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, temple blocks, snare drum, bass drum) harp, piano, and strings.
He added:The structure was intuitive, and Young's transitions from one idea to the next were skillful—including an exceptionally clever quote from the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—but the destinations didn't always resonate.
This was like listening to someone's dreams, a private and necessarily obscure experience, and the arch form—rising to a late climax and colorful, misty, denouement—was so standard that it caught the piece at a difficult halfway point between an intriguing surrealism and a conventional neo-romantic narrative.