Gregory Spears has built a career on making time misbehave. His compositions don't progress chronologically so much as they spiral, loop back, and layer centuries of musical language on top of each other like geological strata. It's a disorienting effect — Renaissance polyphony bleeding into minimalist repetition, Baroque ornamentation suddenly colliding with electronic drones — and it makes his work feel both ancient and urgently contemporary.

Now he's bringing that uncanny temporal sensibility to perhaps the most time-obsessed fairy tale in the Western canon: "Sleeping Beauty." His new opera, "Sleepers Awake," premieres this season, and according to the New York Times, it promises to be his most ambitious exploration yet of how music can compress, stretch, and ultimately transcend linear time.

The choice of source material feels almost too perfect. "Sleeping Beauty" is fundamentally a story about time stopping and starting, about a century passing in what feels like a single breath, about waking into a world that has moved on without you. It's a narrative that practically demands the kind of temporal manipulation Spears has been refining throughout his career.

A Composer Out of Time

Spears first gained significant attention with his 2013 opera "Paul's Case," based on the Willa Cather story, which demonstrated his ability to make historical musical forms feel newly strange. His 2015 work "Fellow Travelers" — about a gay relationship during the McCarthy era — used its anachronistic musical language to comment on how queer history exists in a different temporal relationship to the mainstream American narrative.

What distinguishes Spears from other contemporary composers working with historical material isn't mere pastiche or postmodern irony. He's not winking at Renaissance motets or ironically deploying Baroque gestures. Instead, he seems genuinely interested in how these different musical languages might coexist, how a listener's ear can hold multiple temporal references simultaneously without resolving them into a single "now."

It's an approach that mirrors how we actually experience culture in the streaming age — where a Spotify playlist might jump from Monteverdi to Mica Levi without apology, where TikTok users soundtrack their videos with everything from medieval chants to hyperpop. Spears was doing this before it became our default mode of consumption, which makes his work feel prescient rather than trendy.

The Fairy Tale as Time Machine

"Sleepers Awake" takes its title from the Bach cantata "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" — itself a piece about waiting, anticipation, and the moment of awakening. The reference signals that Spears isn't simply setting the Perrault or Grimm versions of "Sleeping Beauty" to music. He's engaging with the deep history of the tale, its multiple retellings, its existence as a story that has been put to sleep and awakened across centuries of cultural memory.

Fairy tales are already time machines of a sort. They exist in an eternal "once upon a time" that is simultaneously medieval, Victorian, and utterly contemporary. Every generation rewakes them, and they emerge both the same and transformed. Tchaikovsky's ballet did this in 1890, Disney's animated film did it in 1959, and countless adaptations since have continued the cycle.

What Spears appears to be doing, based on reports from the Times, is making that temporal layering audible. If the story is about a princess who sleeps through a century, why shouldn't the music contain that century — and several others — simultaneously? Why shouldn't we hear the moment of her awakening as a collision of all the musical languages that existed during her slumber?

Opera's Temporal Anxiety

This approach also speaks to opera's ongoing struggle with its own historicity. The art form exists in a peculiar temporal bind: it's simultaneously a living practice and a museum of past forms. Contemporary opera composers must navigate the weight of centuries of tradition while somehow speaking to present-day audiences who may have no relationship to that tradition whatsoever.

Spears sidesteps this anxiety by embracing it as subject matter. His work doesn't try to be "timeless" in the conventional sense — that bland universality that often means "vaguely European and pre-digital." Instead, it's aggressively time-full, packed with temporal markers that refuse to cohere into a single period style.

This makes his operas challenging but never alienating. There's always something familiar to grab onto — a melodic contour that recalls plainchant, a harmonic progression that evokes late Romanticism, a rhythmic pattern that could be Steve Reich. But these elements never settle into pastiche. They remain in productive tension, creating a listening experience that feels like memory itself: non-linear, associative, collapsing distant moments into sudden proximity.

The Politics of Musical Time

There's also something quietly political about Spears' approach to temporal manipulation. In an era when "Make America Great Again" rhetoric depends on a nostalgic fantasy of a pure, coherent past, Spears' music insists that the past was never pure or coherent. It was always multiple, contradictory, containing seeds of what came after and echoes of what came before.

His work suggests that we can't actually return to any single musical moment because that moment never existed in isolation. Renaissance polyphony was already looking backward to earlier forms. Baroque opera was already hybrid and impure. Even the most supposedly "authentic" historical performance is filtered through contemporary ears and contemporary anxieties.

"Sleepers Awake" will inevitably be compared to other recent fairy tale operas — Thomas Adès' "The Exterminating Angel," George Benjamin's "Written on Skin," Missy Mazzoli's "Breaking the Waves." But Spears' temporal obsessions set him apart. Where other composers might use fairy tale structures to explore psychological or political themes, Spears seems most interested in the tales themselves as temporal objects, as stories that have survived by constantly transforming.

What We Wake To

The great question hanging over "Sleepers Awake" is what kind of awakening Spears envisions. In most versions of "Sleeping Beauty," the princess wakes to find her world preserved, waiting for her. The curse has suspended time rather than allowing it to flow. But what if she woke to find everything changed? What if a century had actually passed, and she was now hopelessly out of step with the world around her?

That's the condition of contemporary opera itself — an art form that sometimes feels like it fell asleep in the 19th century and woke to find the cultural landscape utterly transformed. Spears' music acknowledges this dislocation while refusing to treat it as tragedy. Instead, his temporal layering suggests that being out of time might be the most honest relationship to time we can have.

We are all, in some sense, sleepers who have awakened into a moment we don't fully recognize, carrying memories of musical languages and cultural forms that no longer quite fit. Spears' achievement is making that dislocation not just bearable but beautiful — a source of strange harmonies rather than mere dissonance.

"Sleepers Awake" arrives at a moment when our relationship to cultural time feels more scrambled than ever. Perhaps that's exactly when we need a composer who has been taking time apart and reassembling it all along, showing us that the past and present were never as separate as we imagined. The spell was never about stopping time. It was about recognizing that time never moved the way we thought it did.