Dream Cuisine, a setting of the text of the same name by Robert Fitterman, is something of sham cantata.  The text combines fragments from the Lewis & Clark journals with menu items from the Union Square Cafe.  At first, the music observes these categories by assigning the explorers’ text to the men & the menu texts to the women.  The two kinds of texts are further set apart by the kind of music each group sings:  the women have an intense, chordal (vertical) music while the men sing slower, melodic (horizontal) material.  Sooner or later, the text/sex boundaries start to dissolve, with each group singing parts of the other’s text, in various attempts to find a way for all six singers to sing together.  An extended section of musical cooperation among the singers and instrumentalists does finally occur, but only after a frenetic romp through a dreamworld terrain comprising impersonations, quotations & bastardizations—that is, music from everywhere—interwoven with music from nowhere.